Fox News Stumbled After the Dominion Settlement and Fell Back on Hunter Biden and Crime
A condensed overview of 17 hours of Fox News for the week ending 4/23/23
Fox News seemed like a wounded Roman soldier last week. It’s gleaming and seemingly impenetrable armor was blood stained and muddied. None of the network’s wounds were lethal but the once unstoppable media company had finally been taken down a notch.
Unlike the multimillion dollar sexual harassment suits Fox paid out in the past, the Dominion defamation settlement caused actual damage. The correspondence revealed during the discovery process, exposed Fox News host’s real feelings about management, the former president and the Fox News audience.
The network could bounce back more easily after treating its female employees with disdain than it could from evidence that its hosts hated former President Donald J. Trump or that the network lived in fear of its own audience.
Fox News’ overpaid talking heads seemed visibly nervous after the $787.5 million settlement was announced. The cast of “The Five” laughed a bit too loudly while the co-hosts on “Fox & Friends” appeared overly chipper and enthusiastic about every segment.
The biggest story of the week was supposed to be Tucker Carlson’s interview of Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter. The network included extended segments about the interview on “Fox & Friends,” and “The Five.”
The Musk sit-down was about as interesting as listening to a half loaded dishwasher run on energy efficiency mode. Musk said nearly everything in a robotic monotone while Tucker Carlson squinted and occasionally forced a laugh. It was supposed to be an earth shattering warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence but was a snooze-fest of self-praise.
The rest of the week was dedicated to the network’s usual festival of fear - crime is out of control, marijuana is dangerous, the United States is being invaded by migrants and the Hunter Biden laptop scandal is about to take down the Biden presidency.
Fox News hosts have predicted imminent arrests and criminal indictments surrounding Hunter Biden and the Biden family for years now, while the whole sordid affair has remained not much more than a constant talking point.
By Thursday Fox host, Dan Bongino was unexpectedly let go despite having high ratings for its Saturday night time slot. By the next Monday Fox would terminate Tucker Carlson the host of the second highest rated show on the network. The firings had begun.
Shows I covered last week
Fox & Friends - The first hour
The Five
The Ingraham Angle
Tucker Carlson Tonight - Monday and Tuesday.
Bye Bye Bongino
Last week Fox News announced Dan Bongino and the company were parting ways.
Dan Bongino, former Secret Service agent and Fox News host, was best known for shouting down anyone who disagreed with him and acting like an expert on every topic.
Bongino yelled a lot. He made Judge Pirro look shy and reserved by comparison.
He frequently berated Geraldo Rivera while paired with him on “Hannity.”
This is a brief collection of the clips I captured and analyzed of Bongino since the start of the Decoding Fox News project. He wasn’t an intellectual so much as someone who would openly brag about the size of his penis.
“Listen, I may get fired from Fox after this, but that's okay . . .Yeah. I mean, you think this is some third World bullshit right here? Let me say it again. . .Third World bullshit. Yeah. . . Who the hell is denying elections? Elections happen. This is not happening in a safe, secure way. That's what we're concerned about. . . This is some Third world garbage.
It happened tonight. Starts crapping their diaper. Who don't have to deal with the problems of the smellies. They've sent the people. You're not the smellies. You actually built this place. . . My last name is Bongino. Probably don't want to tell them who's got a bigger crank. . .You can plant a big wet one on our asses. We don't care. . . Everything's the dipsy do flip-a-roo happen like everything's been flipped on their heads.
Right? So ah, listen, your great unwashed, smelly Walmart idiots . . . the liberal zeros out there who watch this network all the time. I mean, some of them that their only job is to watch our shows, which is kind of humiliating. But that's for another day,” said Bongino.
Laura Ingraham Blames Single Mothers and Pot for the Rise in Crime.
This past week a large group of teenagers, organized on social media, descended on downtown Chicago and briefly caused havoc. During the chaos police said a 16-year-old was shot in the arm, and a 17-year-old was shot in the leg and some cars and other property was damaged. Fifteen people were arrested.
Fox showed footage from the event on a loop - most of the teenagers were Black.
Media clips like this are red meat for Fox News. Large crowds of urban teenagers running wild feed into the narrative that Democratic led cities are hotbeds of crime and a sign of the demise of the the entire country.
While featuring footage from the incident, Ingraham blamed fatherless homes and marijuana use for the rise in urban crime.
If Laura Ingraham actually looked up data regarding violent crime in the United States she'd see that it's decreased since the 1970's through the 1990's. The recent uptick in crime is dwarfed by crime stats in the 1970's when there were fewer single parent households and marijuana was illegal in every state .
This is an edited version of a much longer monologue that included media clips from a crime scene in Chicago.
“This degradation and this slide now into cruel criminal activity. It's not limited to any one race. It's being burned into our national DNA. Look at the dead eyes of some of the worst mass shooters. There was Adam Lanza who killed those beautiful children at Sandy Hook Elementary. Dylann Roof, who killed nine in that black church in Charleston. Then the Pulse nightclub shooter.
