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Posted

Sure would be easy to just show us some of this MASSIVE EVIDENCE. Don't point to somewhere else where we can go find the evidence. Just show us. 

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Posted
21 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

I think they started out leading the tiger, guiding it, but I think it's very accurate now - if they were to back off and take a moderate stance on things, their audience would leave, and Murdoch's and Fox News's testimony/legal filings in the lawsuit show that Hannity, Tucker, etc. were scared of losing their audiences.

Now, rather than leading the tiger, they are dealing with this:

shocked attack GIF

Sorry, don't mean to derail, but I've never seen that gif before. That man and that elephant appear to be proper fucked.

Posted
2 minutes ago, Restless Native said:

Sorry, don't mean to derail, but I've never seen that gif before. That man and that elephant appear to be proper fucked.

They were actually all very good old friends getting ready for a genuine embrace.  It was a beautful moment, umarred by a brutal mauling/animalistic shredding of human tissue.

Posted (edited)
20 minutes ago, Restless Native said:

Sorry, don't mean to derail, but I've never seen that gif before. That man and that elephant appear to be proper fucked.

He got scratched up.  It's an awesome display of the tiger's stealth and speed.

 

Edited by atomheartbevo
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Posted
 
FqEVPIWWwAIgUOW?format=jpg&name=small
 
So Trump is wondering out loud why Murdoch didn't perjure himself? is that what i am reading?

I’d like to hear him explain what he thinks being thrown “under the table” means
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Posted
On 3/1/2023 at 12:12 PM, Mdhorn said:

Prob should also go in the Tucker Carlson thread (if not already posted):

'Daily Show' Guest Hasan Minhaj Has Filthiest Explanation For Tucker Carlson

 

Minhaj said one behind-the-scenes message “truly freaked me out.”

It was a message from Carlson warning that viewers might leave for Newsmax if Fox News didn’t toe the Trump line and spread his conspiracy theories.

“He’s saying, ‘If I don’t say this bullshit, my viewers will leave me,’” Minhaj translated. “This whole time we thought Fox News was manipulating its viewers. But it turns out the viewers were manipulating Fox News.”

Then he offered up his explanation of Carlson’s behavior:

“Just think of it like this: Tucker Carlson is a moral vacuum. A hole, if you will, who glorifies election deniers. So, a glory hole. And his viewers expect him to please them with his mouth, and he’s constantly terrified that they’ll find a new, more satisfying glory hole. And that is why Tucker Carlson will never stop sucking.”

 

Just ruthless.

He really should have the job.  

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Posted
3 hours ago, Restless Native said:

Sorry, don't mean to derail, but I've never seen that gif before. That man and that elephant appear to be proper fucked.

That elephant was fine.

Posted
1 hour ago, Lurch said:


I’d like to hear him explain what he thinks being thrown “under the table” means

It's what he does with soggy french fries.

 

 

 

 

 

Just kidding, he eats those, too.

Posted (edited)
10 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

image.png.d03aae712aab3a9b2265648ff04dc0c8.png

The KState professor already proved anyone can lose weight by eating less calories with the Twinkie diet in 2010 

Edited by Neonmoon
Posted
7 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Why does Tucker only have that one god damn face?

It's the only thing he has in common with Pete Mitchell.

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Posted

Why would dominion have evidence of fox sharing ad info?  Just found during discovery for their suit?  
 

I haven’t read the other tweets- did they pass the info on and the Biden team is suing? I can’t imagine that dominion would be the correct plaintiff. 

Posted

Murdoch admitted to sharing the ads with Jared in his deposition to Dominion and they then used that as evidence in a filing last week

Posted

Inside the panic at Fox News after the 2020 election

Quote

WASHINGTON — A little more than a week after television networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden, top executives and anchors at Fox News held an after-action meeting to figure out how they had messed up.

Not because they had gotten the key call wrong — but because they had gotten it right. And they had gotten it right before anyone else.

Typically, it is a point of pride for a news network to be the first to project election winners. But Fox News is no typical news network, and in the days after the 2020 vote, it was besieged with angry protests not only from former President Donald Trump’s camp but from its own viewers because it had called the battleground state of Arizona for Biden. Never mind that the call was correct; Fox News executives worried that they would lose viewers to hard-right competitors such as Newsmax.

