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Bama Chick
Bama Chick

I know you’re joking about the military and “wokeness” but let me tell y’all a little story. My son has been in the Marines around 18 months. COVID absolutely destroyed his path at Troy - he’s ADHD

The Royal We
The Royal We

1. No one from the Trump campaign ever had any contact with Russia. 2. Well, someone may have had contact with Russia, but the campaign/Trump didn't know about it. 3. Actually, there was con

TexArcher
TexArcher

I'm saying I'd like to get in my car and ram it into Sean Hannity at high speed.

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Restless Native

Restless Native 315

Posted
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.

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hookemATL

hookemATL 11734

Posted
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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.

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89664

Posted
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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Nivek

Nivek 16929

Posted
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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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NWBuck

NWBuck 8565

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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.

 

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YChang

YChang 3444

Posted
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 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32391

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

 

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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.

 

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mdmost

mdmost 43001

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Got to play the hits. Now starts the scary Michelle Obama rumors. Because if there's any one the Fox News viewers hate more than Barack Hussein Obama, it's the uppity female who he's married to who dared to make our kids not be fat because of their school lunches. Oh and that one time she said she was finally proud to be an American. 

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/michelle-obama-potus-2024

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32391

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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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BevoAbyss

BevoAbyss 2059

Posted
Posted

In the prophetic novel 1984, Orwell realized that the "telescreen" (large flat-screen TVs) were perfect technologies for ideological control and emotional manipulation—orchestrated by Party intellectuals, especially those in the media.

Fox News is filled with Doublethink and "Two Minutes Hate."

From 1984: "The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. ... 

In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices"

 

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Captainant

Captainant 27667

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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!

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