NEW YORK - MAY 22: (L-R) Brian Kilmeade, Steve Doocy and Elisabeth Hasselbeck at Fox and Friends' All-American Summer Concert Series at Fox Studios on May 22, 2015 in New York City.
Legal filings resulting of a defamation lawsuit reveal Fox News employees were wringing their hands over their company’s fawning support of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
The Guardian collected employees’ statements from a 771-page filing released last week, made public as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against the network by voting technology company Smartmatic. The comments came from an anonymous internal survey of 1,040 employees conducted between August 2020 and early September 2020.
According to the Guardian, one employee said Fox should “change the misogynist, racist, rightwing content”, adding: “Fox News is a propaganda machine for the Republican party NOT a news organization and should be acknowledged as such. It is embarrassing to tell people that I work here as even conservatives know [Fox News Channel] and [Fox Business Network] are biased information sources — not news.”
Other employees complained the news content at the company is “hateful and has made the world a more divided and angry place.”
“I sometimes go home fighting back tears,” another employee said. “This network made me question my morals. Have I sold my soul to the devil?”
Still another employee pointed out that the network should “get out of Trump’s pocket” and realize that its most prominent hosts, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, “are a total embarrassment, peddling BS and conspiracy theories.”
“Many days I feel like I am part of the problem and FNC is contributing to hatred in this country,” the anonymous contributor added.
The complaints of rampant bias continued with another employee ranting: “This company aligns itself with the current administration and has lost its integrity.”
A different survey respondent complained, “I wish there was purpose for what we do other than pushing the brand, ideology and political will of [the president].”
Other employees wished management would crack down on “conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric” spewed by opinion hosts like hosts like Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs, while one asked management for “a commitment from opinion hosts/producers to only tell viewers the truth, and to bolster their arguments with hard, proven facts given in full context, rather than spin or reckless conjecture that causes harm to real people.”
Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Fox claims Fox “lied and knowingly spread falsehoods about Smartmatic’s role in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.” The company told Guardian reporters that it believes the employee criticisms provide evidence that Fox executives were on notice of internal concerns about what the network was airing. The company has also argued that Fox’s board of directors failed to act on the results of the survey, which it said provided a “stark warning” about the network’s programming.
Newsmax has already settled a similar defamation suit with Smartmatic over the 2020 election.
Read the full Guardian report at this link.
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