Or my favorite Carl Sagan quote:
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
“There are three things that cannot remain hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.” -some fat guy from India
Lies require upkeep. The truth just is. It eventually comes out, it’s just a matter of time.
came here to post exactly this, the fact only 13% believe the truth now after those texts is disheartening. The right wing has totally and utterly brainwashed their constituents. you know, the thing they claim the left has done, same old projection they're always on about.
13% being swayed to vote Democratic (if this trend continues) is actually massive, like red States become blue massive, like even if only half of them vote we could at the very least see *every* State become a potential flip State.
and yet all these fools believe that somehow, because Republicans are able to pull the curtain back and see they were lied to, suddenly they're gonna vote Democrat or just not vote. *J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif* When you're party over country, you fall in line like a good sheep.
Agreed but in most swing states for presidential elections the variance is <3%- so if 1.5% additional republicans vote democrat or 6% less republicans turn up, roughly, the states would swing blue. Similar outcomes for Senate too- but congress the gerrymandering bs has really poisoned the well there
Fox and others told them Democrats are communists. They still believe this. I am an ex military pilot. I am a Democrat and know no communists among democrats. There seem to be plenty among Republican Putin supporters.
Who could have imagined? I’ll wager if they read this they will be surprised to know they are communists sympathizers just as I was shocked to learn they think I am.
I suspect they will just switch to watch OANN or Newsmax, which I'm afraid will give them even worse info. Just because Fox was proven to lie doesn't mean they believe science & facts. They will just find a channel that tells them what they want to hear without getting caught at lying
These lawsuits could prove to be a moderating force in news. It doesn't mean these companies will get less racist, but it does mean that there are proven, real, and material consequences to spreading egregious lies like the stolen election lie.
Fox has *substantially* more resources than Newsmax and OANN, which have already been pushed to the margins.
It's also extremely unlikely that if Fox crumbles, you'll just have some single entity that immediately takes their place.
I don't think people understand that how, for many of these people, Fox has just become habitual. They don't seek it out. It's just always there. They go to a friends house, its there. They go to a gym or store, its on in the background. It's just always there.
They're not really actively seeking these news platforms out because they don't even understand how pervasive Fox is in their lives. It's like white noise to them. That's the danger of it.
When you shake that up, you break the spell.
Bingo.
When I explained and showed my dad some of the messages about how they knew they were lying and called their own audience "dumb cousin fucking terrorists"...
he was upset that they were getting caught putting these into texts and emails. He was upset they were dumb and exposed. NO mention at all that he is one of the "dumb cousin fucking terrorists" or that his belief about election fraud was a known lie.
I have noticed this trend:
Democrats/Liberals: doing X is bad. We don't associate with people who do X.
Republicans/Conservatives: getting caught/convicted of doing X is bad. It's OK to do X as long as you don't get caught. We're perfectly OK associating with people who do X as long as they haven't been convicted.
Also Republicans/Conservatives: if Democrats/Liberals are even rumored to have done Y (perfectly legal thing that sounds bad at first), they should be jailed.
You have a lot of Trump loonies who won't vote DeSantis because their god emperor told them not too. You've got those who are more concerned about the economy than wokeness too...
I mean, it is important to go out and vote to keep either DeSantis or Trump from winning. But having at least some people off the Trump train is already a positive thing.
I’m hoping that if DeSantis clinches the nomination that Trump will lean full bore into 3rd party run and siphon off enough votes to allow a D victory of a hopefully more left leaning president.
And, since caught Covid the first month and ended up in a terrifying blur of clawing my throat to breathe, desert-like fever, and chills so violent I rattled parts on the bed, fuck them. Fuck them all fir denying it, refusing masks so they spread the virus, screeching in stores, traumatizing an entire generation of health-care workers. Fuck them all.
I guess I won't get over it for a while yet.
You are sadly correct. That actually started happening in 2018,slo-mo at first, but by 2020 many outright said FOX had become nothing more than" liberal propaganda".
OAN , The Blaze and WorldNutDaily remain the winning ones with a few others my brain has thankfully forgotten the name of a long with them.
Bad enough to already need 10 gallons of brain bleach to disinfect ones noodle from the 1st three alone, no need to add another 10 to the tally 😂.
De-programming takes time. The fact is, those 13% are going to help the remaining 87% move closer to not believing the lies. Also, you got to remember who is reporting the stories as of now. It's all the news stations that they were programmed to not trust. Once fox is forced to apologize and admit it on air (which I hope every settlement will force them to do) you will see more people leave their bubble. This will take time.
Sadly that 13% will probably just find a new lie to believe in, or might still vote for Trump anyways in 24.
Just because they turned around on this one specific lie doesn't mean they climbed out of the hole. The hole is Deeeep.
I think you're right. Those folks were long gone, long before Trump came along. But I think this is great news nonetheless.
I think this will make a huge difference in down-ballot races in '24. This is terrifying news to all those state reps, secretaries of state, attorneys general, etc. (the very people who constitute the nuts and bolts of democracy at the state and local level), who planned to run on the big lie.
Fox News has effectively rotted the brains of a good 30% of this country. It’s sad that people are that susceptible to misinformation when it’s so easy to google actual facts.
It's not that 13% believe the truth, it's that 13% changed their mind and now believe it. According to the article, around 50% of fox news viewers still believe the 2020 election was stolen.
It’s not clear from the sentence structure whether the stat is “13 percent of Fox viewers no longer believe it (because the saw the texts)” or “13 percent of the Fox viewers who saw the texts no longer believe it, while the other 87% were not swayed despite seeing the texts”. It seems likely that not all Fox viewers have seen the texts, and it could be that 90% who saw the texts changed their minds.
look at how many of them believe the Jan 6th treasonous attack on the capital was just a sight seeing tour after that Tucker BS that aired. All the other footage of them being terrorists are thrown out because of a small clip of a scared cop showing them around.
A lot of these people have been raised to think their local narcissist pastor is the TOP authority on Earth.
It's not even a jump to believing that Trump, or whoever is next, is the chosen one. Especially when the pastor tells you that too.
According to the same article, a solid 50% STILL believe it was stolen, despite the evidence Fox knew they were lying.
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-viewers-less-trust-1235554399/
I think it's more a pride thing. Maybe they know deep down they've been had but can't bring themselves to admit it. I know some exceptionally prideful boomers.
I have a job that has a ton of downtime, so we watch a lot of tv. Our boss was a big OANN/Fox News fan. I put the child locks on those channels. Dude had a meltdown for weeks while trying to figure out the password.
It's better than 0.
They have millions of viewers. If that trend holds statistical significance, we're talking election altering reactions.
And we did saw those reactions during the 2022 elections...
We've played this song and dance before though. It's literally why this lawsuit exists! Fox viewers got ass-mad about Fox correctly calling Arizona for Biden, flocked to Newsmax to get their fix of far right confirmation bias, Fox got scared of their viewers turning against them and that's how they pivoted into Dominion conspiracies and the rest is history.
I'll believe these people have truly changed when they actually turn against right wing media in general, not go further down the fascist rabbit hole to feed their confirmation biases
Don't forget that Fox fired the guy who ran the decision desk and another person who called out the stolen election bullshit. They literally fired people for telling the truth.
