On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone talks about Media Matters' billboard campaign calling out Fox News and Lachlan Murdoch for their election lies
Carusone: We have to make sure the American public understands Fox News is “not a news network that may just be a little bit conservative or biased -- that they are actually a biased, partisan political operation masquerading as news”
Published
Citation From the March 13, 2023, edition of MSNBC's The Katie Phang Show
KATIE PHANG (HOST): Tell our viewers a little bit more about those billboards and why Media Matters is doing them.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS): I mean a big part of it was that he was going to do this huge industry event. He was speaking. We knew he was going to talk about the revelations that have come out. And I think a part of what we have been trying to reinforce is that this should change how we all interact with Fox News.
PHANG: It's huge.
CARUSONE: It's huge. And so the news media should treat them differently. Politicians should treat Fox News differently. And so I think a big part of that was this is his first time out. It should not be a normal routine, back to business as usual. He shouldn't be able to say “our brand is strong" without there being something to demonstrate that that is inconsistent with reality. And so those ads weren't attacking or saying anything nasty. It was simply, here's what they did. Fox Knew. You go to the website. It lists all the things that Fox actually knew, specifically that we found out from Dominion to show that we knew they were lying about, not just Dominion, but the election itself. This is an important thing. I think we have to make sure that things don't go right back to the way they were because nothing will get better. And Fox isn't just lying about Dominion. They lie about a lot of stuff. This is just a keyhole view into their larger partisan deceptions. And it is an important part of it.
PHANG: And was part of the plan to do these billboards to get the messaging about -- out of the Fox News kind of echo chamber where only people that are hearing the wrong stuff and to get it out for public consumption so that Americans who maybe watch Fox News but are walking down that street and saw that billboard may say, “Oh my god, maybe there is some information there"?
CARUSONE: Yeah, that’s a big part of it. It’s also for the people inside the room to say, “Hey, that’s right. I remember, this guy does know." So while he is up stoling and talking about the industry, he can’t escape the reality of what he oversaw and continues to oversee at Fox News. And this is the first step in a larger, to your point, making sure that we begin the process of taking and pulling the thread on this so it doesn’t just fall back down to the memory hold. We do have to make sure the American public understands what Fox News is, that they are not a news network that may just be a little bit conservative or biased -- that they are actually a biased, partisan political operation masquerading as news.
PHANG: And pushing propaganda.
CARUSONE: That's it. And that’s an attack on our democracy. It has nothing to do now with the fact that they are a little bit biased. What we saw there was not just one or two one-off lies but a campaign of deception. We actually counted it.
When you add up all the machinations that we saw in the Dominion case, we went back and looked. There were 774 individual instances between the time they started panicking about calling the election and worrying about audience backlash until shortly before January 6 -- 774 individual instances where Fox News attacked the election results; said they were false, fake, stolen, and undermined the results. So that’s what it looks like in practice. They literally helped build the scaffolding, in a way, for what became the January 6 insurrection because they validated the lie that ended up creating all the conditions that inspired people to go there in the first place.