Fourteen months ago, the media reported how the picture Fox painted of “patriots” at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, didn’t match private texts about the event. Three Fox hosts—Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham—were frightened that the rioting, clearly shown all day on television, would hurt the legacy of Dictator Donald Trump (DDT). They begged his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to stop the riots causing deaths and injuries. Fox & Friends’ Brian Kilmeade texted pleas to stop the destruction of everything DDT “accomplished.” The news came out during the last public hearing of the House January 6 investigative committee when they voted to recommend charges against DDT. Fox didn’t air the hearing, and Hannity didn’t ask Meadows, his guest that night about the texts. So much for Fox’s “fair and balanced” claim.
Fast forward 26 months and the public is discovering much more from depositions for the Dominion defamation lawsuit admitting Fox knew their support of DDT’s conspiracies were lies. After DDT’s supporters attacked the Capitol, DDT tried to call Fox, but the network wouldn’t put him on air because “it would be irresponsible to put him on the air” and “could impact a lot of people in a negative way,” according to testimony by Fox Business Network President Lauren Petterson. On the evening of January 6, Carlson texted his producer calling Trump “a demonic force. A destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us.”
Privately, Fox’s most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives ridiculed MAGA’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, but on air the network publicly pushed the lies. In March 2021, Dominion filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox, stating that the network “recklessly disregarded the truth” during the election and pushed pro-DDT conspiracy theories about the election technology company because “the lies were good for Fox’s business.” Following is testimony from the depositions:
Tucker Carlson texted Ingraham that Sidney Powell, one of DDT’s attorneys, was “lying” and that he had “caught her” doing so. Carlson also called Powell an “unguided missile,” and “dangerous as hell.”
Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”
A week after the presidential election, Carlson told his producer that it had been a “mistake” to not present DDT’s voter fraud claims but acknowledged, “I just hate this shit.” Three days later, Carlson wrote that he wanted DDT to concede the election and that “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome.”
Six days after Biden was inaugurated, Pillow guy Mike Lindell was on Carlson’s show to talk about “new machine election fraud” and claim that Dominion “hired hit groups of bots and trolls” to have him “cancelled.” Lindell added he “found” “the machine fraud” and had “all the evidence” about “Dominion” without Carlson disagreeing or asking questions; Carlson finished the show by saying “God Bless You.”
Sean Hannity said “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”
Just days after the election, Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor texted a friend, “[T]here is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations – stories. Twitter. Bulls—.”
Off the air, the network’s stars, producers and executives called the conspiracies “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails,” and “completely bs”—or more graphic terms.
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, did not believe Trump’s election lies and even floated the idea of having Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham appear together in prime time to declare Joe Biden as the rightful winner of the election. Murdoch said doing this “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen.” But Fox was in trouble with right-wing viewers because it had accurately called the election for Biden.
Weeks after the election, Murdoch emailed, “Really crazy stuff. And damaging” about the claims that DDT’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was making on Fox.
Fox admitted Hannity and Lou Dobbs’ shows did not “challenge the narrative” that Dominion was responsible for rigging the election or producing inaccurate results. Soon after the insurrection, Fox cancelled Lou Dobbs’ show which he used to promote false conspiracies about the 2020 election. A month after the insurrection, Fox cancelled Dobbs’ show but said it had nothing to do with Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against him.
The most recent filing from Dominion is a motion for summary judgment on liability. It asks the judge in Delaware to rule based on evidence and material facts that a trial is not needed but wouldn’t settle damages. Dominion sells electronic voting hardware and software. Fox both denied Dominion’s claims and insisted it is “proud” of its 2020 election coverage.
The judge ruled that he considers Dominion to be a public figure in the defamation claims, meaning the company must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Fox defendants acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth. Two weeks after the election, Carlson told Ingraham that he personally found MAGA lies “unbelievably offensive,” but added, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Matt Gertz wrote:
“It establishes definitively that at least in some cases, Fox hosts are knowingly deceiving their viewers because they think that is what the viewers want.”
Sean Hannity tried to get a Fox employer fired for accurately fact-checking a false DDT tweet about Dominion changing the vote totals because, as Carlson said, such content was “measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.” On his program Carlson did note that Powell hadn’t provided evidence for claiming Dominion stole the election for Joe Biden, but off screen, he called her claims “absurd” and insane.” With its role to confirm what its right-wing viewers already believe, Fox is a propaganda outlet, not a news outlet. Carlson supported the election fraud lies by asking how Biden received “15 million more votes than his former boss Obama.”
Twelve days—296 hours—after the disastrous 7.8 earthquake hitting Turkey and Syria, a couple was rescued alive from under a collapsed apartment building, but over 46,000 people have died. Many others are still missing, and 264,000 apartments in Turkey were destroyed. Although almost 6,000 of the dead were discovered in northwestern Syria, 95 percent of the rebel-held region has not yet been searched because search and rescue teams are not able to enter. The remaining five percent was searched by volunteers and local organizations. In the impacted region, relentlessly bombed by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, Russia, and Iran-backed militias, 90 percent of the 4.4 million people live on humanitarian aid, many of them displaced by the conflict.
In neighboring Turkey, 15,000 or 19,000 collapsed buildings were inspected a week after the disaster. Government teams inspected 1.85 million homes and offices in 369,000 buildings in the earthquake’s epicenter.
The upcoming president election is less than three months away, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan may struggle with relection after being in office for 20 years with emergence of damaging videos in which he is seen praising some of the housing projects that killed people when they crumbled. In the 2019 videos, Erdogan is seen bragging about solving housing problems “with zoning amnesty,” meaning that he allowed contractors to ignore safety codes designed to create apartments, housing, and other buildings resistant to earthquakes. According to experts, his “amnesty” caused the huge death toll. A senior Istanbul city official listed over 40,000 amnesty certificates in the hard-hit Gaziantep province. Builders might have to pay a fine for the certificates, but they could proceed without meeting code restrictions. In 2013, on the anniversary of the 1999 earthquake killing over 17,000 people, Erdogan tweeted:
“Buildings kill, not earthquakes. We need to learn to live with earthquakes and take measures accordingly.”
Rebuilding in Turkey may cost up to $100 billion to restore one million plus buildings. Half of the 3.4 million buildings in the affected region of southern Turkey may need to be demolished, said Eyüp Muhçu, head of the architects’ chamber at the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects. Infrastructure and public facilities must also be built, and 13 million people may be affected in Turkey’s hardest hit areas where residential properties, schools, hospitals, commercial buildings, airports, mosques, and other places of worship will all need to be either fixed or rebuilt. Vital infrastructure such as motorways and underground pipes has also been demolished.
Tiziana Rossetto, professor of earthquake engineering at University College London. said buildings damaged in natural disasters fit into one of three categories: totally ruined, fixable, and liveable. Erdogan promised “complete construction and recovery within a year,” but authorities disagree. Sara Shneiderman, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studied how Nepal recovered after its 2015 quake, called a timeline of 12-months “fanciful . . . reconstruction is a multiyear process” while Rossetto said it was “completely unrealistic.”
Erdogen’s big problem is where to get the money to rebuild because Turkey is short on funds. He will need foreign investors who are avoiding Turkey because Erdogen has failed to fight inflation by drastically cutting interest rates. At the time of the quake, the annual rate had dropped from 85 percent to 58 percent, and economists agree that Turkey’s economy will stall in the coming year.