And so, on Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, Suzanne Scott, CEO of Fox News Media, and Jay Wallace, the network’s president, convened a Zoom meeting for an extraordinary discussion with an unusual goal, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times: how to keep from angering the network’s conservative audience again by calling an election for a Democrat before the competition.

 

Posted
13 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Why would dominion have evidence of fox sharing ad info?  Just found during discovery for their suit?  
 

I haven’t read the other tweets- did they pass the info on and the Biden team is suing? I can’t imagine that dominion would be the correct plaintiff. 

I might be off but I think the evidence came from discovery in the Dominion one… the new complaint filed by Mediamatters 

Posted

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-deep-archeology-of-fox-news

 

Quote

One further nugget brings the story nearer to our time from the distant past of the early Cold War and the origins of modern conservatism. Today we know Tucker Carlson as the preppy boyishly middle aged white nationalist who is the current center of gravity to Fox News. But that wasn’t always his public presentation. Always a conservative, his younger incarnation held an air of ironic and quasi-urbane detachment from full wingnut intensity. Back in February 2009, in a moment of mid-career identity crisis, he gave a speech at CPAC which bundled together much of what we’re discussing here. The fact that no one took conservative news organizations and journalists seriously, he told the crowd, wasn’t a matter of liberal bias or anything about the establishment. It was because they weren’t really journalists. Needless to say, he wasn’t speaking to a terribly receptive audience. “If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail,” he said. “The New York Times is a liberal paper, but it is also…a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions.”

 

 

Quote

As you can see in this clip, this wasn’t really a condemnation of conservative news outlets. He actually praises Fox and he sort of jumps back and forth in response to boos from the crowd. But there was some getting at the root of the matter.

As soon became clear, Carlson was not only the John the Baptist of this clarion call but the Jesus too. A year later he launched The Daily Caller expressly on the model of the speech he’d given a year earlier at CPAC. But what quickly became clear is that there was little audience, market or demand for that kind of conservative publication. To whatever extent Carlson had ever really been committed to creating that kind of publishing operation, he quickly lost patience with it and shifted gears to the publication we’ve been familiar with for the last dozen years: a slightly less transgressive and racist version of Breitbart. There simply wasn’t any future or money in that other kind of operation. So, after briefly trying to go semi-legit, he shifted gears and went full-steam-ahead into the white nationalism and lying business.

 

Posted (edited)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-journos-sound-off-on-soul-crushing-dominion-legal-filings

 

Quote

“I think no regular person could read this and look at Fox like a news organization at this point.”

In the wake of bombshell legal filings showing that Fox News executives and stars seemingly sought to pacify their disgruntled MAGA viewers by airing election lies, while punishing and censoring the employees attempting to deliver the actual truth, the above observation has become commonplace within media circles.

But some of the shots are being fired from within the conservative cable giant.

 

Quote

According to nine Fox News staffers and insiders, the pre-trial filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News further impugn and sully the reputation of the network’s “straight news” journalists, especially since they show Fox was “operating out of fear” over losing viewers to smaller right-wing competitors following its Decision Desk’s early (and accurate) Arizona election night call for President Joe Biden.

“We are not happy,” one reporter told The Daily Beast.

 

 

Quote

At the same time, five sources familiar with the situation say that despite the very public reputational harm resulting from the Dominion documents, the news side has been kept in the dark on the filings, with no communication from Fox’s corporate management or human resources department.

“It’s just a really bad time to be working here,” one news producer said.

The network, on the other hand, defended its treatment and handling of the news division.

 

Spoiler

“Under the leadership of FOX News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, the network has increased its investment in journalism by more than 50%, further expanding our newsgathering footprint both domestically and abroad while providing state-of-the-art resources to enhance our coverage,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement. “We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists who continue to deliver breaking news from around the world and will continue to fight for the preservation of the First Amendment as Dominion attempts to suppress basic rights protected by our Constitution.”

