The Betrayal At Fox News Is Even Worse Than We Imagined
The Matt Walsh Report | The Daily Signal | 6/16/23
For 120 straight weeks, Fox News was the most-watched cable news network in primetime. Its main competitors, MSNBC and CNN, never came close. In the key advertising demographic — people between the ages of 25 and 54 — Fox News was the undisputed leader.
But last week, after nearly two months of declining ratings following the ouster of Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ streak came to an abrupt and very unceremonious end. Last Friday, Fox News recorded its worst performance in primetime in the network's history. Just 109,000 people between the ages of 25 to 54 tuned into Tucker Carlson's old 8:00p.m. time slot, to watch the replacement show "Fox News Tonight."
How bad is that? To put it in context, "Fox News Tonight" was ranked 41st out of all cable news shows on Friday. This is the time slot that used to routinely be ranked number one. Now YouTube streams of people playing with Legos get more viewers. And keep in mind — Fox News attracted those 109,000 viewers on a very busy news night, after the announcement of Donald Trump’s indictment. Not many people cared what Fox News anchors had to say about the indictment of a presidential frontrunner.
Whatever you make of that, it’s clear that the implosion of Fox News is well underway. And it’s showing no signs of stopping. This week, as Tucker discussed on his Twitter show Thursday, Fox News executives publicly condemned a veteran producer who wrote a banner criticizing Joe Biden. Five years ago, the banner wouldn’t have attracted any attention whatsoever. But under the current leadership at Fox News, it led to the producer leaving the network within 48 hours. Here’s Tucker:
That banner is the most interesting thing that’s happened in that time slot for about two months, so of course Fox News cracks down on it. What’s happening at Fox feels familiar. The network is on the same trajectory we saw with Bud Light, then Target. Fox News executives, for some reason, are destroying their own product, and now they've lost the trust of their customer base. They didn’t just fire their top-performing host in the single most important hour in television, without providing any justification for it. Now they’re punishing producers too. They’ve also been relentlessly promoting transgenderism across all their platforms. They’ve made Caitlyn Jenner one of their top contributors. In every article about Dylan Mulvaney, or any other trans activist, they diligently make sure to respect their preferred pronouns.
Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corporation, is even sponsoring a pride parade. All of this is driving Fox News’ viewers away. It’s hard not to wonder what’s happening at Fox News, and whether there’s any chance the company —– which was once trusted by millions of people —– can ever recover.
We just obtained a series of internal documents from Fox News employees that illustrate how deep the rot goes, and how unsalvageable the whole organization truly is. These are documents that are produced by Fox Corporation, and presented to Fox News employees when they login to their employee portal. Any Fox News employee can access them. I encourage you to read the entire thread on Twitter and get all the facts on the story. I must warn you, though, what we found included very sexually explicit content. I don’t have to tell you that I have a lot to say about that.
The documents show that the leadership of Fox Corporation despises their viewers, and everything they stand for. This is a company that abhors not only traditional values, but also basic human decency, it would seem. Am I overstating things? Let's see. In honor of Pride Month, Fox Corporation is now encouraging employees of Fox News to read literature about “glory holes.” You read that right. These are literal holes in restroom walls where men anonymously receive oral sex. Fox's executives want their employees to learn all about them. Now if you went up to a co-worker and started talking in graphic detail about “glory holes,” you’d get hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit. But this is what Fox is telling its employees to read. And that's not the only pornographic topic Fox is pushing on its workers.
In addition to the porn, Fox is also encouraging everyone at the company to donate to organizations that administer sterilizing hormones to young people —– including homeless youth. This is something that, on-air, Fox News occasionally pretends is a bad thing. But internally, Fox Corp. is promoting it, with enthusiasm. Pull back the curtain, and there's not much daylight between the Fox boardroom and the faculty lounge at U.C. Berkeley.
Actually, in some respects, Fox is even worse than Berkeley. Fox has gone high-tech with its DEI agenda. Just in case any employees at the network stepped out of line, the documents we've obtained also show that Fox leadership experimented with an artificial intelligence program that pushes "diversity, equity and inclusion" in the workplace. The AI, called Eskalera, advertises that it can track the progress of organizations towards certain “DEI” goals. That’s its main function.
Yesterday we uploaded the documents outlining all of this on my Twitter feed. You can check them out there if you haven’t already. Again, the materials come from Fox's employee portal. Here's a screenshot of one of the documents:
You can see that Fox Corp encourages its employees to donate to a variety of organizations, and says it will even help match funds to these groups. Let's go through a couple of them.