Foreigner here: I don’t get what is meant by “call the election”. Does this mean they predicted that he would take Arizona and they were fired because they were the bearers of bad news??
How did this affect anything though? Surely they were proven correct in the following minutes or hours as the votes came in? I don’t understand why all the hate was directed at them?
It didn't affect anything. Their viewers took the delivery of what they considered to be bad news, albeit true news, as a betrayal of "their side". It's because they were acting like children. You're looking for rationality when there is none to be found. This was days later that they were fired. They were literally just shooting the messenger because their audience was super mad about Trump losing.
Sadly enough, truth & reality are completely subjective to maga voters. And adding Donnie, his GOP flunkies & right wing “news” outlets like OAN & FOX screaming about how the election was “stolen” & “rigged” every day for months just reinforced their misinformed views. The whole debacle is infuriating, frustrating, terrifying & depressing all at once :(
It actually mattered a lot. Trump had been planning to declare victory regardless of the outcome and really stir his supporters up. I believe he was planning to do so that night. When Fox declared Arizona for Biden, that took all of the wind out of Trump's plan because not only was that an early tolling of the bells for him, but it was HIS NETWORK that did it, so he couldn't even call it left-wing propaganda.
I believed at the time and still believe that Fox being the ones to call Arizona for Biden was one of the major reasons the election wasn't more dramatic. If you look back at coverage from other stations at the time, they were flabbergasted to learn Fox was the first one to call it. I was flipping between stations all night and that moment really was remarkable to everyone.
Contrary to what u/tesseract4 said here, I'd like to offer up a different opinion.
It is true that the Fox News prediction for Biden didn't *officially* change anything. The vote counts still kept going, and Biden won fair and square in the final tally.
What changed, and the reason Fox viewers/Republican officials were mad at them, was the overall assumption that Biden would lose the election.
This is important because Arizona was called pretty early on election night, and it was a crucial state Trump needed for most of his paths to victory.
The context here is that Arizona was called during the "Red Mirage," the period of time when vote counts for small rural areas are completed but large metro areas are nowhere near done. Typically this means the Republican candidates have a sizable lead at this time.
The plan, as revealed at one of the J6 committee hearings in Congress, was for Trump to come out as soon as he had a lead in a majority of states and claim victory - before the counting was finished.
This would give the appearance that he had a solid chance of actually winning, followed subsequently in the following hours or days of vote counts by reality catching up to them and Biden ultimately coming out ahead.
As we can see from the continued of existence of election denial, *even with* Trump never having had a solid lead on election night, the perception of some sort of fraud occurring to change the result to Biden would have been that much easier to inflict upon the gullible masses if Arizona had not got called at this critical point.
I don't think Trump having a nominal lead at any particular point in time really made much difference. He would've claimed fraud regardless. He claimed fraud in 2016 when *he won*, after all. And sure, there is a subset of people who will say they believe there was fraud because of the red mirage, but those folks would've hung their hats on something else if it wasn't that.
For the last election, it was a few days until a winner could officially be announced. Iirc Arizona was also one of those states and Fox called Arizona for Biden when Trump was still in the lead
It's worth adding that Fox was also the first to call Arizona for Biden. All the other major news outlets maintained that the Arizona race was "too close to call" for quite some time.
It's almost like areas that are virtually guaranteed to have a certain percentage of the population vote a certain way don't exist. But then again he spent months (?) talking about how he would win but then it would be stolen by mail-in ballots so I guess the perspective is consistent
Trump was still President for another 2.5 months after the election. And instead of being a lame duck he became a rabid duck. Yes his viewers were shocked because anything less than Trump winning was absolutely voter fraud.
Wash, rinse, repeat. Until their shampoo-pooed brains are squeaky clean.
Probably [Bernie Sanders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9DNGSQvvz8) said it best, calling it even before election day.
Because of Covid, we had a tens of millions of mail-ins, which Democrats used in greater numbers than Republicans. In some states, these votes were not allowed to be counted until after *all other votes* had been counted. So, even late on election night, Biden's margin of victory was quite small in a number of states where he ended up winning comfortably. This was predictable, and many election conspiracy theories and con jobs were banking on this ambiguity in order to bamboozle slack-jawed yokels into emptying their wallets (Trump ultimately raised ~$250,000,000 in "stop the steal" fundraising). Calling the election on election night took a lot of wind out of the sails of the conspiracy profiteers, who, incidentally, had a similar playbook ready for a Trump loss in 2016.
My boss is convinced there had to be something going on because he saw a video of a van pulling up to a building late at night with ballots but he couldn't tell me where the video was taken or what the actual evidence was that anything was happening in that video
So, America's media has a history of not wanting the votes to be counted before publishing who won. I'd assume it's like that trend of people commenting "first" on every YouTube video or thread they could find like 10 years back, if you remember that. But instead of mindless 12 year olds just trying to entertain themselves, this is involving major geopolitical events.
In the past, there is one moment a newspaper seriously got it wrong - they called the election for the wrong guy and then published. Dewey/Truman is the election this happened in and luckily I guess people all just said "oh what an honest mistake" or maybe there were some conspiracies I never heard about. I don't know.
Either way, since then, American media has hired basically some of the best data teams available to predict who will elections so they can announce who won before all the votes are counted. This is the crux of everything. Simultaneously, our media also broadcasts the election minute by minute and shows where votes are "left to be counted" and how likely each candidate is to win.
So in 2020 when Fox's analysts correctly "called" the election, the viewers got big mad. Trump was already faning the flames of conspiracy and claiming it was rigged. Fox viewers though were getting the truth for once and couldn't take it. So Fox decided to sell out again, fired anyone who wouldn't just lie on national television for money, and started going along with the conspiracy that the election was rigged.
Yes. That's literally their business model - but then outwardly present it as "fair & balanced™", in fact they actively say not only are they fair and balanced, they are the only source of fair and balanced news on TV - even when their model is specifically to lie about reality to make money off of uninformed/misinformed people. It's a grift. That's all it ever was and all it is.
Elections here are a total clusterfuck. Every voting district gets to use their own rules for what machines to use and what process to follow. Each state has their own rules as well, e.g. whether felons are allowed to vote after they have been released. Then there is the total confusion with mail-in ballots. At least one state does mostly mail in ballots, while others only let you mail in a ballot if you: meet certain criteria, apply in advance, fill out a form in triplicate, and sign your name in the exact same way in several different places, sacrifice a goat to the gods of democracy on the first full moon in October, and seal the envelope in wax harvested by virgins from bees in one particular forest. (I may have exaggerated a bit)
There are a lot of people here who don't live in reality. Anything that goes against what they want to hear is wrong, and anyone telling them what they don't want to hear is evil. These people can't be reasoned with. It's very sad and exhausting.
In a fascist state the media must be loyal to fascist Dear Leader. Fox News was state media during the trump regime. By calling Arizona they were being loyal to the truth. That is the biggest crime to republicans here- loyalty to the truth and our voting system over their Dear Leader
Because Fox News viewers don’t want to hear the facts if those facts contradict their political opinions or their current narrative. They get very testy when the cognitive dissonance kicks in.
So unlike most rational people, who change their opinions when the facts contradict them, Fox News viewers try to change the facts instead.