With the much-anticipated trial kicking off next month, multiple filings from Dominion’s lawyers have been unsealed in recent weeks, pulling back the curtain on Fox News’ inner machinations surrounding the 2020 presidential election, which saw former President Donald Trump and his acolytes peddle baseless conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud.

More than anything, the tranche of internal messages and texts Dominion obtained from Fox executives, hosts, and producers show a network in full-blown crisis over the fear of losing its relevance within the conservative movement—and a network whose top stars loathed the fact-driven journalists on the “hard news” side. Rupert Murdoch, the head of the Fox empire, privately conceded that Trump’s claims were “really crazy stuff,” and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott warned shortly after the election that they shouldn’t “give the crazies an inch.”

Even stars like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham privately trash-talked Team Trump’s “insane” fraud claims. But despite all that, the Fox hosts were simultaneously boosting them on the network’s airwaves in the days and weeks after the election.

Additionally, with wannabe rival Newsmax suddenly pulling away Fox’s viewers by openly embracing Trump’s false “stolen election” narrative, there was a concerted internal effort to thwart any embarrassing fact-checks of these lies by Fox News journalists, the documents show.

White House correspondent Kristin Fisher was “punished” by her boss Bryan Boughton for debunking the “really crazy” Nov. 19, 2020, press conference by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, with Boughton telling her she “needed to do a better job of…respecting our audience.”

Tucker Carlson and Hannity demanded that management fire reporter Jacqui Heinrich for fact-checking a Trump tweet that tagged Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the fuck?” Carlson messaged Hannity, adding: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

And while Scott did not terminate Heinrich (she has since been promoted), another Fox News executive did privately complain at the time that the reporter “has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”

Other hard news Fox hosts such as Neil Cavuto and Leland Vittert also found themselves in the crosshairs for pushing “anti-Trump” narratives in the days following the election. Hannity, for his part, was particularly enraged with Cavuto, who had cut away from a Nov. 9 press conference when then-White House Press Secretary (and now Fox News host) Kayleigh McEnany began tossing out baseless allegations. Vittert, meanwhile, was blasted by Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch over his “smug and obnoxious” coverage of a Nov. 14 Trump rally, which Murdoch felt should be treated as a “celebration of the president.”

And in a group chat shortly after the election, Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham raged about the news division, fuming that their “anger at the news channel is pronounced” because “we devote our lives” to “building an audience and they let Chris Wallace and Leland fucking Vittert wreck it.” The primetime stars noted they had “more power than we know or exercise” and they should “force a change” together. “The first thing we need to do [is] exactly what we want to do,” Carlson declared on Nov. 16.

The two top faces of the network’s hard news division, Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier, did not necessarily cover themselves in glory, however. The New York Times recently obtained a Zoom recording from shortly after the election that found Baier and MacCallum just as panicked over Fox’s ratings drop as Scott and Fox News President Jay Wallace. And the issue largely revolved around the Arizona call and how it angered the network’s audience.

“We are still getting bombarded. It became really hurtful,” Baier said during the Nov. 16 call.

Baier had previously sent an email to Wallace urging Fox to pull the Arizona projection and “put it back” in Trump’s column. (It was never in Trump’s column.) On the call, MacCallum and Baier also asked for another “layer” surrounding election projections so they could “think beyond, about the implications.”

Bill Sammon, the managing editor for Washington who oversaw the Decision Desk, was also on the call. “If I may defend the Decision Desk for a moment, they got all 50 states right,” he said on the call. “We called Arizona. It was a good call. It held up.”

Four days later, Rupert Murdoch suggested that maybe it was “best to let Bill go right away” as it would “be a big message with Trump people.” Sammon was “told the inevitable” later that day, with the termination framed as a “retirement.” Chris Stirewalt, the political editor tasked with defending the Arizona call on air, was also let go. Fox portrayed his firing as a “restructuring.”

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make... good journalists do bad things,” Sammon wrote in a Dec. 2 email, worrying that Fox had reached an “existential crisis” over its coverage of false election claims.

The way actual journalists at the network see it, the revelations are depressing—but also not unexpected.