According to Fox, employees should donate to the Trevor Project, because it's supposedly devoted to helping "LGBTQ young people ages 13-24." How exactly does the Trevor Project help these youths? As the National Review reported recently, they run a chat room that allows 13-year-olds to connect with LGBTQ adults to talk about sexually explicit topics. As the National Review put it, it's a "pandora's box of depravity." Reportedly, there’s no age requirement or verification whatsoever. In many cases, these adults tell children in the chatroom how to obtain medications, and products like chest binders, without alerting their parents.
One chat from an adult, which children could see, began with the adult talking about his urge to masturbate — it goes on from there in graphic detail. In another chat hosted by the Trevor Project, an adult starts talking about "doggystyle," and a user under the age of 18 responds, saying he also wants to try it. None of this is new information, by the way. It's been reported for months. Fox wants their employees to support the Trevor Project anyway.
They're also telling employees to donate to the Ali Forney Center. That's a group that says it takes care of homeless young people. On their Twitter account, the Ali Forney Center boasts about injecting these young people with cross-sex hormones — hormones that will sterilize them. They say they provide "life-saving services like hormone replacement therapy for our young people."
So they're taking at-risk youth, and they appear to admit that they’re flooding their bodies with irreversible chemicals. This is all right out in the open. And Fox supports it.
As if to erase any doubt about that, Fox also encourages donations to the Los Angeles LGBT Center, which openly brags about giving hormones to children. They even uploaded a video of a mother "surprising her trans daughter with first dose of hormones."
YouTube took down that video for terms of service violations, but a screenshot is still on Twitter. By itself, all of this is alarming. Again, Fox is matching employee donations to these far Left groups. How much of your monthly cable bill is funding this barbarism? And why exactly are Fox executives taking the position that their employees should support the chemical sterilization of minors?
We obtained other documents from the Fox employee portal, and after reviewing those documents, the answer is obvious — to me anyway — Fox is run by a bunch of highly dedicated, godless perverts. There's really no other way for me to describe this: They want to impose their sexual fantasies on other people, whether it's children or their own employees.
We know that because Fox's executives recommend several books for their employees to read.
One of the books is called "Fairest." It's by Meredith Talusan. Here's a quote from the book, early on.
"I'm sorry but what's a glory hole?” I asked. The chuckles in the room aimed themselves at me. Gavin leaned forward so I could see him. In the half-second before he spoke, I noticed that he was beautiful. A glory hole is an opening drilled into the side of a restroom stall, he said like we were reading out of a dictionary…”
What follows is a graphic description of how a glory hole works. I can’t even share with you what most of this book says — at least, I won’t. This is a book that Fox executives tell their employees will "expand [their] perspective." The author goes on to elaborate in ways that I will not share, but again, it’s all on Twitter if you’d like to read it for yourself.
In case you're tempted to think that Fox executives recommended this book by mistake, you should know they also tell their employees to read a novel called "Red, White and Royal Blue." It's about a fictional gay relationship between the prince of Wales and the president's son. It starts off with this dialogue, which can best be described as barely literate.
"Listen," Alex tells her, "royal weddings are trash, the princes who have royal weddings are trash, the imperialism that allows princes to exist at all is trash. It's trash turtles all the way down." "Is this your Ted Talk?” June asks. "You do realize America is a genocidal empire too right? “Yes June, but at least we have the decency to not keep a monarchy around,” Alex says, throwing a pistachio at her."
Why does Fox encourage its employees to read this horribly written dialogue about how America is a genocidal empire? It's hard to say. The book doesn't linger on that topic very long. Very quickly it also devolves into gay erotica.
"Henry gets a grip on Alex's hips and pulls him close, so Alex is properly straddling his lap, and he kisses hard now …” And it gets much worse from there, but again not anything I want to share.
By the way, Fox also recommends a book for its employees read to their children. It’s an illustrated book starring a unicorn, which is clearly intended to be a symbol for being gay or trans or nonbinary, et cetera.
Fox also tells employees to watch videos of activists, including a Ted Talk in which a woman explains that undergoing a medically unnecessary double mastectomy was a sign of strength. Watch:
What we're seeing is a top-down effort by Fox executives to ensure that radical gender ideology, and all of its deranged excesses, is dominant at every level in the company. But of course, not every Fox employee wants to go along with this. That might be why, last year, Fox experimented with a solution to whip those employees in line. It’s an AI platform called Eskalera, which tracks employees’ commitment to the cult of DEI. Here's how VentureBeat describes Eskalera.