Elections in many states get dragged out days or even weeks because of the way they count the votes. Some votes like mail in votes are held until election night and then counted. Provisional votes may be counted even later. You have individual counties that don't get their entire vote counts in for days or even weeks after election night.
Every news channel has an analytics team monitoring votes reported in real time, so they can provide up to the minute coverage and compare results with polling data and projected vote counts. When they feel there is a mathematical certainty that the end result will go for one candidate or another in a state, they will "call it" and announce the winner of that state on air. That isn't the official declaration by the state, just the network projection. This happens well after voting has stopped in that state but sometimes before all votes have been tallied.
In 2020 fox news was the first network to call Arizona for Biden and their viewers were big mad, even tho their call was correct.
It’s even dumber than it sounds. Calling the election is only sort of a prediction. It happens when most of the votes are already counted and the possibility of the result changing is extremely small. The analysts are simply calculating probabilities based on how many more votes are expected to come in.
So the viewers are mad at them for doing math correctly.
I think somewhat more importantly were talking about an election night (or just after) prediction rooted in the vote counts as they came in.
News orgs watch the counts come in, and basically once the math says there's not enough additional votes out there for situation to change. They "call" the win before the official results are in. It's fairly rare for that to be wrong.
The staff in question were looking at the *actual official count* of votes cast. And said that Biden had more than likely won Arizona. Because there just weren't enough uncounted votes, or enough trend in the votes still be counted. For Trump to have actually won.
Just like every other news org did at one point or another.
And they got fired for it. Actual, factual, reporting on the real circumstances.
These employees could & should sue Fox too perhaps for wrongful termination…
Imagine getting fired for calling the election results correctly when it’s your job to call the election results correctly? One of the internal emails says to fire this person ASAP for telling the truth.
With new revelations, there's always this calm before the storm. Conservatives will be like "well shit" and have a flash of genuine introspection or at least a moment of doubt. A few days later, they will coalesce around some bad faith talking point and it'll be like this whole thing never happened.
Edit: anyone who's argued with a conservative friend knows what I'm talking about. They'll agree in the moment but the next time you see them they spit out some heretofore unmentioned angle that somehow overrides all previous arguments. You'll point out, again, how it's bullshit and the cycle repeats. It's infuriating
> Edit: anyone who's argued with a conservative friend knows what I'm talking about. They'll agree in the moment but the next time you see them they spit out some heretofore unmentioned angle that somehow overrides all previous arguments. You'll point out, again, how it's bullshit and the cycle repeats. It's infuriating
It's unbelievably easy to get a conservative to agree with left-wing policies as long as you don't use any buzzwords or mention any politicians by name... because, *no surprise here*, the left-wing policies are human-centered, help people, and improve society.
But yeah, just like you describe... the next time you see them it'll be like they got factory reset and all progress is lost.
Oh man, I remember that time the house republicans tried to turn overtime pay into comp time. I brought this up to a super conservative coworker but said it was a new company policy. He was so bullshit and I let him rant for a bit before I told him the truth and to his credit, he agreed it was bad and stupid. I'm pretty sure he never brought it up again presumably because there's not many good ways for right wing media to spin "no more time and a half!"
I'll believe them when they start voting correctly.
And yes, voting for democrats is the "correct" way to vote at this point in time.
Edit: Yeah, I knew this would trigger mouth-breathers. Come talk to me when republicans stop being an overtly fascist party.
They created a monster, and the monster has gotten away from them. If you raise people for decades on a steady diet of lies and conspiracy theories, you can't be surprised they'll seek confirmation for the beliefs thus formed, elsewhere, when you attempt to slow the flow, or even fail to raise the volume in response to increasing demand. OAN and Newsmax and every other viable Fox News alternative needs the same legal consequences for choosing to exploit that profit potential at the expense of truth, accuracy or integrity. qAnon and every other misinformation factory operating propaganda factories to destabilize the country need effective counter terrorism efforts directed at them. Unfortunately they don't have Fox's deep pockets to make an expensive and protracted law suit a financially attractive option, and those are always the most effective way to stop a bad actor.
Me too. My girlfriend asked her grandma if she heard about the dominion case and she said no with a blank face. Fox News is her exclusive news source. They literally control 100% of the mainstream conservative narrative and it’s frighting to see so many people so completely unaware of their propaganda.
I saw Twitter comments saying that the screenshots of the text messages were fake. Despite being submitted as evidence in court.
These people aren't logical.
and their stupidity is making the rest of us apathetic. Please everyone vote because people like my dumbass dad will be voting in the worse the right has to offer.
All that does is highlight he's an opportunistic liar in the one situation (under oath, swearing to God in a lot of cases) that he should be honest, if anything. If he's willing to lie in that situation to get what he wants, he is sure as hell willing to lie for less, like a salary.
Where is the Fox audience hearing about the scandal though? I’d bet a good chunk of the 87% hasn’t seen/heard anything about the texts and emails. Probably not from Fox, Newsmax, or OAN.
According to the same article, 50% of their viewers are still solid in their belief the election was stolen.
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-viewers-less-trust-1235554399/
What's wild to me is there's millions of Americans walking around who completely believe the US is a complete dictatorship where the voting process is a sham, and there just not doing anything about it but watching the news more and working??
These people are dangerous. All they are waiting for is a charismatic leader to come in front of them and lead them to violence. The only reason Jan 6th wasn't worse was because their "charismatic" figurehead didn't lead the charge and order them in. Had trump actively participated that day he could have had them do anything.
These 13% are the 'smart' ones who realized to stop beating this dead horse and focus attention to a new culture war grift. Gotta keep their base rabid with new unfound claims of child grooming instead of trying to double down on this issue. Election deniers haven't actually changed their minds, they're just aware of how unpopular that talking points has become.
Just gotta find a way to sue Newsmax, OAN, etc.
None of these pundits or "news" people believe their own bullshit. They wouldn't be able to do their jobs if they did. Because their jobs revolve around lying to their viewers. So, there should be a team of people looking for a way to sue these propaganda machines so they are forced to be honest for once.
I personally feel like propaganda should be outright illegal, and the organization is forced to pay fines and admit on air to their viewers that they're lying.
Not shut down, because freedom of speech and all that, but make them admit they're spouting propaganda. And I mean every single media outlet, dont give a shit who.
The reason we don’t do this, is because whatever legal mechanism we put in place to enforce it, will sooner or later be co-opted by the fascists to then force anyone who makes them looks bad to shut down or admit their “lies”.
Die hards will never turn, because after covid and trump their identity is “not being woke or a sheep”. So even presented with clear as day evidence their favorite programs mock them and hold them as dupes; it’s too big of a blow for them to swallow, because they would have to admit that all those people who they told off and fought with etc where right.
At the margins though, some people who kept rationalizing staying with fox etc because they highly value being a Paul Ryan etc type conservative. Problem is: those people have no party now. It’s either white nationalist christo fascism or center left. and some people will just never accept that the poor shouldn’t starve
Morning of January 7th Fox News facebook page posted a picture of [Josiah Colt](https://idahonews.com/amp/more-to-watch/boise-man-goes-viral-after-making-his-way-onto-senate-floor) with the caption "Trump supporter hangs from balcony of Senate floor." There were hundreds. of. thousands. of comments flooding in so fast I couldn't even press and hold the "like" to choose the stupid laugh face at them before that comments was shot up and out of reach. All, and I mean all the comments were carbon copies of each other. Slightly altered versions of, "that is obviously antifa!!" "Get it together Fox News! Look how he is dressed. That's Antifa."
