David Folkenflik:
It was feverishly anxious about this issue.
And it raised fears inside. It raised vitriol inside, anger inside. You see that in a private message between Tucker Carlson and I believe Sean Hannity. You saw the CEO, the chief executive of FOX News, Suzanne Scott, lashing out at Bill Sammon, their Washington managing editor, senior executive over political news for that network.
Why? Because he took part in FOX News as call of Arizona for Joe Biden, which was exactly what its audiences didn't want to hear. And people talked internally about this breaking the credibility and trust between FOX News and its audiences, its viewership built up over a generation, over 25 years.
You don't hear them talking about how credibility and trust can be broken by not sharing the truth with your audience, by not sticking to the facts. And yet FOX News time and again brought on people, including then-President Trump, but also his surrogates and champions, people like Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others, to make claims that they were mocking and assailing, denigrating and trashing behind the air to one another, because they knew it was false.
But they were bringing them on. Why? To try to rebuild that trust in a hurry, as millions of viewers fled FOX, often for a much smaller conservative rival called Newsmax.
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