Network of lies, p.15
Network of Lies, page 15
Even at its lowest-rated point, Fox was still incredibly influential. The demeaning of Smartmatic and Dominion was so scarily effective that lawyers for both companies decided to call for help. Dominion called Thomas Clare, who along with his wife, Libby Locke, ran Clare Locke, perhaps the most feared defamation law firm in the country. Clare took the call “while we were preparing Thanksgiving,” he recalled, and he walked to his office by the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia, to keep talking.
A paper trail was already established, thanks to Fratto’s emails and Langberg’s retraction demand, but there was so much more to do. “When we got the call, it was an easy ‘yes’ to get to become a part of it,” Clare said.
At almost the same time, over Thanksgiving weekend, Smartmatic’s general counsel David Melville left a voice mail for J. Erik Connolly, who led a defamation practice based in Chicago. Connolly, wondering if the inquiry was a prank, googled Melville before returning the call. They talked about the MAGA media chatter around voting machines, and then Melville said, “I’m going to send you some videos.” The clips showed Bartiromo and Dobbs disparaging Smartmatic. Connolly called right back.
“What’s your reaction?” Melville asked.
“Well,” Connolly said, “I’m assuming none of this is true.”
“None of it is true.”
“Then you’ve got a very good case.”
* * *
November 2020 produced a colossal migraine for the United States. The American people had evicted Trump from the White House. The public wanted to hear him get it over with and concede. But Maria Bartiromo was so infected by MAGA brainworms that she believed the public wanted to hear a “path to victory.”
On November 29, POTUS was set to call into Bartiromo’s Sunday morning show for his first TV appearance since the late unpleasantness. So she texted chief of staff Mark Meadows at 9:21 a.m. to prep for the segment. “The public wants to know he will fight this,” Bartiromo wrote. “They want to hear a path to victory. & he’s in control.”
Trump had never eclipsed 50 percent in approval ratings and won just 46 percent of the vote in each presidential election, but somehow Bartiromo assumed that what he wanted (and what she wanted) was universally backed, and therefore what the country wanted.
The host was so determined to help Trump that she even sent questions for him ahead of time to ensure he was well prepared for the broadcast. (According to Dominion, she also scripted answers for herself like “the facts are on your side.”) The ensuing “interview” consumed most of the 10 a.m. hour on Fox. Rather than pushing back on Trump’s broken-record spiel of propaganda, Bartiromo sat back and encouraged him to lie under the guise of asking for “evidence.”
She referred to conspiratorial “dumps” of votes, “big massive dumps” that benefited Democrats. At one point she exclaimed to Trump, “This is disgusting, and we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted.”
Trump’s lies were also practically scripted. They were predictable and repetitive. For example: “They found ballots in a river with the name Trump,” he claimed. “They were signed. And they were floating in a river.”
This was so untrue that it had been dismembered by Fox’s Jon Decker back in October during a rare White House briefing with Kayleigh McEnany. Every time Decker, a serious reporter for Fox’s radio division, pushed McEnany by asking where this river was, she ducked and dodged. “I simply want to know where the river is,” Decker pressed. He never got an answer because there was no river.
“Where is the river?” went viral, but it didn’t win Decker any fans inside his company. Not surprisingly, he left Fox at the beginning of 2021. On Bartiromo’s show, Trump continued to talk about this nonexistent river, and she did not interject, not even once, certainly not to ask for the river’s location.
* * *
While Bartiromo and Trump were gabbing on the phone, Hannity was in a text chain with Meadows, and like a dutiful soldier, Hannity still seemed to believe all the wild and crazy claims about the election. “I’ve had my team digging into the numbers,” Hannity wrote. “There is no way Biden got these numbers. Just mathematically impossible.” He was forgetting a crucial aspect of math: show your work. Biden had just done it, so it was obviously mathematically possible. Hannity then offered up his own contradiction, conceding he needed something valid—something like actual evidence—to prove the concocted charges of fraud: “It’s so sad for this country they can pull this off in 2020. We need a major breakthrough, a video, something.” Meadows replied one minute later: “You’re exactly right. Working on breakthrough.”
In this conversation Meadows was the would-be content creator and Hannity was the would-be distributor. “Ok,” Hannity responded. “Would be phenomenal.”
On CNN, immediately following the Trump interview, I said the president was delusional and Bartiromo was aiding in his delusions. What a disservice it was, to the Republican Party, to democracy, to reality, to have the president on the phone and allow him to deceive and damage viewers. The ratings report for Sunday showed America’s rupture: Of the 50+ cable news telecasts that day, the Bartiromo-Trump show was #1 and the Reliable Sources dissection of it was #2. The political system was approaching a treacherous point, a point where the peaceful transfer of power could not be taken for granted.
Bartiromo and Trump chatted after the broadcast and Trump said he was happy with how it went. But Bartiromo was doubting herself. She texted Abby Grossberg and said “I hope I didn’t blow it by not asking about Biden,” then wondered if they should have “just stayed the extra 5 minutes and talked about peaceful transition.”
“To be honest,” Grossberg told her, “our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition. They still have hope. And the vouchers”—I think she meant vultures—“would have declared it a concession.”