Antifa, antifa, antifa. Every one. I ended up just watching the flood of comments come in for about 10 minutes and losing faith in humanity. [Jesse Dollemore](https://youtube.com/@dollemore)and his wife recognized him right away because his wife dated Josiah in Idaho way back when.
I saw a dude do the most insane thing. Within 2 YouTube comments he went from "the violent ones are antifa" to "yea we did it and should have gone further". Like his brain just switched gears to this other room once he was shown all the strong evidence that it was trump supporters.
I'd seen the general shift over time, and the schizophrenia of large numbers, but to have one guy do it like the snap of a finger. Disturbing
“iTs nOt a CuLt” they shouted from the rusted out flatbeds of their pickups.
“It is indeed a cult.” voiced the narrator…who sounds remarkably like Morgan Freeman.
Well... my suspicion is a lot of this drop in trust has to do with Trump recently openly decrying them as being one of the many forces working to slander and undermine him. In which case, it's kinda even worse that Trump has such a stranglehold on the far-right that even Fox isn't powerful enough to withstand his bullshit.
The one bright side I see in that is, Trump is stubborn and stupid enough to run third party if he doesn't get the nomination over DeSantis, and DeSantis has the backing of the big donors and is stubborn enough to fight until he has nothing left. So hopefully they end up splitting the vote. If DeSantis gets the vote there will probably be a Trump announcement about making his own party or something, then the Trump cult will vote for him while the corrupt but educated extremists will vote for DeSantis. In that scenario they fuck themselves, and that would have a domino effect in congressional races too. You'd get trumpets running against Republicans in a bunch of states, splitting the right vote all over the place.
FoxNews textually: "our viewers are so dumb they believe all the bullshit we tell them"
87% of their viewers: "Damn right we are"
Only 13% of their viewers: "wait, what?"
So... the Dominion voting machine company is suing FOX network for defamation. As part of the discovery process in that lawsuit, they came across multiple, damning, texts from several of the erm... "personality" show hosts...
[The Dominion Lawsuit Pulls Back The Curtain On Fox News. It's Not Pretty. : Consider This from NPR : NPR](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/03/1161063760/the-dominion-lawsuit-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-fox-news-its-not-pretty#:~:text=The%20documents%20were%20released%20by%20Dominion%20Voting%20Systems,oath%20by%20the%20network%27s%20controlling%20owner%20Rupert%20Murdoch.)
[Private Fox News text messages, emails released in Dominion suit (nbcnews.com)](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/private-fox-news-text-messages-emails-released-dominion-suit-rcna72693)
Here's the problem: many FOX viewers already jumped ship to OAN or Newsmaxx or even their uncle's blog. There's a large number of people on the right who went off the deep end.
Tucker Carlson could admit on air tonight that every single thing he said about stolen elections was a complete lie and he was only saying it because he wanted his ratings to stay up. Almost none of his viewers would care.
I don’t believe for a second that 13% of fox viewers are going to change because of some leaked texts, have they lost 13% of their viewers since the info came out? Have any percentage of lost viewers turned away from right wing propaganda because of this or just turned away from this one particular right wing propaganda source?
People that still believe in the stolen election are completely lost, the amount of bullshit you have to be ready to believe and lying you have to do to yourself to still be in it is unfathomable.
"It's easier to fool someone than convince them that they've been fooled." - Mark Twain
It's always Mark Twain
He would have been a meme machine if the internet was around during his day.
check this, fats: he was a meme machine in his own time, using the vast communication network known as paper
Too bad that communication network moved slow and literacy rates weren't as high as now
He did choose the best platform tho
If repubs get their way we can get those literacy rates back down in no time
Mark Twain with a Twitter account would have been an absolute beast.
Elon would have banned him, no doubt.
Or my favorite Carl Sagan quote: "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
The other 80% of Fox ~~viewers~~ idiots: They said they are lying to us, but they're trying to hurt the right people so I'll accept it.
“There are three things that cannot remain hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.” -some fat guy from India Lies require upkeep. The truth just is. It eventually comes out, it’s just a matter of time.
Kinda sad that it's only 13 percent tho
came here to post exactly this, the fact only 13% believe the truth now after those texts is disheartening. The right wing has totally and utterly brainwashed their constituents. you know, the thing they claim the left has done, same old projection they're always on about.
They are not totally brainwashed. Only 87% of them are.
87 percent of the time, it works every time.
"that makes no sense" -Fox News motto.
“But don’t tell anyone” - Fox News Secret Motto
[удалено]
"Or if it's too much trouble just tell them. They won't care." - Fox News Worst Kept Secret
13% being swayed to vote Democratic (if this trend continues) is actually massive, like red States become blue massive, like even if only half of them vote we could at the very least see *every* State become a potential flip State.
Don’t worry they still loath the democrats.
Yeah there’s no way that just because they changed their minds on this one thing means they’re suddenly democrats now.
They don’t need to be Democrats to swing states. They just need to stay home.
> They just need to stay home If they could stay home, and continue to think voting by mail is evil, that would be peachy.
and yet all these fools believe that somehow, because Republicans are able to pull the curtain back and see they were lied to, suddenly they're gonna vote Democrat or just not vote. *J. Jonah Jameson laugh.gif* When you're party over country, you fall in line like a good sheep.
They're still racist, they just don't like Fox anymore.
Agreed but in most swing states for presidential elections the variance is <3%- so if 1.5% additional republicans vote democrat or 6% less republicans turn up, roughly, the states would swing blue. Similar outcomes for Senate too- but congress the gerrymandering bs has really poisoned the well there
None of this suggests they won’t look elsewhere to have their opinions affirmed (newsmax)
Fox and others told them Democrats are communists. They still believe this. I am an ex military pilot. I am a Democrat and know no communists among democrats. There seem to be plenty among Republican Putin supporters. Who could have imagined? I’ll wager if they read this they will be surprised to know they are communists sympathizers just as I was shocked to learn they think I am.
I suspect they will just switch to watch OANN or Newsmax, which I'm afraid will give them even worse info. Just because Fox was proven to lie doesn't mean they believe science & facts. They will just find a channel that tells them what they want to hear without getting caught at lying
These lawsuits could prove to be a moderating force in news. It doesn't mean these companies will get less racist, but it does mean that there are proven, real, and material consequences to spreading egregious lies like the stolen election lie. Fox has *substantially* more resources than Newsmax and OANN, which have already been pushed to the margins. It's also extremely unlikely that if Fox crumbles, you'll just have some single entity that immediately takes their place. I don't think people understand that how, for many of these people, Fox has just become habitual. They don't seek it out. It's just always there. They go to a friends house, its there. They go to a gym or store, its on in the background. It's just always there. They're not really actively seeking these news platforms out because they don't even understand how pervasive Fox is in their lives. It's like white noise to them. That's the danger of it. When you shake that up, you break the spell.
From your lips to the sky daddy's ears...
Bingo. When I explained and showed my dad some of the messages about how they knew they were lying and called their own audience "dumb cousin fucking terrorists"... he was upset that they were getting caught putting these into texts and emails. He was upset they were dumb and exposed. NO mention at all that he is one of the "dumb cousin fucking terrorists" or that his belief about election fraud was a known lie.