“I mean, anyone that’s been paying attention has kind of realized, obviously it’s deteriorated,” a news production staffer said. “Chris Wallace leaving, everything that happened in the wake of Jan. 6, I guess the deterioration is faster, and maybe there’s been more of a flashlight shown on the actual operation within Fox.”

Noting that he’s not sure “how much has changed” because it’s always been “opinion first, news secondary” at Fox, the staffer did say that Fox has lost a lot of its ability to publicly boast about its news division.

“The news side has always been kind of used as a bit of a shield, a bit of a legitimacy play,” he stated. “And I think that in and of itself is, it’s kind of falling apart now.”

The feeling among the news division’s employees that journalism is not a high priority, and that money and ideology drive decisions at the network, has only risen since the Dominion filings were unsealed.

“Because the problem is, it’s pretty damn clear that the motivation is the money-based machine on the opinion side that drives all their business decisions, that drives a lot of their programming decisions,” the reporter told The Daily Beast. “And so even if you have good reporters who are trying to report the news, it’s just not what Fox as an entity sees its value as, so that sucks.”

The producer, for her part, called the filings “disappointing” before wondering why “is the news side being censored?” (Fox News media host Howie Kurtz recently revealed on air that the network is preventing him from discussing the fallout over the Dominion filings on his weekly media show.)

She continued: “If journalists are being criticized for being hard on the Trump admin or truthfully talking about the election, it’s a form of censorship. The news division is being given less importance.”

Another veteran Fox journalist disagreed that he was being “censored or scared.” But he does feel “incredibly angry that the reputations of amazing news people and reporters are being dragged through the mud because of the buffoonish and dangerous actions of a few during that election.”

He added: “There were journalists every single day that did that right thing during that time. We stuck to the facts despite pressure from our audience and social media to not do our jobs.”

Another reporter, meanwhile, called the fallout over the filings “demoralizing, deflating and soul-crushing” as a journalist.

With all of the turmoil over the filings and the revelations about how Fox News really operates, has upper management addressed the staff?

Not really, sources told The Daily Beast.

“I’m also shocked by the fact that like, we have not had any sort of corporate communication,” the reporter said. “We’re operating as though nothing’s happening.”

The news production staffer declared that there was “definitely nothing formal coming from corporate” on the matter.

Another Fox News insider said it was “true” that corporate had not communicated at all with staff about the filings. “No word from anyone,” the insider added.

“Not a word to us,” a network correspondent said. “It’s like it’s not even a thing. There’s been no guidance—nothing internal, not even hush-hush in the hallways. But of course, we all see the reporting, and every day it’s more and more damning.”

While management is keeping Fox staffers in the dark as the controversy only continues to grow, they did make sure to put out the word to media outlets that Scott’s job was not in danger.

This comes amid speculation that the Murdochs “are certainly setting Suzanne Scott up to take the fall for this,” and that “they’re leaving a trail of crumbs that lead back to her office.” Rupert Murdoch himself said in his deposition that network executives who knowingly allowed election lies to be aired “should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.”

“Suzanne Scott, she’s in charge of the whole company, so that’s news and opinion and she’s clearly not looking out for the news side here,” the reporter exclaimed. “How can we all continue to work for her?! How can anyone watching Fox for news believe that they’re gonna get news if she’s in charge? We are not happy.”

The reporter also wondered how Carlson could continue to work for the company after it was revealed that he was demanding at least one journalist be fired for doing their job.

“It’s wrong,” the producer said of Carlson’s behind-the-scenes actions. “He acts like the king of Fox. Entitlement. Extremely unprofessional.”

“Honestly, Tucker is a joke, and I don’t know many in the news division that likes or respects him,” a correspondent sighed. “He makes our jobs harder and way more dangerous.”

The veteran journalist, however, pointed out that “Tucker has publicly attacked and humiliated journalists here at Fox before” so “it shouldn’t be a surprise that he was trashing us behind the scenes.”

Citing the enormity of Fox as an entertainment and media corporation, and how even $1.6 billion may not change the bottom line all that much, the news production staffer observed: “I don’t think it’s going to change anything operationally for them, right?”

