Fox News has come under a lot of heat as of late. With the increasingly strong case by Dominion Voting Systems against the network, more evidence of their blatant deception about the 2020 election has been exposed, undermining the supposed credibility of America’s most infamous news channel. But even with the evidence of Fox’s lies now on full display, there is another layer of cruelty to Fox’s coverage. That being their complete and utter contempt for their viewers.
Amid millions of texts and documents from within Fox News, there has been a wide array of revelations about the nature of Fox’s coverage, but recent reporting from the Washington Post suggests that not only did Fox fear its audience and tried to appeal to it, but they also outright hated them for it.
In November of 2020, Fox’s Senior Vice President, Raj Shah, and Tucker Carlson producer, Alex Pfeiffer, were debating how to respond to a statement by the Trump campaign which distanced itself from the claims of Sidney Powell.
Powell, ever-inclined towards the absurd, had claimed that communist money from Venezuela had influenced the election prospects of Joe Biden thanks to Hugo Chavez. It is worth noting that Chavez has been dead since 2013.
In messages between Shah and Pfeiffer, Shah lambasted the claims as absurd, calling them “f------ insane” and warning that Fox should adopt a middle ground to the claims. In response, Pfieffer wrote, “It is so insane, but our viewers believe it, so addressing again how her stupid Venezuela affidavit isn’t proof might insult them.”
The frustration in dealing with those claims eventually boiled over as Shah expressed his annoyance with having to respond to an audience that he deemed beneath him, especially when the station he worked for seemingly couldn’t afford to denounce their conspiracies. Adding to his previous private denunciations, Shah compared working with supporters of the Big Lie to “negotiating with terrorists” and added that they were “especially dumb ones. Cousin f----- types, not Saudi royalty.”
That frustration did not stop Shah or Pfeiffer from maintaining the course to the point where significant portions of Americans now believe that the election was stolen, thanks to pundits who didn’t believe what they were saying.
It was nothing more than a cynical ploy by a news station that feared its audience was so tied to Trump that it couldn’t see anything else and, at the same time, despised that audience as unintelligent and belligerent. In another set of texts, Tucker Carlson went so far as to admit that Trump hadn’t delivered on his campaign.
“We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”- Tucker Carlson on Trump Presidency
Earlier last week, I noted how fundamentally deceptive and condescending Fox News content is, especially when it comes to the blatant and knowing lies that came from Tucker Carlson. But even with what was known about Tucker and his colleagues’ lies about 2020, it still comes as an astonishing admission by Fox News and its staff about how they think of their own fans.
The fact that Fox staffers actively pursued a position of pro-Trump, pro-Big Lie propaganda despite them actively knowing that they were lying and that Trump hadn’t delivered on their goals is insane. It demonstrates a clear malice in how Fox staff and contributors view their audience and the nation as a whole.
That the body politic should be subjugated to lies that not only eat at the soul of America but at the soul of the very people who promote them for a channel’s bottom line is insulting. Not only to the people who have to defend themselves from absurd accusations with no basis in reality but to the very people who trusted Fox to give them the news.
That Fox, or any channel, would dare to insult the intelligence of its audience in such a way is outrageous and should drive every American to see Fox for what it is, a disgusting rag that leeches off the American heart.