Angelo Carusone talks to Dean Obeidallah about how Fox's “straight news” has spread lies about election results
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From the November 13, 2020, edition of Sirius XM’s The Dean Obeidallah Show
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yah, I think that one of the things that happened is that, you know, Fox is -- you know, there -- there's such a low bar for Fox News that if they provide -- if they provide any accurate information, even a snippet of it, it feels like there's something huge. And it also gets --
DEAN OBEIDALLAH (HOST): Right.
CARUSONE: To this larger battle with Trump, right?
OBEIDALLAH: Right.
CARUSONE: And -- and obviously their primetime hosts are behaving as though -- as --as expected. So, we just did a quick sort of analysis like, "Let's just see nuts and bolts."
Is -- are we -- are we -- you know, we were debating amongst ourselves, which is that "Are we so venomously and reflectively angry at Fox that we can't even acknowledge when their coverage is qualitatively different."
And so we said, "Okay look -- we're gonna look at the three days or four days after they called the election." So, from the 7th through the -- the 10th. And just code every instance where they either promoted a conspiracy theory about the results -- so -- or cast doubt on -- on the election, and then we're just gonna -- we're just gonna code that straight up and then we'll see news side, opinion side.
And what we basically found is that overall during that time period, there's more than 250 times, and when you look down at it -- you know, about 170 were on the -- of those instances -- you know, took place on the Opinion side, and about 130 took place on the news side. So, not that much of a difference.
And -- and the -- the point in that was to -- is to say "Yah, their news side is doing it too."
It's not as intense, its not as regular, certainly, and there's more snippets of facts and truth being sort of sprinkled into the coverage, which ironically is getting them into trouble with Trump and the rest of the right wing.
So it's like they're get -- they're really getting no benefits of it. You know, they're making their audience mad at them but they're also not -- you know, sort of even hitting the -- the full mark here in terms what you would do if you were doing journalism.