In the end, one thing that stood out to many of these staffers was the mere fact that Fox News was legitimately worried that Newsmax would suddenly overtake them as the top cable destination for conservative viewers.

“Generally speaking it was very clear that Fox leadership was incredibly worried about Newsmax and viewer backlash,” the journalist said. “It was clear we were operating from a place of fear and bad decisions were made.”

The news production staffer was far more blunt.

“The biggest eye-opener of all of this is the paranoia at the highest levels of the company. That an upstart like Newsmax can even be in the same arena as Fox for them,” he proclaimed. “This is Fox, Fox News, dude, like, they have a huge infrastructure nationwide. So many resources that something like a Newsmax just cannot even come close to matching, and to think that they were so concerned about losing market share to someone like Newsmax and to go so far as to report these conspiracy theories on the air?”

The staffer concluded: “That to me is the most revealing of all of this is that the people in the positions of power—Rupert, Lachlan, Scott, all of them—they were actually genuinely concerned and paranoid that without pandering to the Trump base and entertaining the lies, that they would actually crumble as a business. That’s just ridiculous in my mind.”

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Posted (edited)
On 3/8/2023 at 12:18 PM, HenryJames said:

image.png.8c6c886c0df8f63afa551788af78bf4d.png

"Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" remains? ...not upset

"Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" gets removed? ...not upset

 

What does that make me?

 

-

Edited by yoladu
Posted
52 minutes ago, Hornius Emeritus said:

The way that reads it sort of indicates that the producer ranks the FOX-watching audience below Saudi terrorists.

That's certainly my read. 

What a shock that fox would be cynically and dishonestly pushing a narrative just for the pursuit of power and money!

Posted
1 hour ago, Lurch said:

Yeah, I wound up finding it in the Tucker Carlson thread.

May as well post the whole article.

Quote

Ex-Trump aide at Fox wrestled with election lies, network’s interests

Documents show Fox Vice President Raj Shah privately derided the White House’s narrative of a stolen election. But he also pushed back on efforts to dispute the claims.

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Josh Dawsey
March 12, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

As Rudy Giuliani railed about voter fraud from the lobby of the Republican National Committee’s headquarters a few weeks after the November 2020 election, rivulets of hair dye running down the side of his face, an executive at Fox Corporation let loose in text messages with his reaction.

“This sounds SO F------ CRAZY btw,” wrote Raj Shah, who had served as a senior aide in Donald Trump’s White House for two years before his hiring at Fox. “Rudy looks awful,” a deputy wrote back, prompting Shah to respond that “he objectively looks like he was a dead person voting 2 weeks ago.”

But Shah’s job at Fox was to protect the company’s brand, then under pressure from Trump allies who wanted to push Giuliani’s wild claims of a stolen election and who were abandoning the network for more hard-line options like Newsmax and One America News. So when a Fox News reporter went live on air just after Giuliani’s news conference concluded and declared that some of what the president’s lawyer had said was “simply not true,” Shah reacted with alarm.

“This is the kinda s--- that will kill us,” he texted the deputy. “We cover it wall to wall and then we burn that down with all the skepticism.”

The texts are drawn from more than a million pages of internal Fox correspondence released in recent weeks as part of a defamation lawsuit filed against the company by Dominion Voting Systems. The cache has revealed how Fox executives, producers and hosts expressed private doubts about Trump’s false election claims even as the network amplified the allegations on air.

The emails and text messages involving Shah offer a particularly vivid example of the pattern, demonstrating how elements of Fox, the Republican Party and the then-president’s own staffers spent years accommodating some of Trump’s worst impulses and amplifying some of his lies. When it came to the baseless election fraud narrative — including that counting dead voters had lifted the Democrats to victory — many of these people were aware of the likely falsity of the allegations but were unwilling to anger Trump or his supporters by clearly stating so publicly.
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Shah is also a reminder of how Trump’s operation had become fused to the nation’s most watched conservative news channel, whose coverage had helped fuel his rise before his 2016 election. Shah was part of a long line of Trump underlings who passed back and forth between Trump’s orbit and Fox’s on- and off-air ranks.

