Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News - The New York Times - 0 views
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Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, have avoided the story. Newsmax and One America News, Fox’s rivals on the right, have steered clear, too. So have a constellation of right-wing websites and podcasts.
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Over the past two weeks, legal filings containing private messages and testimony from Fox hosts and executives revealed that many of them had serious doubts that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through widespread voter fraud, even as those claims were made repeatedly on Fox’s shows.
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On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16
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Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.
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The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff.
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The lone on-air mention of the case on Fox News has been by Howard Kurtz, who hosts the weekly Fox News show “MediaBuzz.” He addressed the Dominion case on the air this week, telling viewers: “I believe I should be covering it.”“But,” he continued, “the company has decided as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee I have to abide by it.”
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Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Mr. Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”
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“The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”
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There are no legal orders barring media organizations from covering lawsuits they are involved in. And Mr. Rosenstiel pointed to a long history of past suits and scandals covered by the news organizations involved. The Washington Post, for example, ran a deeply reported article on how and why a reporter had made up a character in an article that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The prize had been withdrawn a few days earlier after the fraud was uncovered
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Fox’s lawyers might fear that anything said on the air could be used against the company at the trial
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“From an ethical perspective, I’d say it’s a real disservice to their viewers on Fox not to be covering this,” she said.
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Newsmax and The Washington Examiner — two of the four outlets reviewed by The Times that mentioned Dominion’s lawsuit but not the specific comments by Fox News’s hosts — have focused on Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, including that he saw Newsmax as a potential threat to Fox News
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The hosts’ comments have also not been a focus of users on right-wing social media. Instead, many users on sites like Gab and Truth Social accused Mr. Murdoch of disloyalty to former President Donald J. Trump
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One of the articles by The Gateway Pundit that advanced voter fraud narratives about Dominion was the most-shared story about the case on right-wing social media, according to data from Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors the right-wing internet.
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When users on right-wing social networks discussed the Fox News hosts, many criticized Mr. Carlson, Mr. Hannity and others for not fully believing the election fraud lies they appeared to endorse, Pyrra found.