Then Salvador Ramos. The unspeakable inflicting of mass damage and carnage in Uvalde. And then the twisted trans killer, Audrey Hale, who just killed six at that Nashville Christian school. They're hiding her manifesto and other writings. Hmm. It's all stomach churning. All of it. So many lives lost. Utter callousness. Most killers seem to suffer from some deep sense of isolation.
An odd right. Your connected. More connected than ever before with the Internet. But you're more lonely and more isolated than ever before. Many of the kids heavily medicated for depression or anxiety, some with drug induced psychosis. Maybe they started with marijuana. Yet many have a deep desire at the same time for notoriety. Hence the live streaming or the last messages posted on social media before they go carry out their carnage.
It's a lack of empathy and often a lack of fathers. Kids with no guardrails whatsoever can quickly slip from smoking a little weed now and then to ending up in a mob that's stomping a poor passer by. As we saw in Chicago last Saturday night. Yet so when so many elected officials and other powerful people on the left have spent decades running down this country and attacking the nuclear family, is it really surprising that many kids have lost all hope?
If Joe Biden thinks America is an evil place, racist place, systemically racist? Why would kids be optimistic today? So politicians have to stop lying to the American people about the state of things in this country. The kids aren't. All right. Children need love and rules laid down by responsible adults. They need communities that support parenthood, not make it harder with soft on crime policies.
Drug legalization and radical racial and gender propaganda. All of that just undermines churches, moms and dads,” said Ingraham.
The Five - Lock Up the Black Teenagers are Acting Like Animals
Whipping fear about crime is an evergreen topic on Fox News. The network cannot get enough of scary scenes of urban crimes committed by Black and Latino assailants. The Five also dedicated an extended segment to the same story.
On “The Five” Greg Gutfeld complained that he couldn’t call the mob of teenagers animals.
“So if you express any outrage about mob violence and you use terms, if you God forbid, you use the word, these people are acting like animals. That's racist. How dare you? That is worse than a man getting beaten up by a mob,” said Gutfeld.
Judge Jeanine Pirro went back to her crusade of throwing children in prison, a theme she’s pushed several times in the past few months.
“You know, you can have people come out and say, like Brandon Johnson did, the new mayor of Chicago. It is not constructive to demonize the youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunity in their own communities. I disagree with him 100%. It is time to demonize them and it's time to send them to jail,” said Pirro.
Stephen Miller Rewrites History on His Own Cruel Policy at the Border
Stephen Miller, the architect of the child separation policy during the Trump administration went on The Ingraham Angle last week to criticize President Biden for his lack of oversight in the growing problem regarding child labor among migrant children.
Inviting Miller on to talk about the mistreatment of migrant children seemed like a bold choice even for Fox News.
The family separation policy Miller helped create separated more than 3800 children from their families from 2017 to 2021 under the Trump administration. Although the Biden administration has reunited many of these children, over 1000 have yet to be reunited with their parents.
Ingraham started off the segment.
“Stephen, you were at the receiving end of all the kids in cages outrage. And at the time, obviously keeping people separated seemed to make sense because, you know, you couldn't hold children for any length of time in facilities with adults. That would be dangerous. But you guys were hammered for that. And now we have slave labor courtesy of the Biden administration,” said Ingraham.
Ingraham completely misrepresented the policy Miller crafted. The Trump administration did not hide the fact that the family separation policy was meant to deter other families from crossing the border.
Miller not only didn’t correct Ingraham he warped history even further.
“Right. Well, you've summed it up perfectly, Laura, as you know. Well, the policy of the government across all crimes is that if a parent commits a crime, their held in a different setting, then their minor relatives. Of course, in many cases, these individuals are being trafficked into the country and they were being sold into slavery. And we save those children and we save their lives and we save them from those ravages,” said Miller.
Hunter Biden and the Deep State - The Never Ending Story
If Hunter Biden is ever indicted and convicted of any crimes I’m not sure what the folks at Fox News will talk about. When a news week is slow or the network wants to distract its viewers from an unflattering story it pulls from the well that is the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
Some details stay the same - Hunter Biden was a drug addicted crack smoker who filmed himself with sex workers.
Some details have changed - Did he have deals in Ukraine? Russia? China? Was his father involved? Was his uncle part of various schemes? How much money was given to other family members? The alleged proof and evidence is always damning but never quite enough to link Hunter Biden to any crime.
The latest layer to the Hunter Biden saga involves a whistleblower at the IRS who claims the investigation into the President’s son is being mishandled. His claims could be credible.
Fox has made so many wild claims regarding Hunter Biden it is difficult to ascertain what is another wild claim made by a bunch of politically motivated propagandists and actual evidence of a crime.
The Elon Musk Interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight
Fox desperately tried to hype up this interview last week. It was mentioned so many times I decided to go back and capture the full interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday and Tuesday.
The entire interview in one sentence.
Artificial intelligence is dangerous so I want to make my own artificial intelligence company.
