Oh, my. The last time bombshells fell this fast and furious was during the London blitzkrieg of WWII. Dominion Voting Systems made a new court filing today and the deposition transcripts featured therein are revealing all kinds of tidbits. So far my favorite is Rupert Murdoch receiving a call Election Night from “my friend Jared Kushner,” whose father-in-law could be heard “shouting” in the background. Murdoch gave Kushner the unhappy news that he could not assist in changing the Arizona call, which Fox News had just made, announcing Joe Biden had won the state, as Trump was evidently screaming should be done.
On to Paul Ryan’s wake up call.
“On January 12, [Paul] Ryan discussed with Rupert and Lachlan an article called ‘The Alternate Reality Machine’ about ‘the right-wing media ecosystem created an alternative reality for those who had come to rely on its outlets for news’ and were the ‘enablers’ of January 6,” said the documents. “Ryan believed that ‘some high percentage of Americans’ thought the election was stolen ‘because they got a diet of information telling them the election was stolen from what they believe were credible sources.'”
When Murdoch responded to Ryan’s email, he said, “Thanks Paul. Wake-up call for Hannity, who has been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.”
Ryan was quite the busy bee during this period.
Ryan complained as a Fox Corporation board member that it was his “fiduciary duty” to inform Murdoch that they shouldn’t be spreading incorrect information about the 2020 election.
He confirmed that the ‘inflection point’ was not just one day; ‘it was the whole time’ in the post-election November/December timeframe,” the court documents say.
“Ryan knew that ‘these conspiracy theories were baseless’ and that Fox ‘should labor to dispel conspiracy theories if and when they pop up,'” the documents continue. “Ryan also understood that when events occur, Fox ‘can clearly amplify that news being made by covering it.’ … Ryan believed ‘there ought to be a listing of all the allegations and then all the evidence or the validation or invalidation of those [election fraud] allegations just for the viewers’ sake,’ and suggested as much to Fox’s senior management… Ryan told Rupert and Lachlan ‘that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.'”
Former conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post commented on that fact, saying that Ryan still stayed on the board of Fox despite disagreeing with their promotion of what he called conspiracy theories. In fact, Ryan profited off of it.
Profit is the name of the game. One of the quotes I like the best of Murdoch’s is, “This isn’t about blue or red, it’s about green.” Indeed it is about green, the color of money. That’s exactly what all this is. And silly notions like protecting the American way of life, who has time for that fiddle faddle?
Bingo Ms. Rubin. If Ryan had a fiduciary duty in 2020 then it would seem he would have had a duty to his own integrity to leave the board. One gets the feeling his little call to Murdoch was of the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” type. Wonder if there is a recording of that little call.
Actually, I think it’s the opposite. Yes, he can always leave in protest. But truly, if you cared about the company, you have a duty to pound heads in that room and say, “Yes, it’s a for profit company but not just about profits THIS YEAR, this company will want to profit 5-10 yrs down the road and now you’re putting a lot of that in jeopardy, not just with lawsuits but in destabilizing the country and the media in particular. This is a dangerous time and you need stability to continue making “green,” so I suggest you rein it in, have some meetings with on-air personalities and slowly pull back from the cliff.
Murdoch has already tossed Trump. So he is making changes. They could remain open to Trump or DeSantis but they clearly are not. That’s why Trump complains so much every day.