TIERNEY’S REAL NEWS 17.2.23
We all know that Dominion voting systems is suing Fox News, Mike Lindell and others for reporting on the stolen election and implying that Dominion machines played a part in that scheme. Since 2020, tons of evidence has come out from video, eyewitness testimony, data analysis, machine analysis & whistleblowers to prove the election was stolen.
The evidence is overwhelming. A large majority of Americans believe the 2020 election was rigged. That’s no longer in question. The question is WHO IS WORKING AGAINST THE TRUTH. Fox News is right at the top.
Dominion just filed a long brief against Fox News. It is filled with redactions. I don’t care about Dominion’s false claims in the lawsuit. They, of course, will claim they did nothing wrong and that voting machines are all fine. Right.
What I do care about is how Fox News and their key anchors & executives acted behind the scenes – particularly since they called the election early for Biden in Arizona and were part of the coup against President Trump. This lawsuit includes actual emails and texts from people like Tucker, Hannity, Ingraham, Murdoch and Scott – at Fox News.
The emails reveal that people like Tucker and Murdoch privately insulted President Trump and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election.
Tucker was the most insulting – calling President Trump “demonic” and a “destroyer.” Tucker was more worried about the price of Fox stock than telling the truth. He actually wanted Fox to fire reporters who didn’t report what he wanted. Tucker & his bosses were worried about Newsmax & OANN taking audience away from Fox News – so they decided to shift gears and tell people what they thought they wanted to hear.
I’ve been telling people for years that Tucker hates Trump and was groomed by CNN and MSNBC and was funded by the Kochs. I know that people LOVE Tucker – but you need to know who he really is.
Behind the scenes, the leaders of Fox (including Rupert Murdoch & Bret Baier) disparaged Trump. Hannity caved to pressure and wanted Trump to concede to just stop the bleeding. So did Ingraham. So did Cavuto. Fox went out of its way to try to hurt good people like Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo & Judge Jeanine who actually tried to present both sides of the argument on claims of election fraud.
The redacted brief is here. You should read it all yourself. I summarize some of it below with verbiage from the brief & from the New York Times.
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![May be an image of text that says 'dropped a bomb." Hannity indeed had discussed with Scott. Hannity texted his team: "I just Ex.292 at FNN055_ FNN055_04455643. Suzanne Scott received the message. She told Jay Wallace and Fox News' SVP for Corporate Communications 31 Irena Briganti: "Sean texted me-he' standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn' understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in are going to be further disgusted." news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers deleted her fact-checking tweet. Ex.283. Ex.233. By the next morning, Heinrich had'](https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ZlCB24l0GUZO3ywymwFiZv4irGf6eEM-zlwOv_Tk0-Wyf5ZxNJaUEcpxTwttU_IF40qOp23tJnoLrtidBuok4zquTkFL3HD0Esw1JZ3auaiOuTrKneSdE789I2C1S3m8UjNvTs4WLqQsPmNSu4YIgOrJJyxMD3ftOQbhEgQYpbk-siKTOXYXfpX03GVwl8OTzE0S7Dn8Fk9Ei0LKzDqgX-SWFy67gT_1VgaBy7U5JvRaJWPDfrJ71lvZtj5jeSuHmTNTvgD8eslvdbQ1qaU3w68D5hpVy3xyqQwtqpQ0ly6fq4BYu490=s0-d-e1-ft#https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1920,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc30fc241-38da-43a3-8c51-579f5a9cf41c_960x797.jpeg "May be an image of text that says 'dropped a bomb.\" Hannity indeed had discussed with Scott. Hannity texted his team: \"I just Ex.292 at FNN055_ FNN055_04455643. Suzanne Scott received the message. She told Jay Wallace and Fox News' SVP for Corporate Communications 31 Irena Briganti: \"Sean texted me-he' standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn' understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in are going to be further disgusted.\" news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers deleted her fact-checking tweet. Ex.283. Ex.233. By the next morning, Heinrich had'") |
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Fox News stunned the Trump campaign on election night by declaring Biden the winner of Arizona – early – effectively projecting that he would become the next President. Then, as Fox’s ratings fell sharply after the election and President Trump refused to concede, Fox changed their tune & briefly allowed guests to talk about election fraud. Then when Dominion threatened to sue – they panicked again – fired Lou Dobbs and shut up everybody else.
Fox has sought to keep much of the evidence in this lawsuit under seal – hence the redactions.
FOX NEWS: “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
The brief shows that Fox News stars and executives were afraid of losing their audience, which started to defect to conservative cable news alternatives Newsmax and OAN after Fox News called Arizona early for Mr. Biden. They were concerned with the impact that would have on Fox’s profitability and stock price.
TUCKER CARLSON: “Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Dominion is asking for $1.6 billion as compensation for the damage it says it suffered as Fox guests and hosts claimed, for instance, that Dominion’s voting machines had been designed to rig elections and were equipped with an algorithm that could erase votes from one candidate and give them to another.
Fox Corporation has about $4 billion cash on hand.
The burden in the case falls on Dominion to prove that Fox acted with actual malice. That burden is difficult to meet, which is why defamation cases often fail.
For eight months, Dominion lawyers have taken depositions from dozens of people at all levels of the network and its parent company. Murdoch was deposed last month. Dominion’s brief was written before Murdoch’s deposition and does not reflect its contents, which remain under seal.
Hannity has been deposed twice. Both sides appear confident of victory. The judge has scheduled jury selection to begin in mid-April.
Fox has contested how Dominion arrived at the amount it is seeking in damages, arguing that the company has vastly overstated its valuation of $1.6 billion and the reputational harm it suffered.
