JOHN FUGELSANG (HOST): Is it fair to say that Bill Shine probably couldn't be hired in any major corporation in America, and that's probably why -- one of the reasons why he's working with the Trump White House?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Without a doubt. There is no way that he could get a job at a major corporation. What he did at Fox -- I mean, think about what you have to do to be so bad at Fox News that they will not keep you anymore. They forced him out because one of the things that he did is, he knowingly not just helped implement Roger Ailes' sort of long term vision and transition of Fox -- that might be a badge of honor. But one of the things he did was really run cover for Bill O'Reilly.
He really facilitated and enabled a lot of the, sort of serial sexual misconduct that was going on there. And then from a business perspective, even knowing all those things and the fact that it was likely to come out that Bill O'Reilly had made all those payments, re-signed Bill O'Reilly's contract, shortly before the New Yorker article started pushing things out, and The New York Times. So that really -- and so when Bill O'Reilly was openly forced to go, one of the things that happened is Bill Shine was forced out shortly thereafter because he really had been the one responsible for that calamity.
...
CARUSONE: I've been a Fox watcher now for I guess ten years and the thing that really is concerning to me is in the last year and a half, but in the last year in particular, Fox has actually gotten worse.
FUGELSANG: Yeah they have.
CARUSONE: They've really started picking up things that otherwise used to stay mostly peculating in online message boards and maybe some really extreme YouTube channels or Periscope videos, and now they're getting airtime and oxygen on Fox News. And you started seeing that filter up last May when Sean Hannity promoted the Seth Rich conspiracy that Hillary Clinton murdered a DNC staffer.
FUGELSANG: Right.
CARUSONE: But that wasn't really the only example of that. Tucker Carlson does that nearly daily. And now it's really started to affect a much larger part of that apparatus and it's worse. It really is intensifying. And they've gotten significant blow back from that, I mean their revenue is down by several hundred million dollars.
