Crooked Media - What A Day: What the actual Tuck?!

Last night, new text messages from Fox News personalities and executives dropped as part of Dominion Voting Systems’s ongoing defamation lawsuit, and boy are they juicy. 
 

• This week, Fox News is very busy with its packed schedule of trying to create a new fictional narrative around the January 6 insurrection, but the company’s executives and hosts can’t outrun their own paper trail. According to court documents made public on Tuesday, Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch told CEO of Fox News Suzanne Scott that their star merchants of lies Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham maybe “went too far” in pushing the Big Lie. 
   

• The redacted legal document includes texts, emails, and depositions, all of which portray the network as having embraced conspiracy theories (that hosts and executives privately disavowed) as a liferaft to try to bolster declining viewership. The paper trail shows that Murdoch in particular did not believe the Big Lie, and did believe that both Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani were becoming “increasingly mad” (as in crazy), all while his network continued to platform Trump allies like Sidney Powell who strenuously promoted the lies. 
   

• The pull quotes from these documents are…really something. A particular favorite is one in which Murdoch laments to Scott, “All very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump, but what did he tell his viewers?” An extremely ironic thing to say for someone who…chairs the company peddling this misinformation! He also went on to describe the baseless claims of voter fraud “really crazy stuff.” Again, for Murdoch to strike such a tone of powerlessness and “Aw shucks, what can be done,” attitude shows that he’s effectively no different from Hannity: privately disavowing the Big Lie but allowing it to be spoon-fed to millions of bloodthirsty Fox viewers.

So, have these new disclosures caused any sort of meaningful self-reckoning at Fox? Of course not. 
 

• In a response to these leaked messages on Tuesday, Fox News accused Dominion of distortions and misattribution of quotations as part of a broader attempt to “smear Fox News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.” Many of the excerpts in question come from the time directly after the 2020 election, but one from Carlson right before January 6 was particularly damning, so we gotta share: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait…I hate him passionately.” Okay go off. Carlson continues, “The last four years…We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.” Yahtzee!

• Millions of Fox News viewers who inhaled the Big Lie are still convinced of it, because in the years since those text messages and emails were written, not only has Fox News continued perpetuating 2020-related conspiracy theories, it has only doubled down on them, while the broader right-wing media ecosystem maintains a code of silence about the Dominion revelations. They’re doing the same thing now with the doctored January 6 footage. Now Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is working with House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) to schedule of trip for members of Congress to visit the Washington, DC, jail where the January 6 defendants (the part of the Department of Corrections MTG calls “the patriot wing”) are being held. Greene praised Carlson’s selective airing of the footage, naturally, and has tried to return to the jail several times. This lady loves national traitors!

The tough pill to swallow about the revelations in the Dominion case is what we’ve known about Republicans for some two decades now: that calling them on “hypocrisy” does absolutely nothing. These are people with zero capacity for shame. Bad faith is an essential element of GOP ideology. Democrats should absolutely continue to point it out and provide a truthful, evidence-based narrative in its place, but we shouldn’t expect Republicans to change what they say, even when they themselves don’t believe what they're saying, unless they lose election after election after election.

Louisville Metro Police Department engaged in systemic civil rights abuses and routine excessive-force misconduct in the years leading up to the 2020 police killing of Breonna Taylor, who was murdered in her bed after police entered her home with a no-knock warrant, according to the feds. 

The Iowa state legislature passed a bill Wednesday banning gender-affirming medical care for any transgender people under the age of 18, despite the fact that giving trans minors such care is unanimously supported by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump went on Sean Hannity’s radio show on Monday to once again baselessly claim that the Russian invasion of Ukraine wouldn’t have happened if he was president, but clarified further that that’s because Trump would have let Russia “take over” parts of the country uncontested. Hannity naturally edited Trump’s confession out of the segment, because Fox News.

The Federal Trade Commission is ramping up its investigation into Twitter’s data and privacy practices and will seek testimony from company owner Elon Musk, who laid off most of Twitter’s workforce last year, which weirdly has had some negative consequences??

Longtime Republican campaign aide Carton Huffman came forward as the accuser in the sexual-battery and defamation case against CPAC leader Matt Schlapp. 

The centrist “No Labels Party” (eyes rolling so hard I’m doing physical damage to them) has qualified for the Arizona ballot in 2024. What. Could. Go. Wrong.

Voters in Oklahoma rejected a ballot measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana after an aggressive opposition campaign from law enforcement and prosecutors. 

The Biden administration’s new “tough on crime” posture and its opposition to the DC crime law is now being used in Republican attack ads against other Democrats—a surprise to no one. 

The Justice Department came out in opposition to a bipartisan proposal to restrict judges’ ability to impose longer sentences based on alleged crimes, even if unanimous(!) jury verdicts find the defendant not guilty of those alleged crimes! So I guess the Justice Department is taking a jazz approach: it’s all about the crimes you don’t commit. 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy invited House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to visit Ukraine after McCarthy’s histrionics over giving the country a “blank check.” McCarthy declined, because he committed to his blank brain. 

Today is International Women’s Day. The gender pay gap? Strong as ever!

Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) posed for a photo with high-profile neo-Nazis while commuting between congressional hearings, but says he didn’t know who they were and “condemn[s]...hate groups, hate speech, and violence.” Whoopsie!!

During a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on union-organizing rights, Chairman Bernie Sanders and ranking Republican Bill Cassidy took turns questioning a panel of major American union leaders. It was all business as usual—part of Sanders’s effort to build bipartisan support for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Then things heated up. Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien and Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) got into it. O’Brien and other witnesses on the labor panel repeatedly argued that corporations were making record profits while workers were not seeing any of the spoils, even when many of them had risked their lives to provide essential goods and services during the pandemic. Then Mullin, who is a plumbing-company owner, aired his “concern” that union leaders use “intimidation” when trying to unionize a company, pressed O’Brien with a right-wing line on the value of labor in general—“What job have you created?”— and accused O’Brien of “sucking” money out of people’s paychecks and “forcing” them to pay union dues. O’Brien tried to respond that Teamsters did not force members to pay dues, then said “You’re outta line!” in his perfect Boston accent. Then Mullin told O'Brien “Shut your mouth,” (!!!) accusing him of not knowing what he was talking about, at which point O’Brien owned him into oblivion. Poor Bernie just sat there banging his chairman’s gavel to no avail. I highly recommend watching this excerpt of the exchange!!

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Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) is the frontrunner in his reelection campaign, after losing to then-Republican Gov. Matt Bevin by just 5,000 votes in 2019. This is KENTUCKY we’re talking about, folks!