#rnctv

Sophie Lawton at MMFA: 

A new legal filing reveals that Rupert Murdoch, chair of Fox News' parent company, pushed for Fox News to help Republicans in the 2020 Georgia election run-offs “any way we can.” The statement is one of the clearest in Fox News' history showing that Fox News is the Republican Party.

A recently released filing in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News reveals that after the 2020 presidential election, the network’s prime-time host Tucker Carlson tried to get a Fox reporter fired for fact-checking former President Donald Trump’s election lie involving Dominion.

The filing, totaling 192 pages, shows the extent to which the network knew it was pushing false claims to its viewers in the aftermath of the 2020 election by suggesting that Dominion’s machines were involved in a supposed voter fraud scheme. The lawyers for Dominion lay out a long list of facts and evidence that demonstrates how — from producers to on-air personalities to executives to Rupert Murdoch himself — “literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility” acted with, in Dominion’s view, “actual malice.”

Fox Panel Continues Push to Privatize the Post Office

(via

http://crooksandliars.com

)

A new book from Jonathan Alter claims that Fox News President Roger Ailes told producers to cut off the microphone used by Fox host Geraldo Rivera as he pushed back against Fox's politicization of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Appearing on Fox & Friends the day before the 2012 election, Rivera accused The Five's Eric Bolling of being "a politician trying to make a political point" with Bolling's claim that the government did "nothing" in response to the attack.

The New York Times reports that Alter writes in the upcoming book The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies that "Ailes called the control room and told the producers to cut Rivera's mic."

Mediaite reports that their sources claim that Ailes never called the control room, but that Fox News Executive Vice President of Programming Bill Shine did. They go on to write, "Shine did not order Rivera's mic to be cut. Instead his call was to urge the show to move on because the segment had come to its conclusion, as the EVP seemed to believe that two Fox personalities calling each other liars with an escalating tone made for bad morning television and could potentially alienate their audience if it continued."

One of Scott Brown's first acts as a Fox News host was to build a segment entirely around a GOP press release, a continuation of Fox's long history of using Republican talking points to build their news.  

Brown, a Republican former Senator, served as guest host on the April 1 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, where he immediately focused on the National Republican Congressional Committee's "waste list," meant to detail areas of government's continued wasteful spending despite recent spending cuts and the closing of White House tours. Brown complained about a "dancing iPhone with robots," "snail sex research," and $1 million worth of puppet shows for kids.

Fox News “The Five” co-host Eric Bolling is adding to his duties at the network. According to Hal Boedeker at The Orlando Sentinel, Bolling will become the anchor of “Cashin’ In,” one of FNC’s weekend financial shows.

Sarah Palin has parted ways with Fox News, multiple outlets wrote on Friday.

Real Clear Politics was the first to report that Palin — who reportedly signed a $1 million-a-year contract with the network in 2010 — will not be renewing it. The New York Times' Brian Stelter later confirmed the news with Fox News.

By the time her contract ended, it had been since mid-December that Palin had appeared on Fox News at all.

The post-election soul searching going on inside the Republican Party is taking place inside Fox News as well. Fox News chief Roger Ailes, a canny marketer and protector of his network’s brand, has been taking steps since November to reposition Fox in the post-election media environment, freshening story lines — and in some cases, changing the characters. According to multiple Fox sources, Ailes has issued a new directive to his staff: He wants the faces associated with the election off the air — for now. For Karl Rove and Dick Morris — a pair of pundits perhaps most closely aligned with Fox’s anti-Obama campaign — Ailes’s orders mean new rules. Ailes’s deputy, Fox News programming chief Bill Shine, has sent out orders mandating that producers must get permission before booking  Rove or  Morris. Both pundits made several appearances in the days after the election, but their visibility on the network has dropped markedly. Inside Fox News, Morris’s Romney boosterism and reality-denying predictions became a punch line. At a rehearsal on the Saturday before the election, according to a source, anchor Megyn Kelly chuckled when she relayed to colleagues what someone had told her: “I really like Dick Morris. He’s always wrong but he makes me feel good.”

A Fox spokesperson confirmed the new booking rules for Rove and Morris, and explained that Shine’s message was “the election’s over.”