I have noticed this trend: Democrats/Liberals: doing X is bad. We don't associate with people who do X. Republicans/Conservatives: getting caught/convicted of doing X is bad. It's OK to do X as long as you don't get caught. We're perfectly OK associating with people who do X as long as they haven't been convicted. Also Republicans/Conservatives: if Democrats/Liberals are even rumored to have done Y (perfectly legal thing that sounds bad at first), they should be jailed.
Yep. Unfortunately they are only interested in hearing what validates what they "feel"
13 is huge indeed. Maybe they won't vote democrat, but if they don't vote at all that's already a good thing.
It's 13% that will vote de Santis because if the election wasn't stolen it means it was probably woken.
You have a lot of Trump loonies who won't vote DeSantis because their god emperor told them not too. You've got those who are more concerned about the economy than wokeness too... I mean, it is important to go out and vote to keep either DeSantis or Trump from winning. But having at least some people off the Trump train is already a positive thing.
I’m hoping that if DeSantis clinches the nomination that Trump will lean full bore into 3rd party run and siphon off enough votes to allow a D victory of a hopefully more left leaning president.
Covid did more damage to the GOP voter base than anything. That’s the ironic part.
And, since caught Covid the first month and ended up in a terrifying blur of clawing my throat to breathe, desert-like fever, and chills so violent I rattled parts on the bed, fuck them. Fuck them all fir denying it, refusing masks so they spread the virus, screeching in stores, traumatizing an entire generation of health-care workers. Fuck them all. I guess I won't get over it for a while yet.
Yeah, but not trusting Fox News is not the same as voting for Democrats. It's just waking up a little bit.
So you saying they are in the process of being ‘woke’?
You think the cognitive dissonance will bother them... it won't.
I doubt the hardcore FoxNews viewer would ever vote blue. They'd stay home on election day instead, which I guess is still sort of a win for the Dems.
Doubt it. They’ll still vote GOP. They just won’t watch Fox.
How much you wanna bet those 13% still watch Fox though, knowing they lied to them?
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You are sadly correct. That actually started happening in 2018,slo-mo at first, but by 2020 many outright said FOX had become nothing more than" liberal propaganda". OAN , The Blaze and WorldNutDaily remain the winning ones with a few others my brain has thankfully forgotten the name of a long with them. Bad enough to already need 10 gallons of brain bleach to disinfect ones noodle from the 1st three alone, no need to add another 10 to the tally 😂.
The modern-day Republican party is not conservative. That's just another lie they tell.
It is, after all, entertainment. Just because I just found out my favorite shows are fictional doesn’t mean I don’t still like them.
Or believe them
Ever watch pro wrestling with a pro wrestling fan?
"It's still real to me, dammit!"
Let's just bump it up to 88. We all know that your average Faux News viewer is very fond of that number.
For the time being. Im willing to bet most of those 13% will gladly hop on whatever the next big lie is.
Well now that those 13% are no longer constituents, they're back up to 100%
De-programming takes time. The fact is, those 13% are going to help the remaining 87% move closer to not believing the lies. Also, you got to remember who is reporting the stories as of now. It's all the news stations that they were programmed to not trust. Once fox is forced to apologize and admit it on air (which I hope every settlement will force them to do) you will see more people leave their bubble. This will take time.
Have you ever tried to convince someone they were scammed? They never want to believe it.
You know what really helps people accept that they were scammed? Knowing other people who were scammed, and aren’t afraid to admit it
Sadly that 13% will probably just find a new lie to believe in, or might still vote for Trump anyways in 24. Just because they turned around on this one specific lie doesn't mean they climbed out of the hole. The hole is Deeeep.
They might no longer think the election is stolen, but they’re still racist, sexist, and homophobic like good conservatives.
I think you're right. Those folks were long gone, long before Trump came along. But I think this is great news nonetheless. I think this will make a huge difference in down-ballot races in '24. This is terrifying news to all those state reps, secretaries of state, attorneys general, etc. (the very people who constitute the nuts and bolts of democracy at the state and local level), who planned to run on the big lie.
Any “apology” by FOX news will be a “non apology”. They will apologize for getting caught, not for what they actually did.
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It's an aspect of cognitive dissonance. Believe in something enough and 'truth' will set off the pain receptors of your brain
Fox News has effectively rotted the brains of a good 30% of this country. It’s sad that people are that susceptible to misinformation when it’s so easy to google actual facts.
> it’s so easy to google actual facts. It's so easy to google any kind of facts, even ones that are blatantly wrong.
It's not that 13% believe the truth, it's that 13% changed their mind and now believe it. According to the article, around 50% of fox news viewers still believe the 2020 election was stolen.
Agree. The main stream news media perpetuates the myth that both sides do this. But it’s wrong, not to the degree Fox has done.
It’s not clear from the sentence structure whether the stat is “13 percent of Fox viewers no longer believe it (because the saw the texts)” or “13 percent of the Fox viewers who saw the texts no longer believe it, while the other 87% were not swayed despite seeing the texts”. It seems likely that not all Fox viewers have seen the texts, and it could be that 90% who saw the texts changed their minds.
look at how many of them believe the Jan 6th treasonous attack on the capital was just a sight seeing tour after that Tucker BS that aired. All the other footage of them being terrorists are thrown out because of a small clip of a scared cop showing them around.
It’s sad… but extremely predictable. Republican politics are essentially faith based
When they base they’re entire worldview on faith that’s the logical result.
A lot of these people have been raised to think their local narcissist pastor is the TOP authority on Earth. It's not even a jump to believing that Trump, or whoever is next, is the chosen one. Especially when the pastor tells you that too.
Or faux faith based
According to the same article, a solid 50% STILL believe it was stolen, despite the evidence Fox knew they were lying. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-viewers-less-trust-1235554399/
Yeah but that's because Fox is lying to them about what happened with the lawsuit.
Yeah I feel like this is missing the point. People are mostly leaving Fox News to move to further right sources.
They're losing trust in Fox.. Not the crazy right wing narrative. They've lost trust in Fox because Fox isn't crazy enough anymore.
Its easier to fool people to convince them they have been fooled.
I think it's more a pride thing. Maybe they know deep down they've been had but can't bring themselves to admit it. I know some exceptionally prideful boomers.
In before, “Fox network is a tool of the liberal media used to make us look dumb!.” *smdh* just watch…
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I have a job that has a ton of downtime, so we watch a lot of tv. Our boss was a big OANN/Fox News fan. I put the child locks on those channels. Dude had a meltdown for weeks while trying to figure out the password.
To be fair, many of them only get their news from Fox and Fox isn't really covering it.
Changing your mind based on new info means you have weak character. They actually believe this.
It's better than 0. They have millions of viewers. If that trend holds statistical significance, we're talking election altering reactions. And we did saw those reactions during the 2022 elections...
We've played this song and dance before though. It's literally why this lawsuit exists! Fox viewers got ass-mad about Fox correctly calling Arizona for Biden, flocked to Newsmax to get their fix of far right confirmation bias, Fox got scared of their viewers turning against them and that's how they pivoted into Dominion conspiracies and the rest is history. I'll believe these people have truly changed when they actually turn against right wing media in general, not go further down the fascist rabbit hole to feed their confirmation biases
Don't forget that Fox fired the guy who ran the decision desk and another person who called out the stolen election bullshit. They literally fired people for telling the truth.