“Yes agree,” Bartiromo replied.
One more time the ghost of “Do the Right Thing” had made a visitation, only to be sent packing.
In the TV biz, anchors and producers often crave a segment that can “make news.” A guest who “makes news,” who says something that gets picked up elsewhere, with credit flowing back to the show, is considered a big win. That morning Trump made a lot of news even though what he said was drivel in a can. “It was the first time he acknowledged Dominion was bad,” Bartiromo commented proudly—and ominously.
The two women proceeded to insult the Fox exec in charge of weekend coverage, David Clark, calling him a moron. Clark knew Trump’s claims were gibberish and supported afternoon anchor Eric Shawn in saying so. Shawn recapped Bartiromo’s interview by saying Trump “doubled down on his claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even though local and national election officials, as well as federal and state courts in multiple states, and in some cases the Trump campaign’s own lawyers, have said there is no evidence to prove that. And experts say such claims are simply unsupported falsehoods that are not backed up by any facts.” See, that’s the kind of thing Bartiromo should have said to Trump directly. But speaking truth to power wasn’t her style.
Someone sent Grossberg my tweet about Shawn’s excellent segment. Grossberg shared it with Bartiromo and called it “pathetic and also not a good look for Fox” because it “perpetuates the narrative of post-election failure and infighting.” There was infighting—between folks who accepted reality and those who opposed reality.
* * *
Trump’s lying spree on Fox—particularly his statement that the Justice Department was “missing in action”—pushed Attorney General William Barr to publicly break with Trump. The baseless claims (by his boss!) that the DOJ had ignored evidence of fraud “got under my skin,” Barr admitted later. “It was time for me to say something.” So he invited Associated Press reporter Mike Balsamo to lunch on Tuesday, December 1. That’s when Barr said, for the first time, that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
Balsamo immediately filed an alert for the AP wire. When Trump learned about it, mid-meal in his private dining quarters right off the Oval Office, he hurled his lunch across the room in a fit of rage. White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson famously testified about the “ketchup dripping down the wall” afterward.
Barr’s statement to the AP is what fully convinced Rupert Murdoch that the Trump camp’s allegations of fraud were utterly bogus. “That just closed it for me,” Rupert said. He moved on, just like a growing majority of the public. But the outgoing POTUS remained addicted; he was still jonesing for steady doses of slavish devotion, and if he couldn’t get that relentlessly from Fox, he would look elsewhere. So he changed the channel to OAN, where he was still the man, and where the hosts continued to wish upon a star that he might remain in power. When Barr went to see Trump shortly after the AP interview, he noticed the TV in the dining room was turned to OAN, which was featuring a Michigan legislative hearing full of pro-Trump fraud fantasies. Trump publicly pressured Fox to be as irrational as OAN with tweets like this:
@FoxNews daytime is not watchable. In a class with CNN & MSDNC. Check out @OANN, @newsmax and others that are picking up the slack. Even a boring football game, kneeling and all, is better!
Some of his later tweets promoting OAN and Newsmax coverage of lie-filled election fraud hearings were roped into the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case in 2023.
Despite Trump’s best efforts, OAN’s audience was minuscule. Fox, even in its weakened state, was still dominant. Even with reality-based Republicans like Barr affirming that Trump’s bellyaching about fraud was all inert gas, Fox’s coverage still took Trump seriously. Sammon texted Stirewalt on December 2, while watching Bret Baier’s Special Report newscast, and grumbled, “More than 20 minutes into our flagship evening news broadcast and we’re still focused solely on supposed election fraud—a month after the election. It’s remarkable how weak ratings makes good journalists do bad things.”
Stirewalt called it a “real mess” and said “what’s most worrisome is that there doesn’t seem to be much conflict. Everybody is lazily paddling ahead of Niagara.”
Both men were about to be swept up in a post-election housecleaning. Stirewalt was “restructured” out of a job. Sammon was “retired.” The decisions were actually made in November. Rupert wrote to Scott back then, “Maybe best to let [Sammon] go right away and make acting appointment. Also the other guy. Next few weeks will be very sensitive and we can’t have sneering at events. And [it would] be a big message with Trump people.” Fox scored a respect-the-audience home run by forcing out the men who called the election correctly. Stirewalt spoke out against the “political operators and their hype men in the media” who tried to “steal an election or at least get rich trying.”
* * *
Hannity ignored Barr’s “we have not seen fraud” statement and instead dedicated most of his Tuesday show to people he called “election whistleblowers.” His guest Kayleigh McEnany called them courageous and implored the rest of the media to follow up. But the dogged Eric Shawn did just that the next day and found no “there” there—or anywhere. An account on Hannity’s show from a truck driver who said he carted hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots from New York to Pennsylvania fell apart under even mild scrutiny. The office of the Pennsylvania secretary of state told Shawn that “continuing to repeat these falsehoods only harms our democracy.” When Shawn reported this during a 7 p.m. segment with MacCallum, Scott snapped. “This has to stop now,” she wrote. “This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding [of] what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”
Fox PR later tried to claim that Scott’s objection was “not about fact checking—the issue at hand is one host calling out another.” But I rewatched the segment—Shawn didn’t mention Hannity at all. Scott was really saying that rebutting Team Trump’s antidemocratic lies was “bad for business.” And it was. The Fox Nation streaming service registered tens of thousands of cancellations in November. Scott’s tenure as CEO was riding on expansionist dreams like Fox Nation. This was personal for her.
