MSNBC’s Ari Melber spoke with Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin and lawyer and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa about the newest revelations in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, which McLaughlin pointed out stand far apart from typical media bias complaints about the press.
Following an extensive special report from Melber into the new documents, the MSNBC host asked McLaughlin first about Tucker Carlson, who it turns out bashed Donald Trump in private texts, to the shock of the ex-president’s supporters.
McLaughlin pointed out that not only was there a “wide gulf” between Carlson’s private and public beliefs, the Fox star is “still not coming clean to his audience about what really happened” in 2020.
Speaking to the entire situation, McLaughlin said it’s “a journalistic scandal on a magnitude that we haven’t seen in a very long time.”
Melber appeared with Bill Maher recently, and had somewhat of an argument with Sarah Isgur about the issue of media bias, and more recently MSNBC’s John Heilemann and Rumble podcaster Russell Brand debated the same question, focusing on whether Fox News is worse than other cable networks.
Melber brought up that question with McLaughlin, who said that the revelations about the difference between what Fox News journalists and staff believed to be true and what was said on air are a “completely different ballgame.”
Melber: Yeah. You say we haven’t seen in a long time. I’ve mentioned repeatedly on our shows. There’s plenty to criticize the press about, and there should be a high standard for defamation. But I’ve tried to emphasize both in my view, as someone who happens to be inside journalism right now, but who also practiced First Amendment law, this is by far some of the worst evidence we’ve seen.
And so when people say, “oh, well, there’s problems with the media, fine, or we hear about this and that they all do it,” quote unquote, as someone who actually covers all of this, Aidan, would you say that what has been exposed here looks common to you? Something we see several times a year with all the TV outlets? “Oh, you see this Fox is just doing what ABC does or fill in the blank”? Or is this pretty unusual and thus concerning, including concerning for people who might try to get their information from Fox?
McLaughlin: Right. So I think just to start, it’s always hard for as a member of the media to root for a private company trying to sue a media outlet. You never want to see First Amendment protections be challenged in that way. In this case, I think it’s very clear that what Fox News was doing in the aftermath of the 2020 election was completely different from what the rest of the media does.
I’ve seen a lot of comparisons too between Fox News and other news networks. You can point to bias at every single news network, at every single outlet, newspaper, or what have you. But to be actively lying to an audience because you are terrified of losing that audience, and when those lies end up fueling a riot at the U.S. Capitol, you’re in a completely different ballgame.
And so, no, I don’t think there’s any comparison between standard allegations of bias against media outlets, which we see every day — and it’s a cottage industry for Mediaite and other media criticism websites like us — but it’s completely different to be lying to your audience and to get exposed for lying to your audience to support the bottom line.
Watch the clip above, via MSNBC.
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