"Eskalera creates AI-based Inclusion Index to measure a better workplace. … Eskalera today unveiled the Inclusion Index, a new system for organizing companies that encourages and quantifies inclusive culture. Using organizational analytics, the Inclusion Index is aimed at real-time measurement of a company’s diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts."
If you check the Eskalera website, and do some reading on what "services" this AI performs, it's truly creepy stuff. Eskalera advertises that it pulls in data from a variety of sources, including company email and payroll systems. It generated a “peer comfort index” and a “diversity index,” based in part on how often employees “practice micro-affirmations.” Those are apparently the opposite of “microaggressions,” and it appears Fox is all about them.
Eskalera produces data that guides company leaders, telling them which departments aren't inclusive enough. The system is supposed to guide hiring, terminations, raises — everything.
What's the end result of all this? What happens to a news organization when the executives promote radical gender ideology and perverted reading materials? What happens when they bring in a woke AI to monitor everyone?
You get the current state of Fox. It's a company where it seems that many of the employees hate Fox News viewers. Here’s the Instagram page of one influential Fox News employee, to give just one example. He has pronouns in bio, of course — he goes by he/him.
In one post, this employee calls conservatives "hicks" for complaining about drag queens who target kids.
In another post, he defends the anti-Catholic hate group "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence." “And Catholics wonder why we have an order of Nuns to push back on this ridiculous garbage," he wrote. To be clear, this Fox News employee is defending a group that openly mocks Catholics, putting on perverted and blasphemous displays like this in public.
There are a bunch more posts that make it clear this employee has contempt for Fox News viewers. It's not worth going through all of them, but there's a clear connection between these posts and the content that Fox News viewers see. Some of his posts are about his work on the Fox News website. He says he was "so happy" Fox News got to use the image he made after Joe Biden won the presidency, for example.
This is all very bad, to put it mildly. And now the question is, where do we go from here? What happens next? Well, in the few hours after we first posted our investigation, several prominent conservatives, as expected, stayed silent and refused to amplify it. These are people who are terrified of losing the opportunity to appear on Fox for a couple of minutes. Terrified of not being able to go on Fox and promote their next book, or their podcast, or whatever. They’d rather lose their integrity than lose that.
But several major figures did speak out, to their great credit. Utah Senator Mike Lee, for example, wrote, “This kind of deliberate alienation of its own audience might not end well for Fox News. But for the fact that there is no other large cable news company in America that is widely known as conservative (or even right of center), this account could prove devastating.”
Scott Adams wrote simply, “My brain is exploding.”
James Lindsey observed that “ESG/CEI likely is behind both this and Tucker's removal at FOX. Fox is now openly known to be part of the ESG cartel.”
Blaze host Steve Deace said “Just read this thread. Complete and total vile filth from Fox News.”
Other commentators — including people who stand to get disinvited from Fox, permanently, for speaking out — spoke out as well. Jason Whitlock, a frequent guest on Fox, publicly thanked us for the investigation.
Benny Johnson wrote, “This is insane. You need to read this. Fox News is a 5th column. A Trojan horse in the city walls.”
Robby Starbuck, another regular on Fox, tweeted, “I will not appear on a Fox News show until they drop their attacks on Tucker and fire the person responsible for this vile memo.” And Chaya Raichik, the founder of Libs of TikTok, wrote, “I visited Fox HQ a few times. On one occasion I noticed a bunch of screensavers with the words "Fox Pride" in rainbow colors. I remember thinking it was very strange. It all makes sense now. Fox needs to get their act together.”
All of these people and more, at some significant personal cost, responded to our investigation. They were willing to call out a wrong when they saw it, regardless of whether it impacted them professionally. Credit to them for that, and now we need many more to speak out. Every conservative is quick to criticize corporate wokeism — and for good reason — but Fox must not be given a pass. Quite the opposite.
So the question is: what do Fox News executives think about all of this? Do they object to their parent company recommending books about pornographic topics to their employees? Fox News’ audience deserves to know.
After I posted yesterday’s tweet thread on our investigation last night, we reached out to Fox News executives about this. We still haven’t heard back. So far, Fox doesn’t seem to think its viewers deserve any kind of explanation whatsoever. That may be more revealing than what we uncovered, frankly.
Why explain this? As we said on Twitter, maybe it’s because Fox doesn’t really care what its viewers think. Fox, like many big tech platforms and major corporations, is primarily owned by enormous institutional investors, particularly Blackrock and Vanguard. These massive funds consolidate the wealth of millions of Americans, and then use their combined power to pursue a radical agenda most of those Americans oppose. They are Fox’s real customers. And they’re getting exactly what they want.