So while Scott was morally wrong she was technically correct: The audience really was furious, still, a full month after the election. On December 7, Newsmax beat Fox in the ratings for the first time. It was for a single hour, 7 p.m., and in a single demographic, twenty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds, but it was a landmark moment for both channels. I called Chris Ruddy’s cell phone to hear his reaction and wound up breaking the news to him. (I had received the overnight ratings in my inbox before he did.) “We’re here to stay,” Ruddy said. “The ratings are showing that.”
Fox execs had derided Newsmax as a “joke” but now the punch line had a new victim. Fox was the one with the bloody nose.
* * *
On December 7, Fox board member Paul Ryan texted Lachlan, “I think we are entering a truly bizarre phase of this where [Trump] has actually convinced himself of this farce and will do more bizarre things to delegitimize the election. I see this as a key inflection point for Fox, where the right thing and the smart business thing to do line up nicely. A solid pushback (including editorial) of his baseless calls for overturning electors, etc. will undoubtedly accrue pushback and possibly a momentary ratings dip, but will clearly redound to our benefit in terms of credibility.”
Ryan had no way of knowing that the very same day, December 7, when he was warning about a possible plot based on “overturning electors,” Trump was in fact asking his legal cronies for research into whether a scheme to submit fake electors in the Electoral College tally for president was possible. The idea had been suggested in an email—also that same day—from a Phoenix lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, to Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, proposing that what Wilenchik himself called “fake” electors be submitted from Arizona. (In a subsequent message he concluded “alternate” electors might be a better term than “fake,” attaching a smiling face emoji. In a courtroom that would pass for “consciousness of guilt.”)
The plot expanded from there to include seven targeted states. The special counsel’s indictment said Trumpworld used “dishonesty. fraud, and deceit to organize fraudulent slates of electors and cause them to transmit false certificates to Congress.” The intention was to set up Vice President Mike Pence, in his capacity as the official in charge of certifying the Electoral College results on January 6, to refuse the Biden electors in favor of the fake Trump electors, at least creating enough confusion to throw the election into the House, where Trump would prevail.
A “truly bizarre phase,” indeed. All Ryan knew was that Fox needed to resist any and all attempts to “delegitimize” the election. “Trump is going to wear thin and look crazier by the day,” Ryan texted Lachlan. “Let him cleave off the fringe for his [direct-to-consumer] venture and we can keep the largest pool of people (the center and center right). Fox is stronger than he is now and later.”
* * *
There was a countervailing view, namely that Trump’s people knew how to make things very uncomfortable for Fox people. Case in point: When Chris Wallace interviewed outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar and Azar called Biden “vice president” instead of “president-elect,” Wallace interjected, “he’s the president-elect, sir.” That was the upstanding, professional thing to do; but Meadows turned it against him, sending an article about Wallace to Hannity and writing, “Doing this to try and get ratings will not work in the long run, and I am doubtful it is even a short term winning strategy.”
The suggestion that Wallace would make such a minor word correction in pursuit of ratings betrayed how skewed the thinking was in the Trump White House. Wallace did it because it was true, not because it would boost his audience. That was hardly likely, with his audience largely Trump fanatics. It was about the simple truth: Biden was president-elect. But Meadows couldn’t admit that.
“I’ve been at war with them all week,” Hannity replied to Meadows, before unveiling his own self-oriented power play. “Also if this doesn’t end the way we want, you me and Jay [Sekulow, an attorney for both Hannity and Trump] are doing 3 things together.” Hannity had a list for the former North Carolina congressman:
1- Directing legal strategies vs Biden
2- NC Real estate
3- Other business
In other words: We’ll partner up and cash in. Hannity’s helicopter didn’t fuel itself, after all.
Carlson’s greed was equally evident, though the topic was quite different. He flagged Greg Kelly’s ratings victory for Wells and Mitchell to advance his long-running campaign to discredit Martha MacCallum, his “lead-in,” in TV-speak. To understand a “lead-in,” picture TV hosts as runners in a relay race, grabbing the baton from the person before them and handing it off to the next host. Carlson wanted a faster, stronger hand-off. He believed the relatively weak ratings for MacCallum’s 7 p.m. newscast hurt his total at 8 p.m. and he wanted her replaced.
Wells was on his side since the ratings affected both of them. If MacCallum ended her hour with 2 million viewers, and Carlson was such a ratings magnet that he ended his hour with 3 million, then how much more popular would he be with a better lead-in? “Martha is basically taking a bat to Tucker’s knees” every night, Wells texted. “It’s been four years,” Carlson added. “She will never work in that hour. They know that. They’re too afraid to do anything about it.” Mitchell disagreed: “They do know.” The C-suite was actively contemplating another big change that would benefit Carlson.