Fox’s lawyers added that Staple Street Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns a majority share in Dominion, had paid about $38 million for its 76 percent stake in the company in 2018 and had never estimated Dominion’s financial value to be worth “anywhere near $1.6 billion.” Fox has made a counterclaim against Dominion seeking to recover all its costs associated with the lawsuit.
At times, Fox employees are disparaging one another. The president of the network, Jay Wallace, is quoted at one point criticizing the former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs — one of the biggest megaphones for Mr. Trump’s lies. “The North Koreans do a more nuanced show” than Mr. Dobbs, the brief says.
On Nov. 6, 2020, three days after Election Day, as Mr. Biden pulled into the lead, Mr. Murdoch told Ms. Scott in an email that it was going to be “very hard to credibly cry foul everywhere,” and noted that “if Trump becomes a sore loser, we should watch Sean [Hannity] especially.”
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Dominion says that Fox claimed on the air:
(1) Dominion committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 Presidential Election.
(2) Dominion’s software and algorithms manipulated vote counts in the 2020 Presidential Election
(3) Dominion is owned by a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chavez.
(4) Dominion paid kickbacks to government officials who used its machines in the 2020 Presidential Election.
Dominion says that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 Presidential Election.
WE ALL KNOW THAT’S NOT TRUE.
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Bartiromo: Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software. I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.
Powell: That’s putting it mildly. The computer glitches could not and should not have happened at all. That is where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.
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Fox was the first outlet to call Arizona for Biden — a call that infuriated Fox viewers, conservative activists, and the White House. Within minutes of the Arizona call, Fox News SVP and Managing Editor of the Washington Bureau, Bill Sammon, received an angry text from a member of Trump’s team claiming it was WAY too soon to be calling Arizona.
Minutes later, Sammon received a similarly angry phone call from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. And it was not just the White House. Other viewers were livid. Within an hour of Fox calling Arizona, in early morning on November 4, Suzanne Scott forwarded Jay Wallace an email from Fox Corporation Executive Raj Shah noting lots of conservative criticism of the AZ call.
Fox’s senior executives discussed the heavy backlash from the Arizona call at their daily editorial meeting that morning. On November 5, Fox’s Chief White House Correspondent told Sammon and FNC President Jay Wallace, we are taking major heat over the AZ call. “Our viewers are also chanting Fox News sucks something I have never heard before.”
Fox emails stating Holy cow, our audience is mad at the network, and they’re FURIOUS. The backlash was so strong that Fox Hosts Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity immediately understood the threat to them personally.
Carlson wrote his producer Alex Pfeiffer on November 5: “We worked really hard to build what we have. Those fuckers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.” He added that he had spoken with Laura and Sean a minute ago and they are highly upset. [It appears to me that Tucker is the ringleader – Hannity & Ingraham follow his lead.]
TUCKER: “At this point we’re getting hurt no matter what.”
PFEIFFER: “It’s a hard needle to thread, but I really think many on our side are being reckless demagogues right now.” He was talking about Dobbs, Bartiromo, Hannity and Judge Jeanine.
TUCKER: “Of course they are. We’re not going to follow them. What Trump is good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”
On November 5, Hannity told his audience that it will be impossible to ever know the true, fair, accurate election results, that’s a fact. That was true.
On November 5, Maria Bartiromo posted allegations of vote dumps on social media.
Bret Baier alerted management: “We have to prevent this stuff. We need to fact check.”
On November 7, the New York Post controlled by the Murdoch family wrote an editorial asking Trump to stop the stolen election rhetoric and get Rudy Giuliani off TV.
Fox executives said they believed they could control Tucker & Laura – Hannity was not quite as controllable: “I feel really good about Tucker and Laura. I think Sean will see the wisdom of this track eventually, but even this morning he was still looking for examples of fraud.”
TUCKER CARLSON: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane.”
LAURA INGRAHAM: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”
TUCKER: “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. I’ve never seen a reaction like this from the audience to any media company. Kills me to watch it. We’ve got to be incredibly careful right now. We could get hurt. They are destroying the Fox brand – a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Lou Dobbs chose a different strategy. On November 12, he invited Rudolph Giuliani on his show to explain election fraud and the delays in counting.
DOBBS: “It’s stunning they have no ability to audit meaningfully the votes that are cast because the servers are somewhere else. It looks to me like it is the end of what has been a four-and-a-half year-long effort to overthrow the president of the United States.”
FOX EXECUTIVE: “Sean texted me he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news.”
MURDOCH: “These people should be watched. Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani must be taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake.”
TUCKER: “Sidney Powell is lying. Fucking bitch. It’s insane.”
INGRAHAM: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”
FOX EXECUTIVES: “Do not ever give viewers a reason to turn us off. Every topic and guest must perform AND no more unforced errors in content example. The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in Fox. We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”
That day, both Dobbs and Hannity hosted Sidney Powell. Powell told Hannity: “The machine ran an algorithm that shaved votes from Trump and awarded them to Biden. They used the machines to trash large batches of votes that should have been awarded to President Trump . And they used a machine to inject and add massive quantities of votes for Mr. Biden.”
SCOTT: “Privately, I had a number of conversations with Sean where he wanted the President to accept the results, and Hannity had “understood” that Joe Biden legitimately won the election for some time.” RIGHT.
MURDOCH: “It’s been suggested that our PRIME TIME THREE (Tucker, Hannity & Ingraham) should independently or together say something like ‘the election is over and Joe Biden won’ and that such a statement would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election was stolen.”
It’s clear now that Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson & Paul Ryan control Fox News. I wonder if they had anything to do with AT&T and DirecTV cancelling OANN and Newsmax? I’d check into that if I were in charge!
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