On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses how Fox News no longer plays the same role in the right-wing media ecosystem as it used to
Carusone: “Even if Fox News turned on a dime, my assessment is that it wouldn't really have much of an impact in terms of, you know, that fortress of lies”
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From the October 8, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): The Trump campaign in the final four weeks is amplifying content that is against FEMA, the White House, and the local residents, the very people he's trying to win over. This feels like hyperspiral to something different than what we've been covering for nine years.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, I think that's right. And I appreciate that you acknowledged that this is different. And the last discussion when Vaughn was sort of talking about, you know, in a way that part of this is sort of, you know, sowing the seeds, incubating narratives that they can pluck back up if the election doesn't go their way and point to — that's all being sown right now.
And I think one of the things that's different and why this is so scary from my perspective is that you know, one of the things that Rupert Murdoch acknowledged right before January 6, 2021, was that Fox News was the only entity that could've corrected the record about who won the election. And ultimately they decided not to issue any statements or do any reporting saying that Trump lost in that time period, then we have January 6. But he was right back then. In 2021, that was true, that you could actually — because of where Fox was positioned, if they told the truth, a large enough segment of that audience would have consumed it, and it would have had a neutralizing effect.
What you ask what the difference is and note that — this is the difference. The difference is that no longer is there a single entity in sort of that fortress of lies — I love that description — that Trump is behind that can actually penetrate that and neutralize those lies. It's scattered them out. So if one of them decides to go rogue, the effects of it are really limited. And, you know, 60 Minutes said no fact-checking, but the part I marveled at is that Laura Ingraham fact-checked Donald Trump during that rally when he said that Vice President Harris hadn't been in North Carolina, and she had to correct him in the real-time and say, well, actually, she's there right now.
And of course, that doesn't land, that doesn't have the same penetrating effect, because of exactly what you acknowledged, this is different. That the seeds are being sown across multiple social media platforms and the position that X has is in many ways the position that Fox News had a few cycles ago. They're simply too big, too influential, and too many narratives have been seeded there and incubated that it'll be impossible to singularly swab them down. Even if Fox News turned on a dime, my assessment is that it wouldn't really have much of an impact in terms of, you know, that fortress of lies.
WALLACE: So where are we then, Angelo?
CARUSONE: We are in a, you know, increasingly difficult place, and that's the part that I find so scary. There are a lot of — lot of antibodies in the system, and I'm not a medical professional, but, to me, I look at misinformation in many ways that, it follows a lot of similar patterns that public health does. It's viral, that's why we call it viral when something goes viral, right? Because it follows very similar behaviors.
The only way to really deal with misinformation is not to correct it on the backend, especially nowadays when there's so little faith in institutions, is that you have to have antibodies in the systems. You have to have some trusted sources, and you have to have some friction in the system, some mechanisms that slow it down from spreading, so that good information can get out there and get in front of it.
And that's the thing that is really scary from my perspective. Forget about the lack of antibodies. A lot of the friction that had been in the system is not only being removed, but it's actually being accelerated. So that all of the platforms are not just letting this stuff happen, they're helping boost it and saturate it and amplify it, in ways that have also not existed in previous cycles.
So the opportunism to exploit that vulnerability is great, both from foreign adversaries and from the Trump campaign. And because it is no longer something that they're building on the fly, challenging the election is their plan B. They have been planning for this. That's what makes this so different. We are in a really scary position.
WALLACE: It feels like that's the conversation we have to have next, like, tomorrow, because that is being seeded. And I guess the last thing I would say that I learned from both of you is that despair and hopelessness is their tactic, so the real antibody is us. We are the answer. We are the answer. And our faith and our ability to vote and reject it, that's the answer, that's what they're most afraid of. So all of it is designed to make us think that it's impossible, but it's definitely possible.