Former Fox News co-president Bill Shine was hired as deputy White House chief of staff in 2018, picked in part because Trump was impressed by his experience overseeing television that appealed to the conservative base.

That same year, one of Trump’s closest advisers, Hope Hicks, was named head of corporate communications for New Fox, the successor to Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, after a two-year stint in the White House. She left Fox to return to the Trump administration in March 2020, as the reelection campaign heated up. Numerous Trump aides found post-government jobs as pundits on Fox’s airwaves.

In the lawsuit, scheduled to go to trial in Delaware next month, Dominion argues that Fox defamed the company by broadcasting falsehoods claiming its machines were used to help Joe Biden defeat Trump. Fox has said it was covering newsworthy claims, not promoting or endorsing them, and has accused Dominion of “distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.”

Shah, who remains at Fox, declined to comment through a company spokesman.

Before joining the White House, Shah, 38, worked for the Republican National Committee in four election cycles, focusing on opposition research against Democrats. As the party’s research director, Shah led the 2016 efforts to promote stories related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and her work at her family’s foundation.

After Trump won, Shah became a White House spokesman. In an administration where the top figures often battled to be in the news media and in the Oval Office, Shah liked to keep a lower profile, only occasionally speaking on camera and, unlike many others, reluctant to angle for one-on-one meetings with the president.

John Kelly, a former Trump chief of staff, said he had been impressed by Shah’s competence in a chaotic White House. Shah was popular among competing factions of the White House staff, five former administration officials said.

“He never struck me as that much of a Trump devotee,” Kelly said. “He seemed to be a guy that was trying to do a good job in a really difficult environment, and he was a straight shooter.”

In 2019, Shah left the White House and briefly worked for a major pro-Trump lobbyist and donor, Brian Ballard. “He understands crisis communications at a very high level,” Ballard said.

Shah then took a job as senior vice president of Fox Corp., where he came recommended by fellow White House alum Hicks. He arrived as the company was facing newly organized criticism of its coverage and boycotts of its advertisers. He testified in a January lawsuit deposition that he was hired to conduct “brand protection” for Fox and its properties, including Fox News.
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One of his main jobs is to monitor problems — negative stories, online threats, rising criticism — that could affect the company’s bottom line and orchestrate ways to defend the hosts and the network.

Shah has relied on right-wing social media influencers to defend some of the criticisms, and has hired consultants at times. A former Fox employee said Shah worked closely with Tucker Carlson’s team and was trusted by the prime-time hosts as a vigilant defender against critics. He also served at times as a liaison between Fox executives and the prime-time hosts.

“There was a need for someone who could spot and put out political fires,” the former employee said.

In the documents, Shah emerges less as Trump’s man-on-the-inside at Fox than as a bridge between the then-president’s world and the network, and a reliable translator of Trump’s base for Fox’s management.

After Fox News called Arizona for Biden on election night, earlier than other networks, part of Shah’s job became to manage the rage of Trump and his supporters.

In testimony to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Hicks recalled that it was Shah whom she contacted on election night to find out how Trump’s team could complain about the Arizona call. She testified that Shah suggested the White House contact Jay Wallace, the president of Fox News, and provided his phone number.

In private text messages the following day, Shah made clear that he personally believed that Fox News’s Decision Desk had probably been correct when it concluded that Trump could not overtake Biden’s narrow lead in the key swing state, even though votes were still being tallied.

“What is the latest from Trump world?” a Washington lobbyist texted Shah. “Are we done or is AZ really still in play?”

“I don’t really think AZ is in play. I’m also seeing Fox’s perspective, where we called it early and are catching heat for this,” Shah responded.

By the following week, anger at the network among Trump’s supporters had spiraled. Shah became concerned that Fox’s viewers might be tuning out.

“Want to ask, even though it seems impossible, but is the idea of some sort of public mea culpa for the AZ call completely and totally out of the realm? Or some programming that’s focused on hearing our viewers grievances about how we’ve handled the election?” Shah inquired on Nov. 10 of Fox News PR Chief Irena Briganti.

Shah’s proposal was rejected on grounds that it would spark dissension between the network’s news and opinion employees, a narrative Fox could ill afford while already under fire.