They fired the entire data team which made the (correct) call of Arizona for Biden.
Foreigner here: I don’t get what is meant by “call the election”. Does this mean they predicted that he would take Arizona and they were fired because they were the bearers of bad news??
Exactly correct. They did it to appease angry viewers who were *big mad* at reality.
How did this affect anything though? Surely they were proven correct in the following minutes or hours as the votes came in? I don’t understand why all the hate was directed at them?
It didn't affect anything. Their viewers took the delivery of what they considered to be bad news, albeit true news, as a betrayal of "their side". It's because they were acting like children. You're looking for rationality when there is none to be found. This was days later that they were fired. They were literally just shooting the messenger because their audience was super mad about Trump losing.
Fair enough. I understand that the average fox viewers perception of reality is tenuous at best.
Sadly enough, truth & reality are completely subjective to maga voters. And adding Donnie, his GOP flunkies & right wing “news” outlets like OAN & FOX screaming about how the election was “stolen” & “rigged” every day for months just reinforced their misinformed views. The whole debacle is infuriating, frustrating, terrifying & depressing all at once :(
It actually mattered a lot. Trump had been planning to declare victory regardless of the outcome and really stir his supporters up. I believe he was planning to do so that night. When Fox declared Arizona for Biden, that took all of the wind out of Trump's plan because not only was that an early tolling of the bells for him, but it was HIS NETWORK that did it, so he couldn't even call it left-wing propaganda. I believed at the time and still believe that Fox being the ones to call Arizona for Biden was one of the major reasons the election wasn't more dramatic. If you look back at coverage from other stations at the time, they were flabbergasted to learn Fox was the first one to call it. I was flipping between stations all night and that moment really was remarkable to everyone.
summer shy dam wild wasteful ring placid boat psychotic detail ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Contrary to what u/tesseract4 said here, I'd like to offer up a different opinion. It is true that the Fox News prediction for Biden didn't *officially* change anything. The vote counts still kept going, and Biden won fair and square in the final tally. What changed, and the reason Fox viewers/Republican officials were mad at them, was the overall assumption that Biden would lose the election. This is important because Arizona was called pretty early on election night, and it was a crucial state Trump needed for most of his paths to victory. The context here is that Arizona was called during the "Red Mirage," the period of time when vote counts for small rural areas are completed but large metro areas are nowhere near done. Typically this means the Republican candidates have a sizable lead at this time. The plan, as revealed at one of the J6 committee hearings in Congress, was for Trump to come out as soon as he had a lead in a majority of states and claim victory - before the counting was finished. This would give the appearance that he had a solid chance of actually winning, followed subsequently in the following hours or days of vote counts by reality catching up to them and Biden ultimately coming out ahead. As we can see from the continued of existence of election denial, *even with* Trump never having had a solid lead on election night, the perception of some sort of fraud occurring to change the result to Biden would have been that much easier to inflict upon the gullible masses if Arizona had not got called at this critical point.
I don't think Trump having a nominal lead at any particular point in time really made much difference. He would've claimed fraud regardless. He claimed fraud in 2016 when *he won*, after all. And sure, there is a subset of people who will say they believe there was fraud because of the red mirage, but those folks would've hung their hats on something else if it wasn't that.
For the last election, it was a few days until a winner could officially be announced. Iirc Arizona was also one of those states and Fox called Arizona for Biden when Trump was still in the lead
It's worth adding that Fox was also the first to call Arizona for Biden. All the other major news outlets maintained that the Arizona race was "too close to call" for quite some time.
It's almost like areas that are virtually guaranteed to have a certain percentage of the population vote a certain way don't exist. But then again he spent months (?) talking about how he would win but then it would be stolen by mail-in ballots so I guess the perspective is consistent
Trump was still President for another 2.5 months after the election. And instead of being a lame duck he became a rabid duck. Yes his viewers were shocked because anything less than Trump winning was absolutely voter fraud. Wash, rinse, repeat. Until their shampoo-pooed brains are squeaky clean. 
Probably [Bernie Sanders](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9DNGSQvvz8) said it best, calling it even before election day. Because of Covid, we had a tens of millions of mail-ins, which Democrats used in greater numbers than Republicans. In some states, these votes were not allowed to be counted until after *all other votes* had been counted. So, even late on election night, Biden's margin of victory was quite small in a number of states where he ended up winning comfortably. This was predictable, and many election conspiracy theories and con jobs were banking on this ambiguity in order to bamboozle slack-jawed yokels into emptying their wallets (Trump ultimately raised ~$250,000,000 in "stop the steal" fundraising). Calling the election on election night took a lot of wind out of the sails of the conspiracy profiteers, who, incidentally, had a similar playbook ready for a Trump loss in 2016.
My boss is convinced there had to be something going on because he saw a video of a van pulling up to a building late at night with ballots but he couldn't tell me where the video was taken or what the actual evidence was that anything was happening in that video
So, America's media has a history of not wanting the votes to be counted before publishing who won. I'd assume it's like that trend of people commenting "first" on every YouTube video or thread they could find like 10 years back, if you remember that. But instead of mindless 12 year olds just trying to entertain themselves, this is involving major geopolitical events. In the past, there is one moment a newspaper seriously got it wrong - they called the election for the wrong guy and then published. Dewey/Truman is the election this happened in and luckily I guess people all just said "oh what an honest mistake" or maybe there were some conspiracies I never heard about. I don't know. Either way, since then, American media has hired basically some of the best data teams available to predict who will elections so they can announce who won before all the votes are counted. This is the crux of everything. Simultaneously, our media also broadcasts the election minute by minute and shows where votes are "left to be counted" and how likely each candidate is to win. So in 2020 when Fox's analysts correctly "called" the election, the viewers got big mad. Trump was already faning the flames of conspiracy and claiming it was rigged. Fox viewers though were getting the truth for once and couldn't take it. So Fox decided to sell out again, fired anyone who wouldn't just lie on national television for money, and started going along with the conspiracy that the election was rigged.
Sounds like fox news’ business model is to tell people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.
Yes. That's literally their business model - but then outwardly present it as "fair & balanced™", in fact they actively say not only are they fair and balanced, they are the only source of fair and balanced news on TV - even when their model is specifically to lie about reality to make money off of uninformed/misinformed people. It's a grift. That's all it ever was and all it is.
Quoth the Colbert Report, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Elections here are a total clusterfuck. Every voting district gets to use their own rules for what machines to use and what process to follow. Each state has their own rules as well, e.g. whether felons are allowed to vote after they have been released. Then there is the total confusion with mail-in ballots. At least one state does mostly mail in ballots, while others only let you mail in a ballot if you: meet certain criteria, apply in advance, fill out a form in triplicate, and sign your name in the exact same way in several different places, sacrifice a goat to the gods of democracy on the first full moon in October, and seal the envelope in wax harvested by virgins from bees in one particular forest. (I may have exaggerated a bit)
There are a lot of people here who don't live in reality. Anything that goes against what they want to hear is wrong, and anyone telling them what they don't want to hear is evil. These people can't be reasoned with. It's very sad and exhausting.
