The primary story of Fox News and the 2020 election is nicely understood. Fox’s comparatively small information operation coated the vote rely precisely; this protection infuriated President Donald Trump, the MAGA base, and Fox’s opinion stars; some viewers quickly flipped to further-right retailers, similar to Newsmax; and Fox panicked.
But because of Dominion Voting Systems, which is pursuing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit towards Fox, we now know that the community’s sense of disaster was much more intense than it appeared from exterior. With the case careening towards trial, a courtroom submitting yesterday revealed a few of what Dominion discovered in the course of the discovery course of, together with eye-popping messages from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Fox’s senior administration. “Getting creamed by CNN!” Fox’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, wrote to its prime govt after seeing the in a single day scores on November 8. “Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it.”
He was proper. Some of Fox’s prime exhibits started broadcasting a greater story, one which its viewers did need to watch: a conspiracy-laden story about crooked Democrats stealing an election. Dominion is arguing that Fox knew full nicely that Trumpworld’s voter-fraud allegations had been bunk however promoted the lies anyway. Whether or not Dominion prevails in courtroom, and plenty of specialists imagine it should, the lawsuit is already forcing an moral reckoning over Fox’s disrespect of its viewers. Hour after hour, day after day, Fox stars stored signaling to viewers that Trump would possibly nonetheless win the election, not as a result of they thought he would, however as a result of they had been nervous about their scores. And all of us witnessed the results on January 6.
On November 12, 2020, practically per week after Joe Biden had clinched the presidency, Trump sought refuge in Fox’s different actuality, and as at all times, the community delivered.
At the highest of the 9 p.m. hour, Trump’s good friend Sean Hannity pretended that the end result was nonetheless doubtful. He stated the election was not honest. He cited “outstanding votes that have yet to be counted” and “more reports of dead people voting from beyond the grave.” And, importantly, he talked at size about Dominion.
Trump was livid with the small variety of journalists at Fox who stored calling Biden the winner of the election, however Hannity was nonetheless on his good aspect. So in typical Trump vogue, he flip-flopped. Twelve hours after tweeting his revulsion with the community, Trump tweeted, “Must see @seanhannity takedown of the horrible, inaccurate and anything but secure Dominion Voting System which is used in States where tens of thousands of votes were stolen from us and given to Biden. Likewise, the Great @LouDobbs has a confirming and powerful piece!”
Now it was practically 11 p.m. japanese time. The Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich noticed Trump’s election-denying submit and had the audacity to tweet the reality. She wrote that “top election infrastructure officials”—together with some in Trump’s administration—had issued a press release saying “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Heinrich, a proficient younger correspondent at Fox, was a minnow, and the prime-time sharks had been hungry. The three hosts—Hannity, Carlson, and Laura Ingraham—had been in a textual content chain collectively, the place they’d been commiserating concerning the insanity of the postelection interval. Carlson flagged Heinrich’s tweet and instructed Hannity, “Please get her fired.” Why? Because her minor Twitter fact-check of an out-of-control president was precisely the type of factor that Fox’s fan base couldn’t stand to see.
“It needs to stop immediately, like tonight,” Carlson wrote. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Hannity replied and stated he had already despatched the correct and thus offending tweet to Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott.
“Sean texted me,” Scott wrote to 2 colleagues. Apparently Hannity had threatened to tweet again at Heinrich. “He’s standing down on responding,” Scott wrote, “but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news.” Scott was bothered too. She nervous that reporters at different retailers would discover Heinrich’s tweet: “She has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”
Disgusted by what? By a reporter fact-checking Trump’s fictions.
This excessive pressure between the newsroom and the a lot bigger opinion operation got here up in nearly each interview I performed for Hoax, my e book concerning the disturbing relationship between Fox and Trump. One Wednesday morning in late 2019, I turned on Fox & Friends, pressed the “Mute” button, and dialed up a producer who used to work on the present. It was clear from the tone of his voice that he had profound regrets from his time engaged on the morning present, and that’s why he needed to be a confidential supply.
The former producer stated he sensed himself being brainwashed whereas consuming the entire right-wing content material from the Fox & Friends hosts and friends. He felt himself reworking into one of many hundreds of thousands of Fox addicts throughout America. “People don’t care if it’s right, they just want their side to win. That’s who this show is for,” he stated. “It’s sad.”
It could also be unhappy, however it is usually enormously profitable. Other sources at Fox instructed me to think about it not as a community per se, however as a revenue machine. They feared doing something that will disrupt the machine. “I feel like Fox is being held hostage by its audience,” a veteran staffer instructed me, maybe justifying his personal participation by portraying himself as a sufferer.
When I printed these confessions in Hoax, I wrote that everybody at Fox was “profoundly afraid of losing the audience and the resulting piles of cash.” I cited the previous morning-show producer, who instructed me, “We were deathly afraid of our audience leaving, deathly afraid of pissing them off.”
These quotes had been evocative, I believed, however they suffered from all the constraints that include anonymity. And the quotes had not come from Fox’s prime tier of millionaire stars and executives. That’s why the brand new authorized submitting by Dominion is such a showstopper. We can learn precisely what the leaders and stars of Fox News actually suppose. This is my greatest takeaway: In the times after Biden received the election, whereas Trump tried to begin the steal by shouting “Stop the Steal,” essentially the most highly effective individuals at Fox News weren’t involved concerning the well being of U.S. democracy. They had been involved about Fox’s model and their very own backside line.
