If you search for “safe space” on the Foxnews.com website, you will get more than 46,000 results. Not all are about those awake snowflakes that need trigger alerts and cry rooms. But many of them are.
For example, in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Tucker Carlson questioned a college professor about a student who came into her class crying about the election. “As an adult you shouldn’t say, ‘You know, it was an election and it was democratic and nobody got cancer, nobody died and maybe you should toughen up?’ “
Would Carlson and the rest of Fox’s leadership take a similar view of their own audience, whose average age is 56?
“A little over a week after television networks announced the 2020 presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr. they screwed up.”
The biggest mess was the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden at 11:20 p.m. on election night. The call outraged the Trump campaign and viewers alike.
With the exception of Washington editor-in-chief Bill Sammon, who was also on the “decision desk” who made the call, those at the meeting believed the Arizona announcement hurt Fox’s “brand” — not because they were wrong, but didn’t understand or didn’t understand at all because they were doing it right. . It hurt the brand because it hurt people’s feelings.
That is it. Calling Arizona had no real effect. Arizona polling places — and polling places everywhere except staunch Democratic Hawaii — are closed. It was kind of like telling a fan taping the Super Bowl that their team lost before they had a chance to watch the game end. It was mean, but no one wanted to tell the audience to turn up the volume.
Of course, Trump himself was angry for another reason. He urged his constituents to vote on Election Day so that he could get ahead that night and declare victory before mail-in votes were counted the following day. He thought he could win in court or in Congress. As Steve Bannon admitted For the choice, that was always the plan. But the Arizona call made it more difficult to claim he had ever beaten Biden.
It’s unclear whether some Fox opinion leaders were complicit or just useful idiots in this scheme. But there is no evidence that the executives were involved. Her main concern was simply not to hurt or lose viewers’ feelings, reviving pro-Trump rivals One America News Network and Newsmax, who were only too happy to be safe havens for voter fraud lies.
At the rally, Martha MacCallum, who co-hosted election coverage with Bret Baier, said of the Arizona call, “There was just a tremendous amount of resistance, which I think is more than we all expected.” Group of our viewers” took the call as an insult, she said.
“We are still being bombed,” Baier said. “It really hurt.”
Both MacCallum and Baier argued for a “level” of decision-making that would take “impact” into account.
Due to revelations of the Dominion Voting System defamation case against Fox (in which I worked for over a decade), Fox leadership believed that protecting the Fox brand as a safe space was more important than protecting the Fox brand. that the elections were “rigged”. Even expressing the view that Trump’s claims are nonsense is frowned upon.
Sammon resisted pulling the call, much to Fox CEO Suzanne Scott’s dismay. In an email to a colleague, she complained that Sammon “didn’t understand the implications for the brand and the arrogance of calling AZ” and that his job was “to protect the brand”. Sammon believed it was his job to do his job as a journalist. He and Chris Stirewalt, the political editor (and my colleague at Dispatch), were forced out for violating the public safe space.
In 2018, Fox unveiled a new tagline: “Real News. Real Honest Opinion.” In the promo, Carlson says, “Fox is the only place where dissent is allowed.”
But when Jacqui Heinrich, a Fox reporter, reviewed a Trump tweet claiming the election was stolen, Carlson, who has privately admitted that his honest opinion conflicts with what viewers are told, texted colleagues: Please get her.” added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. This hurts the company measurably. The share price is down. No kidding.”
Sure, humor is in the eye of the beholder, but it’s hard not to laugh at the “safe room” taunts now.
Source: LA Times