'Shockingly reckless': Fox News hosts spread Donald Trump’s election claims knowing they were 'total BS'

17 February 2023

The most influential personalities at Fox News along with members of the network's upper management were privately skeptical of former President Donald Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

"Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems," correspondents Jeremy W. Peters and Katie Robertson explained. "Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network."

The 192-page document obtained and analyzed by the Times and other major news outlets contained unambiguous exchanges between these individuals, who despite their personal misgivings have continued to push Trump's false narratives on the airwaves:

'Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,' Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.

Ms. Ingraham responded: 'Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.'

Mr. Carlson continued, 'Our viewers are good people and they believe it,' he added, making clear that he did not.

Per the Times, "the messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation, with Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, calling Mr. Trump's voter fraud claims 'really crazy stuff.'"

The paper added that "on one occasion, as Mr. Murdoch watched Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell on television, he told Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, 'Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.'"

The duplicity, however, extended beyond Fox's primetime lineup.

"Two days after the election, Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier acknowledged privately, 'There is NO evidence of fraud. None,'" Media Matters for America revealed. "After seeing social media posts from his colleague Maria Bartiromo pushing baseless claims of fraud, Baier warned Fox News' senior vice president and managing editor of the Washington, D.C., Bureau Bill Sammon about her post. 'We have to prevent this stuff...We need to fact-check,' Baier told Sammon."

In its brief, Dominion drew one inescapable conclusion, based on the evidence that was compiled.

"Fox knew. From the top down, Fox knew the Dominion stuff was total BS," Dominion wrote. "Yet despite knowing the truth or at minimum, recklessly disregarding that truth, Fox spread and endorsed these outlandish voter fraud claims about Dominion even as it internally recognized the lies as crazy, absurd, and shockingly reckless."

The New York Times' full report is available at this link (subscription required). Media Matters' is here.

From Your Site Articles