Jeanine Pirro has been able to stay on air even though her number one attribute is being a screaming bore. Pirro crawled her way back into the conservative sphere after her husband’s conviction for “conspiracy and tax evasion” sidelined her march towards the Senate back in 2020. She’s proven that while her husband may have gone to jail for being a corrupt piece of excrement, Pirro has proven she can rival her former husband’s corruption by being morally bankrupt.
The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News has exposed the septic tank of personalities that makes up the behind-the-scenes world at the conservative propaganda giant. And while reports of how people like Pirro went on air and knowingly pushed unverified conspiracy theories and in many cases made claims they knew full well not to be true, the details of the conversations going on behind the camera have only recently begun flooding out.
A story that came out in 2022, which stated that a Fox producer had tried to muzzle Pirro shortly after Donald Trump lost the election to Joe Biden and Dominion began calling for the network to rectify its lies and slander, has some newly released juicy details. It turns out the people at Fox News have the same opinion of Pirro that most of us have, they’re just willing to profit off it. In fact, as we have seen, Fox News treats the women of the conservative movement with the kind of misogynistic scorn we have come to expect from a political philosophy that has rolled back women’s rights.
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MediaMatters has put together a nice timeline of Fox executives’ handlings of Pirro. Fox executive David Clark, the overseeing producer of Pirro’s show, “cancelled Pirro’s November 7 show when they did not trust her not to spread lies,” about the election. Clark reportedly mentioned in an email that while Pirro had tried to promise to not be full of crap, she couldn’t be trusted, and promoted a completely new “conspiracy tangent” to the producers she was trying to convince she wasn’t going to promote.
Then on Nov. 13, 2020, Pirro’s executive producer, Jerry Andrews, passed on Dominion Voting Systems factsheet on the myriad bogus lies being told by Trump, Pirro, and others. According to MediaMatters, while Pirro’s email response to Andrews is still redacted, Andrews forwarded her response to Clark with two words: “Reckless maniac.”
The following day, Pirro brings lawyer-like person and conspiracy charlatan Sidney Powell onto her show. You can guess how honest the information exchange was that evening for Fox viewers. But never fear, show producers kept at the gossiping behind the scenes while not really doing anything to stem the lies being told on air. A week later, on Nov. 20, Andrews reportedly forwarded a draft of Pirro’s upcoming rant-ologue to Clark, writing “rife w[ith] conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example why this woman should never be on live television.” This is the guy who gets paid because she has a show on air. MediaMatters reports that in a separate email, Andrews calls this monologue she intends on giving “completely crazy.”
After reportedly fact-checking Pirro’s rant-ologue allegations that Dominion was started with “Venezuela with Cuban money” and had a secret software that could flip votes, the two Fox producers threw up their hands, continued to call her a mad hatter, and let her go on air and say:
The president's lawyers alleging a company called Dominion, which they say started in Venezuela with Cuban money and with the assistance of Smartmatic software, a backdoor is capable of flipping votes. And the president's lawyers alleging that American votes in a presidential election are actually counted in a foreign country. These are serious allegations, but the media has no interest in any of this. But you and I do, as we should, because 73 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Republicans took seats in the House they said would be won in a Democrat blue wave that never came, and so far we've held the Senate. They say the risk of our giving false hope should be enough to stop us two weeks later. I say the risk of not looking at what is staring us in the face is too great to not stop us.
Fox News is like swimming with Nazi sharks.
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Fox News producer tried to get Jeanine Pirro muzzled for her Big Lie 'conspiracy' lies
State supreme court races are a favorite topic of ours, and there are literally dozens more on the ballot in 2024, so we're previewing the top battles with Carah Ong Whaley of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics on this week's episode of The Downballot podcast. Carah tells us how and why so much money has come to be spent on supreme court elections in recent decades before diving into next year's key contests, including several states where control is on the line, like Ohio, Michigan, and Montana. With the stakes high for redistricting reform, abortion rights, and democracy, progressives everywhere will want to stay up-to-date on all of these races.