Watch Angelo Carusone explain Rupert Murdoch’s active role in spreading the election misinformation that led to January 6
Carusone: “Fox News was the lead steer of the Republican Party for decades, and they fomented this extremism”
Published
Citation From the September 20, 2023, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): I think that there's a lot to be said about this because he wasn't just a passive participant who sort of endured this happening. There was a moment at Fox News and an inflection point where they had actually gone from challenging Trump's election lies in the initial days of the results to making a flip, making a business decision and a political decision that they were actually going to carry the water for it.
That's why they ultimately got sued. And there were moments along the way, in fact, on January 5th, the day before the insurrection, Rupert Murdoch, there's documentation that came out from the Dominion, where he said the only entity that could correct these lies for the American public is Fox News. They're the only ones that have the trust relationship.
And he made an active decision the day before the insurrection not to use Fox News to actually correct that misinformation. So my point is that you know he can -- he wasn't totally a passive participant in this, not just in this moment, he actively enabled it. And then beyond that, and you sort of mentioned in your monologue is that they seeded this; they incubated this extremism. We didn't get here overnight. Fox News was the lead steer of the Republican Party for decades, and they fomented this extremism that they're no longer able to control.