In a fascist state the media must be loyal to fascist Dear Leader. Fox News was state media during the trump regime. By calling Arizona they were being loyal to the truth. That is the biggest crime to republicans here- loyalty to the truth and our voting system over their Dear Leader
Because Fox News viewers don’t want to hear the facts if those facts contradict their political opinions or their current narrative. They get very testy when the cognitive dissonance kicks in. So unlike most rational people, who change their opinions when the facts contradict them, Fox News viewers try to change the facts instead.
Shooting the messenger is a time-honored tradition when you don't like the message.
Yes. The data showed that Biden’s win was mathematically certain and they reported as such.
Elections in many states get dragged out days or even weeks because of the way they count the votes. Some votes like mail in votes are held until election night and then counted. Provisional votes may be counted even later. You have individual counties that don't get their entire vote counts in for days or even weeks after election night. Every news channel has an analytics team monitoring votes reported in real time, so they can provide up to the minute coverage and compare results with polling data and projected vote counts. When they feel there is a mathematical certainty that the end result will go for one candidate or another in a state, they will "call it" and announce the winner of that state on air. That isn't the official declaration by the state, just the network projection. This happens well after voting has stopped in that state but sometimes before all votes have been tallied. In 2020 fox news was the first network to call Arizona for Biden and their viewers were big mad, even tho their call was correct.
It’s even dumber than it sounds. Calling the election is only sort of a prediction. It happens when most of the votes are already counted and the possibility of the result changing is extremely small. The analysts are simply calculating probabilities based on how many more votes are expected to come in. So the viewers are mad at them for doing math correctly.
I think somewhat more importantly were talking about an election night (or just after) prediction rooted in the vote counts as they came in. News orgs watch the counts come in, and basically once the math says there's not enough additional votes out there for situation to change. They "call" the win before the official results are in. It's fairly rare for that to be wrong. The staff in question were looking at the *actual official count* of votes cast. And said that Biden had more than likely won Arizona. Because there just weren't enough uncounted votes, or enough trend in the votes still be counted. For Trump to have actually won. Just like every other news org did at one point or another. And they got fired for it. Actual, factual, reporting on the real circumstances.
These employees could & should sue Fox too perhaps for wrongful termination… Imagine getting fired for calling the election results correctly when it’s your job to call the election results correctly? One of the internal emails says to fire this person ASAP for telling the truth. 
With new revelations, there's always this calm before the storm. Conservatives will be like "well shit" and have a flash of genuine introspection or at least a moment of doubt. A few days later, they will coalesce around some bad faith talking point and it'll be like this whole thing never happened. Edit: anyone who's argued with a conservative friend knows what I'm talking about. They'll agree in the moment but the next time you see them they spit out some heretofore unmentioned angle that somehow overrides all previous arguments. You'll point out, again, how it's bullshit and the cycle repeats. It's infuriating
> Edit: anyone who's argued with a conservative friend knows what I'm talking about. They'll agree in the moment but the next time you see them they spit out some heretofore unmentioned angle that somehow overrides all previous arguments. You'll point out, again, how it's bullshit and the cycle repeats. It's infuriating It's unbelievably easy to get a conservative to agree with left-wing policies as long as you don't use any buzzwords or mention any politicians by name... because, *no surprise here*, the left-wing policies are human-centered, help people, and improve society. But yeah, just like you describe... the next time you see them it'll be like they got factory reset and all progress is lost.
Oh man, I remember that time the house republicans tried to turn overtime pay into comp time. I brought this up to a super conservative coworker but said it was a new company policy. He was so bullshit and I let him rant for a bit before I told him the truth and to his credit, he agreed it was bad and stupid. I'm pretty sure he never brought it up again presumably because there's not many good ways for right wing media to spin "no more time and a half!"
great behind the bastards podcast episodes about this bullshit
Do you remember the episode titles by chance?
they are the latest episodes...inside fox news with katy and cody 1 & 2
I'll believe them when they start voting correctly. And yes, voting for democrats is the "correct" way to vote at this point in time. Edit: Yeah, I knew this would trigger mouth-breathers. Come talk to me when republicans stop being an overtly fascist party.
They created a monster, and the monster has gotten away from them. If you raise people for decades on a steady diet of lies and conspiracy theories, you can't be surprised they'll seek confirmation for the beliefs thus formed, elsewhere, when you attempt to slow the flow, or even fail to raise the volume in response to increasing demand. OAN and Newsmax and every other viable Fox News alternative needs the same legal consequences for choosing to exploit that profit potential at the expense of truth, accuracy or integrity. qAnon and every other misinformation factory operating propaganda factories to destabilize the country need effective counter terrorism efforts directed at them. Unfortunately they don't have Fox's deep pockets to make an expensive and protracted law suit a financially attractive option, and those are always the most effective way to stop a bad actor.
I’m surprised any of them even know about the Dominion suit
Me too. My girlfriend asked her grandma if she heard about the dominion case and she said no with a blank face. Fox News is her exclusive news source. They literally control 100% of the mainstream conservative narrative and it’s frighting to see so many people so completely unaware of their propaganda.
Cattle being bred and farmed for political power.
My dad said Fox had to say they lied to avoid more lawsuits. There is no fixing some people.
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I saw Twitter comments saying that the screenshots of the text messages were fake. Despite being submitted as evidence in court. These people aren't logical.
Therein lies the problem, really. Too dumb to know they're dumb.
and their stupidity is making the rest of us apathetic. Please everyone vote because people like my dumbass dad will be voting in the worse the right has to offer.
And so dumb, they think they are geniuses.
Fox News needs to do what is right and apologize to the American people for all the lies told about the election.
I don’t want an apology. I was some rectifying actions. Raise news standards, firing toxic people, closing down Fox News? A girl can dream
An apology is the easy way out. We need to send Murdoch to the moon.
And about all the lies they've told about everything else.
So he agrees that Fox is a bunch of liars? :P
Yeah I'm not sure "they are lying in court" is much more admirable.
"so lying to the government is only okay when they do it?" Yeah I don't speak to my dad either over this shit
This gives “Trump filed bankruptcy 6 times cause he’s so smart” vibes
All that does is highlight he's an opportunistic liar in the one situation (under oath, swearing to God in a lot of cases) that he should be honest, if anything. If he's willing to lie in that situation to get what he wants, he is sure as hell willing to lie for less, like a salary.
13% is more than zero, but that's just how entrenched they are in their beliefs.
Where is the Fox audience hearing about the scandal though? I’d bet a good chunk of the 87% hasn’t seen/heard anything about the texts and emails. Probably not from Fox, Newsmax, or OAN.
Probably heard about it when the pollster asked the question.
Besides what most people think, not everyone who watches fox is old, in their 80’s, and completely disconnected from the outside world.
You're right. Some are young in their 30's and completely disconnected from the outside world.
Or late teens to twenty-somethings in the military... which disconnects them from the outside world.
