CHRIS HAYES (HOST): Jane Mayer reporting in The New Yorker that Fox News knew about the alleged sexual encounter and the hush money payment before the election, but killed the story their own reporter found in order to protect Trump. It's a story that Oliver Darcy of CNN first reported last year, but Mayer adds some new details. She reports that in killing the story, the then-head of FoxNews.com, Ken LaCorte, told reporter, Diana Falzone, quote, “Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win, so just let it go.”
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HAYES: Angelo, that -- that gets us to the relationship as it exists today, which Jane Meyer goes into in some detail here as well. It's described as symbiotic, it's sort of a partnership. It's almost impossible to distinguish the White House operation now run by Bill Shine, the comms operation, who used to run Fox News and was Roger Ailes' sort of second-in-command, and the White House itself.
ANGELO CARUSONE: Yeah, no, and I think just to underscore that, just to give one example, there was a time last summer where the Fox & Friends segment was actually an entire package built around one of the claims in Donald Trump's tweet. Donald Trump tweeted about that segment, seemingly disconnected from the fact that he was even the source of it, which I think was just amazing.
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CARUSONE: And I think to me, that goes to show how difficult it is sometimes to tease out really who's leading who, but it gets to what I think was one of the key takeaways here, aside from the fact that it's morphed into a propaganda operation, and that is that Fox is sort of afraid of its own audience too now.
HAYES: Right.
CARUSONE: So, could they stop, even if they wanted to? And it doesn't seem that way.
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CARUSONE: Just to rewind, when Mueller was first appointed, in the 40 days after that, Jay Sekulow, Donald Trump's lawyer, was on Fox News every single night. He was practically Sean Hannity's co-host. That affects the ability for that -- I mean, this is the world we live in now. It's different.