Musk also advocated for more government regulation in the A.I. industry but was incredibly vague about what that would entail.
He also brought up what he claimed was government censorship in Twitter, his desire to procreate, and the state of the U.S. economy. Musk said he knew a lot about ‘space stuff’ and said that he had no experience with UFO’s.
There was a lot of forced laughter on Carlson’s part.
Nothing that Musk revealed was new information. It was a softball interview given to an egotist who seems to believe he is the most important person in the world. He is not.
Bogus Expert of the Week
As part of their aggressive campaign to get viewers excited about the Musk interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News thought it was a good idea to have Fox radio host and comedian Jimmy Failla on to talk about the dangers of A.I.
“I would have loved this when I was in college because I needed all the help I could get when I was in Nassau Community majoring in Intro to Xbox, I still ran into some hiccups. It wasn't always pretty, but that's the bigger problem here is it's who controls the A.I. because it ultimately defines value. Okay. As he said, some of the chat is being trained to be politically correct, and sometimes being politically correct means not telling the truth. So chat might tell you a man could have a baby. We might argue otherwise. And I think there's a word for people who argue otherwise.,” said Failla.
Stories Fox News Ignored
Every week I compare 15 hours of Fox News to five hours of the PBS NewsHour. The following are stories that PBS covered that Fox News did not.
A grand jury in Akron, Ohio did not indict eight police officers who were involved in the fatal shooting of Jayland Walker. Walker was unarmed at the time of his death but a gun was found in his car.
Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million. Fox News mentioned the settlement but it was only included as a minor story on the news based programs on the network.
Bangladesh faces its worst heat wave in over half a century as stress to its power grid has caused massive power outages across the country affecting millions.
Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and John Fetterman (D-PA) returned to work last week after they both took time off for medical reasons.
Chris Willingham, a journalist at the McCurtain Gazette-News in Oklahoma, secretly recorded local government officials following a March 6 county commission meeting. The recording included the officials complaining that they couldn’t lynch Black men anymore while also joking that they would love to murder journalists. Right after this story broke “Fox & Friends” featured a Black anchor, Lawrence Jones, in a diner interviewing locals about various topics in Oklahoma City. The segment seemed forced as there was no reason to feature Oklahoma. Fox did not acknowledge the story about the racist government officials.
PBS included a segment about the Muslim religious holy month of Ramadan amid the disaster of the recent earthquakes in Syria and Turkey.
More than 150,000 Public Service Alliance of Canada workers went on strike demanding higher wages and universal work-from-home policies.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was sentenced to 25 years on treason charges. His sentence was the harshest handed down to any government critic since Putin came to power in 1999.
A civil war of sorts has broken out in Sudan as two powerful generals are battling for control of the country. Fox News completely ignored this story until the U.S. embassy was evacuated. PBS included several segments about the conflict that did not involve the United States or its embassy.
PBS produced another segment on the affects of long COVID and how the mysterious illness has caused many Americans to leave the workforce.
At least 78 people were killed and 73 injured during a stampede at an event to distribute financial aid in Yemen. The crowd was panicked by gunfire and an accidental explosion.
A new study published in Nature found that glaciers are receding faster than scientists expected which could put many coastal regions in jeopardy.
Julie Su, President Biden’s nominee for Labor secretary, faces a tough battle for confirmation in the Senate. Her critics cite her record as California’s labor secretary and say she’s a threat to certain industries.
PBS produced a segment as part of its series on healthcare in rural America. This past week the program focused on the challenges diabetic patients face.
Tyre Nichols mother filed a $550 million federal lawsuit against the city of Memphis and members of the Memphis police department over the death of her son following a traffic stop in the city.
Amna Nawaz conducted an interview with Nafatli Bennett the former Israeli Prime Minister about the increasing political unrest and the state of democracy in his country. Nawaz grilled him about various policies the Israeli government has enforced over Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
PBS featured a segment on historic British coal powered railway lines and how increased costs caused by the war in Ukraine could threaten their existence. The railway lines have been described as a living museum as they remain largely unchanged since the invention of rail travel in Great Britain.
After being imprisoned for 32 years a federal court ruled Crosley Green was wrongfully convicted of a 1989 murder in Florida. In 2021 the court granted him a conditional release citing concerns over the COVID pandemic and sent the case back to the state to free Green or hold a new trial. Last week Green was ordered back to prison after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected his claim that his guilty verdict was obtained in violation of his constitutional rights. Green’s case was rejected by the Supreme Court and he is out of appeals.
Ahmad Jamal, jazz pianist, died at the age of 92. Jamal was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, a lifetime achievement Grammy and an induction into France’s Order of Arts and Letters.
By the Numbers
PBS combined several stories involving gun violence last week into the same segments.
Coming up…
This week I’ll be covering “Fox & Friends,” “The Five” and “Jesse Watters Primetime,” and “Fox News Tonight,” the show that has temporarily replaced “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Wow!Your exposes are impactful! You expose the fraud hypocrisy and false statements and one-by-one, they are being "disappeared." Well done.