Listen to Angelo Carusone outline the role of Fox News’ election lies in January 6 riots: “It was mathematically wrong and they knew it”
Carusone: “It made it more politically viable on the Republican side to actually embrace the idea that the election was stolen”
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Listen to Angelo Carusone outline the role of Fox News’ election lies in January 6 riots: “It was mathematically wrong and they knew it”
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From the June 14, 2022, edition of SiriusXM's The Dean Obeidallah Show
DEAN OBEIDALLAH (HOST): You guys at Media Matters had a really interesting article that the Fox News former political editor testified at the hearing yesterday. Chris Stirewalt, is that how you pronounce it? Stirewalt?
ANGELO CARUSONE: Yep, Chris Stirewalt.
OBEIDALLAH: And in the article, you talk about how he actually, in a way, undermined the former Fox News people. So share a little bit about the article from Media Matters and what was your take on it, your organization's take on it?
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting about it is that one, what he says, there's a couple pieces here that really just take a full broadside at Fox News as a whole.
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His whole point was that the night that Fox News made the call and other networks which was in November that night, there was essentially no statistical chance of Trump winning. That you actually had, he gave some comparison about you had a better chance of winning Powerball than, at that point, Trump winning the election.
OBEIDALLAH: Right.
CARUSONE: And yet even though that went out -- now, by him knowing that, remember, they all this information gets shared internally. The crazy thing is, is that immediately after that Fox News was quiet for about a day or two, and then all of a sudden they did seven hundred and seventy four segments denying the election.
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It wasn't just, oh, Hannity, you know, that was everyone. That was everyone from the morning every hour during the day, including the people that they always venerate like Bill Hemmer and Bret Baier, the supposedly serious journalists, they all ran segments specifically undermining and claiming that the election was stolen or reinforcing the idea, or these ideas of of doubt that something could have been done.
And they all knew better, because it was internal measurements. It was internal, they knew it. And so, you know, without him actually ripping his colleagues apart explicitly -- although I almost wanted him to, the reality is it was mathematically impossible and they all knew it. And they never told that to their people.
Right? So they literally went, they turned you, they turned on a dime here to push something they all knew was completely and totally wrong. It was impossible.
And I think that -- that is, obviously here, the committee's job is not to attack Fox, but that is significant because I think the landscape and the conversation around the January six would have been very different had Fox News not done what they did in November and December.
Because it -- what it did is it changed the entire contours of it not just being extremists and fringe people, but it made it more politically viable on the Republican side to actually embrace the idea that the election was stolen.