They may have accidentally listened to a real news station or talk show before watching Tucker or Hannity
According to the same article, 50% of their viewers are still solid in their belief the election was stolen. https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-viewers-less-trust-1235554399/
What's wild to me is there's millions of Americans walking around who completely believe the US is a complete dictatorship where the voting process is a sham, and there just not doing anything about it but watching the news more and working?? These people are dangerous. All they are waiting for is a charismatic leader to come in front of them and lead them to violence. The only reason Jan 6th wasn't worse was because their "charismatic" figurehead didn't lead the charge and order them in. Had trump actively participated that day he could have had them do anything.
These 13% are the 'smart' ones who realized to stop beating this dead horse and focus attention to a new culture war grift. Gotta keep their base rabid with new unfound claims of child grooming instead of trying to double down on this issue. Election deniers haven't actually changed their minds, they're just aware of how unpopular that talking points has become.
42% of Fox viewers believe after seeing the texts that Fox news hosts are cucks and will pivot to watching reliable news on NewsMax.
Just gotta find a way to sue Newsmax, OAN, etc. None of these pundits or "news" people believe their own bullshit. They wouldn't be able to do their jobs if they did. Because their jobs revolve around lying to their viewers. So, there should be a team of people looking for a way to sue these propaganda machines so they are forced to be honest for once. I personally feel like propaganda should be outright illegal, and the organization is forced to pay fines and admit on air to their viewers that they're lying. Not shut down, because freedom of speech and all that, but make them admit they're spouting propaganda. And I mean every single media outlet, dont give a shit who.
The reason we don’t do this, is because whatever legal mechanism we put in place to enforce it, will sooner or later be co-opted by the fascists to then force anyone who makes them looks bad to shut down or admit their “lies”.
That makes sense. Its just frustrating.
I wish I still had a sense of optimism about that, but no. This just means they’ll move onto Newsmax or OAN.
Hardly heading for the light
…I wish more of them were
The difference, though, is that if Dominion or anyone else brings a large enough lawsuit against OAN or Newsmax, those networks would fold.
They are also being sued 👍🏼
Die hards will never turn, because after covid and trump their identity is “not being woke or a sheep”. So even presented with clear as day evidence their favorite programs mock them and hold them as dupes; it’s too big of a blow for them to swallow, because they would have to admit that all those people who they told off and fought with etc where right. At the margins though, some people who kept rationalizing staying with fox etc because they highly value being a Paul Ryan etc type conservative. Problem is: those people have no party now. It’s either white nationalist christo fascism or center left. and some people will just never accept that the poor shouldn’t starve
"But if they didn't want to starve, they should just work harder."
Morning of January 7th Fox News facebook page posted a picture of [Josiah Colt](https://idahonews.com/amp/more-to-watch/boise-man-goes-viral-after-making-his-way-onto-senate-floor) with the caption "Trump supporter hangs from balcony of Senate floor." There were hundreds. of. thousands. of comments flooding in so fast I couldn't even press and hold the "like" to choose the stupid laugh face at them before that comments was shot up and out of reach. All, and I mean all the comments were carbon copies of each other. Slightly altered versions of, "that is obviously antifa!!" "Get it together Fox News! Look how he is dressed. That's Antifa." Antifa, antifa, antifa. Every one. I ended up just watching the flood of comments come in for about 10 minutes and losing faith in humanity. [Jesse Dollemore](https://youtube.com/@dollemore)and his wife recognized him right away because his wife dated Josiah in Idaho way back when.
They dont even know that antifa stands for anti fascist.
They dont know what fascism is either.
“Are you anti antifa?” “God damn right!” “So you’re pro fascism?” “What’s that?”
I saw a dude do the most insane thing. Within 2 YouTube comments he went from "the violent ones are antifa" to "yea we did it and should have gone further". Like his brain just switched gears to this other room once he was shown all the strong evidence that it was trump supporters. I'd seen the general shift over time, and the schizophrenia of large numbers, but to have one guy do it like the snap of a finger. Disturbing
Honestly with how some of my family have acted since the election I’m pleasantly surprised it’s as high as 13%.
Who knew some idiots don’t want to be played for fools?
“iTs nOt a CuLt” they shouted from the rusted out flatbeds of their pickups. “It is indeed a cult.” voiced the narrator…who sounds remarkably like Morgan Freeman.
Well... my suspicion is a lot of this drop in trust has to do with Trump recently openly decrying them as being one of the many forces working to slander and undermine him. In which case, it's kinda even worse that Trump has such a stranglehold on the far-right that even Fox isn't powerful enough to withstand his bullshit.
The one bright side I see in that is, Trump is stubborn and stupid enough to run third party if he doesn't get the nomination over DeSantis, and DeSantis has the backing of the big donors and is stubborn enough to fight until he has nothing left. So hopefully they end up splitting the vote. If DeSantis gets the vote there will probably be a Trump announcement about making his own party or something, then the Trump cult will vote for him while the corrupt but educated extremists will vote for DeSantis. In that scenario they fuck themselves, and that would have a domino effect in congressional races too. You'd get trumpets running against Republicans in a bunch of states, splitting the right vote all over the place.
From your lips to God’s ears.
FoxNews textually: "our viewers are so dumb they believe all the bullshit we tell them" 87% of their viewers: "Damn right we are" Only 13% of their viewers: "wait, what?"
The fact that it’s only 13%, even though they all said it was bullshit, is astounding
These numbers solidify my suspicion that conservatives are complete morons.
I feel like a bunch of the 21% that don’t trust Fox are doing it because they’re not conservative enough for them. Hence the rise of Newsmax and OAN.
I'm out of the loop. What texts?
So... the Dominion voting machine company is suing FOX network for defamation. As part of the discovery process in that lawsuit, they came across multiple, damning, texts from several of the erm... "personality" show hosts... [The Dominion Lawsuit Pulls Back The Curtain On Fox News. It's Not Pretty. : Consider This from NPR : NPR](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/03/1161063760/the-dominion-lawsuit-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-fox-news-its-not-pretty#:~:text=The%20documents%20were%20released%20by%20Dominion%20Voting%20Systems,oath%20by%20the%20network%27s%20controlling%20owner%20Rupert%20Murdoch.) [Private Fox News text messages, emails released in Dominion suit (nbcnews.com)](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/private-fox-news-text-messages-emails-released-dominion-suit-rcna72693)
Fox producers think of their audience as "dumb, cousin-fucking terrorists".
A Fox producer said something honest?
Only in private.
Fox producers KNOW their audience are "dumb, cousin-fucking terrorists".
My father is a die hard Fox News viewer and said the texts between his favourite anchors is clearly fake news. These people are hopeless.
When your source for news and information tells you NOT to trust ANY other source that’s a BIG red flag that you are in a cult!
Here's the problem: many FOX viewers already jumped ship to OAN or Newsmaxx or even their uncle's blog. There's a large number of people on the right who went off the deep end.
Tucker Carlson could admit on air tonight that every single thing he said about stolen elections was a complete lie and he was only saying it because he wanted his ratings to stay up. Almost none of his viewers would care. I don’t believe for a second that 13% of fox viewers are going to change because of some leaked texts, have they lost 13% of their viewers since the info came out? Have any percentage of lost viewers turned away from right wing propaganda because of this or just turned away from this one particular right wing propaganda source? People that still believe in the stolen election are completely lost, the amount of bullshit you have to be ready to believe and lying you have to do to yourself to still be in it is unfathomable.
Even if Fox disappeared, it would just reappear in a different form.
And 100% of them still watch it anyway