On November 7, Fox had fallen in keeping with the opposite main networks and referred to as the election for Biden. There had been spontaneous celebrations in main cities and lengthy faces throughout Fox’s airwaves. The consensus view each inside and outdoors the community was that Fox’s acknowledgment of actuality—and particularly its early projection that Biden had received Arizona—had turned the viewers towards the community.
I used to be working at CNN on the time, so I studied the scores spreadsheets that arrived within the late afternoon. Newsmax, a tiny Fox wannabe, was all of the sudden surging by catering to MAGA viewers and refusing to name Biden the president-elect. On November 8, I interviewed Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy and aired clips of election deniers talking on his community. “Your commentators are promoting bogus voter-fraud lies,” I stated. He tried to show the interview right into a gross sales pitch. “Don’t believe you, don’t believe me, just watch Newsmax,” he stated, “and make your own judgment about how fair we are.”
Ruddy, in different phrases, was capitalizing on the enterprise alternative earlier than him. He was welcoming viewers to Newsmax with a pledge to inform them what they needed to listen to. Fox’s prime expertise knew it—and freaked out. According to the Dominion submitting, Carlson texted his producer that weekend and stated, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real….an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
On November 9, Carlson wrote to Scott, “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company. Kills me to watch it.” Scott shared the message with Rupert’s son Lachlan, the CEO of the Fox Corporation and a Carlson ally. On that day, Dominion alleges, “Fox executives made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back.” One snippet of texts exhibits Scott telling Lachlan that viewers had been “going through the 5 stages of grief.” Angling to impress her boss, she stated the Arizona projection was damaging, “but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”
What a curious phrase—respect. Journalists are taught that to respect the viewers means to report the reality clearly and punctiliously. But inside Fox, which is at first a supplier of leisure, respect meant one thing else. Reading the texts and emails, I used to be reminded of one other factor the Fox & Friends producer had stated. “We were deathly afraid” of the viewers, he admitted, “but we also laughed at them. We disrespected them. We weren’t practicing what we preached.”
That’s what Dominion is arguing within the authorized realm—that Fox’s leaders had been saying one factor privately and one other factor publicly.
Lachlan Murdoch affirmed Scott’s plan to “respect” the viewers and stated that the community’s relationship with its viewers “needs constant rebuilding without any missteps.” Soon messages had been going forwards and backwards about threats to the “brand.” Accurate reporting by Fox journalists, similar to Heinrich’s tweet, was a kind of perceived threats. Carlson texted his fellow hosts that he “went crazy on Meade over it,” which means that he had lashed out at Meade Cooper, Fox’s govt vp of prime-time programming, who reported to Scott. By the following morning, Heinrich’s tweet was gone, as Dominion’s submitting notes.
The Trump tweet Heinrich referenced included each Hannity and Dobbs by title, so by fact-checking it, she had technically run afoul of an organization coverage towards intramural warfare, I realized by way of my reporting. “No shooting in the tent,” the previous Fox govt Roger Ailes used to say, though the coverage was inconsistently enforced. So Heinrich took down her first tweet, however rapidly posted a brand new one on November 13, additionally fact-checking Trump and noting a whole dearth of proof for the anti-Dominion conspiracy theories that had been airing all throughout right-wing TV.
Hannity’s election-doubting monologue, in the meantime, remained on-line. Fox’s web site payments it as “a deep dive into the voting machines at center of controversy.” And Carlson was right about the stock price that November day—Fox Corporation dropped 2.6 percent. While the rest of us were worrying about how Trump’s antidemocratic conduct was going to undermine our democracy, he was worried about his bank account.
The other crucial metric Fox leaders were watching, of course, was the Nielsen ratings chart. The Dominion filing contains snippets of conversations from later in November that showcase Hannity’s alarm. “The network is being rejected,” he texted Carlson and Ingraham, to which Carlson responded, “I’ve heard from angry viewers every hour of the day all weekend, including at dinner tonight.” So they every discovered methods to wink and nod to voting irregularities and unfair programs—displaying “respect” to viewers by actively misinforming them.
In a separate thread, on November 24, one in every of Hannity’s producers cited minute-by-minute scores from the prior week’s episodes and stated, “Our best minutes from last week were on the voting irregularities.” The conspiracy-laden segments continued on Fox by way of December, the scores improved, and the nation’s political divide deepened.
Not lengthy after the election and the revolt, I went again to sources at Fox to listen to concerning the aftermath, gathering mere scraps compared to Dominion’s discovery-aided buffet. Sources instructed me that the stress from the viewers was debilitating within the postelection interval. A senior staffer at Fox railed towards the community’s journalists and math wizards who had referred to as Arizona for Biden, calling them “arrogant fucks” who “are rubbing it in our viewers’ faces.”
Rubbing what? “Biden. They’re rubbing Biden in our faces.”
I by no means absolutely understood that objection till I learn the brand new Dominion submitting. Somewhere round web page 157, it clicked. Inside Fox, the prime-time stars and senior executives raged towards the community’s reporters not as a result of they doubted that Biden had received, however as a result of the reality was too disturbing to the viewers that had made them wealthy. Fox’s postelection technique, the texts and emails counsel, was to cease rubbing Biden in its viewers’ faces. But of their effort to indicate their viewers “respect,” they finally disrespected each their viewers and the American experiment they declare to guard.