As conservative anger at Fox grew and Trump’s allegations about the election results began to mount, Shah and his team monitored declining ratings with worry and arranged to survey Fox viewers about their reactions. It was a tactic drawn from the political campaigns with which Shah was familiar.

“Our brand is under heavy fire from our customer base,” he wrote in an email commissioning the survey. “Our concern is Newsmax and One America News Network,” he wrote in another email, naming two right-wing outlets that were more aggressively embracing Trump’s views and that Fox feared could eat into the network’s viewership.

“I’ve shared my thoughts … that bold, clear and decisive action is needed for us to begin to regain the trust that we’re losing with our core audience,” he wrote in an email the next day.

The Giuliani news conference on Nov. 19 deepened Fox’s dilemma. The former New York mayor appeared alongside attorney Sidney Powell, whom Giuliani referred to as one of the campaign’s “senior lawyers.” Powell had by then been featured repeatedly on Fox, where she lobbed false allegations that voting machines sold by Dominion had been manipulated in key swing states to flip votes from Trump to Biden.

Privately, however, texts released in the lawsuit show that Fox hosts and producers were growing frustrated with Powell. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in a Nov. 17 text.

On the night of the news conference, Carlson opened his show expressing doubts about Powell. He told his viewers that he had taken her claims “seriously” but had been urging her to produce evidence of her claims without success. “She never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” he said.

The monologue earned Carlson some pushback from the right, including from Powell herself, who appeared on Fox rival Newsmax to declare Carlson “abrasive” and “disrespectful.”

Shah swung into action and deployed his contacts in Trump’s world, appearing to act more as a political operative than a traditional news network executive.

“After criticism from social media for Tucker’s segment questioning Attorney Sidney Powell’s outlandish voter fraud claims, our consultants and I coordinated an effort to generate Trump administration pushback against her claims,” Shah wrote in an email to his bosses a few days later. He continued: “We encouraged several sources within the administration to tell reporters that Powell offered no evidence for her claims and didn’t speak for the president.”

Indeed, on Nov. 22, Trump’s campaign issued a statement, attributed to Giuliani and fellow campaign attorney Jenna Ellis, declaring that Powell was “practicing law on her own” and was “not a member” of Trump’s legal team.

Despite his behind-the-scenes lobbying, Shah counseled a middle course in dealing with her claims on air. On the day after Carlson publicly challenged Powell, Shah and a Carlson producer weighed whether Carlson should devote time in his next show to Powell’s claim that she had an affidavit that would link Dominion to Venezuela.

“Might wanna address this, but this stuff is so f------ insane. Vote rigging to the tune of millions? C’mon,” Shah wrote.

Carlson’s producer, Alex Pfeiffer, responded: “It is so insane but our viewers believe it so addressing again how her stupid Venezuela affidavit isn’t proof might insult them.”

Shah advised that Carlson should mention the affidavit noting it was “not new info, not proof” but then quickly “pivot to being deferential.”

Pfeiffer, who has since left the network, answered that the delicate dance was “surreal.”

“Like negotiating with terrorists,” he added, “but especially dumb ones. Cousin f----- types not saudi royalty.”

In the following weeks, Trump continued to court voices who embraced his false claims the election was stolen — and Powell continued to appear on Fox.

On Jan. 3 — three days before the Capitol was attacked by Trump supporters as Congress met to confirm Biden’s win — Shah exchanged text messages with another former White House spokesman, Josh Raffel, who had been primarily responsible for handling communications for Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, senior adviser Jared Kushner.

Raffel flagged to Shah a tweet noting that Trump’s daily schedule now carried with it the vague assurance that the president would make “many calls and have many meetings” and “work from early in the morning until late in the evening.”

“I think what they meant is The President will wake up early and commit many, many crimes including but not limited to obstruction of justice, attempted fraud, and treason in an effort to conduct a coup. Then he’ll fly to a rally in furtherance of the same,” Raffel wrote. (Now a public relations executive in New York, Raffel declined to comment on the text.)

“It’s really disheartening,” Shah responded. “The only clear cut evidence for voter fraud is the failed attempts from Trump.”

 



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