As we learned last month, in November 2020, Carlson texted his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, to say that Trump was good at “destroying things,” adding: “He’s the undisputed world champion of that.” Two months later, on the day of the insurrection, Carlson told Pfeiffer in a text message that Trump was “a demonic force.” We assume he did not mean that as a compliment.
Also revealed in the documents released Tuesday was an email Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch sent to the network’s CEO saying hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham had gone off the rails with their election commentary. “Maybe Sean and Laura went too far,” Murdoch wrote to Suzanne Scott. “All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump, but what did he tell his viewers?” In another exchange with Scott, Murdoch wrote that someone had suggested that Fox’s top hosts give it to their viewers straight and say something like “the election is over and Joe Biden won,” which Murdoch believed would “go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen.” (Obviously, this never happened.)
Among other things, the documents also show that Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo—who was once a respected journalist!—plotted with former Trump adviser and convicted criminal Steve Bannon to discredit Biden and refused to call him president-elect on air, even though Fox News had projected Biden as the winner.
In a truly head-scratching statement on Tuesday, Fox claimed that the new filings had led Dominion to be “caught red-handed using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear Fox News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.” “We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case,” the network wrote, “but to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.” (It is not at all clear how anything revealed Tuesday makes Dominion look bad.)
As for Carlson, if he had any capacity for shame he’d call in sick today and just never show up on TV again, though clearly that isn’t going to happen. The real question, though, at this point, is whether Trump goes nuclear over Carlson’s remarks…or if he keeps his thoughts to himself and revels in the fact that regardless of what the Fox News host thinks of him, the guy is still doing his bidding.
“Not a lot of people know this, but I actually invented International Women’s Day…”
