By Noah Brasseur
Fox News’s ongoing defamation lawsuit from Dominion has revealed to the public several details that show that high-profile anchors, like Tucker Carlson, did not believe what they were saying live on TV.
Carlson wrote in text messages that the idea the 2020 election had been somehow stolen from Donald Trump was “insane.” He also wrote that Sidney Powell’s, who worked with the Trump campaign for legal matters, refusal to release evidence was something that he hated.
He wrote that the idea there was a successful conspiracy to rig the voting system to guarantee Biden’s victory was “absurd”.
Carlson, who had spread Trump’s claims of fraud in the months after election night, privately revealed he could not wait for Trump to be out of the news.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” he wrote, according to recovered texts. “I hate him passionately.”
Ingraham, another of Fox’s anchors, called Powell “a complete nut” in text messages. Another of Fox’s anchors, Sean Hannity, seemed to concur.
“That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second,” he said.
Rupert Murdoch, a member of Fox’s board of directors, told Dominion’s lawyers under oath that he believed the 2020 election was free and fair, adding that it was not stolen.
Murdoch had earlier, in an email, described a press conference featuring Powell “crazy” and “damaging.”
Despite all of the internal skepticism towards the idea of election fraud, the network made a concerted effort to prevent it from being shown publicly.
When one reporter for Fox wrote a tweet that stated there was no evidence of fraud and no evidence that any voting system had tampered with the vote count, executives and higher-ups pushed for her to delete the tweet, and Carlson tried to get her fired.
Similarly, when a separate anchor cut away from a news press from a Trump aide that started spreading the conspiracy, executives got upset.
In a third instance, when Fox reporters started raising questions at a Trump rally about the validity of the claims, the head of Fox News’s parent company wrote that the reporters needed to have been more careful in their coverage.
The corporation has not stopped spreading the claim in light of the lawsuit.
In early March, Carlson said that the Jan. 6 attendees were correct to be there.
“The protesters were angry: They believed that the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted. And they were right,” he said on his show.
He added that “the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy.”
Additionally, in part of Fox’s defense in the legal battle against Dominion, their court filings include various claims related to the conspiracy.
TAGS: Fox, Dominion, Tucker Carlson, lawsuit, politics, 2020 election, Trump
