Friday, November 20, 2020

More On The Next Enrons

It looks like Fox's prime time hosts are under pressure. Overnight, it seems a kerfuffle has arisen over whether, by Tucker Carlson's account, Sidney Powell "got angry and refused to provide evidence for voting software flipping votes" when he requested it.

Maria Bartiromo, also of Fox, interviewed Powell on the phone this morning, and Powell replied

I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics of the statistical evidence far better than I can. . . But he was very insulting, demanding and rude and I told him not to contact me again in those terms.
It looks like Maria Bartiromo is getting off the reservation, and she and Fox will almost certainly come to a parting of the ways. Bartiromo has a serious journalistic career behind her, and I assume she has fallbacks if this happens. Tucker, on the other hand, is a pretty boy, not much different in his way from Megyn Kelly, and if he leaves Fox, the multimillion-dollar money spigot will be turned off, likely without anything like the settlement Megyn got. UPDATE: Don Surber comments, "If Fox dumped O'Reilly who built that time slot, Fox will not hesitate to dump Carlson."

And at this point, I'm not sure how many Megyn style settlements they can pay. (Bartiromo, of course, won't get anything like that anyhow and will just have to go on working for a living.) Fox is making it plain that it wants to go from the market leader to a third-place CNN wannabe. Leaving the election entirely aside, I've got to question what's on their minds just as a business decision.

My guess is that the word has gone out to the prime time hosts -- Hannity may not be in the same boat here -- that there are going to be cuts, and they'd better be on their best behavior. Based on my last post, Laura Ingraham is clearly nervous.

But Fox's audience is already leaving for Newsmax and OAN, while CNN's won't go over to Fox.

But it also looks like Dominion Voting has writen off its chances as a continuing enterprise. It pulled out of testifying before a Pennsylvania House hearing this morning, which will do nothing but continue to destroy its business reputation in any conventional sense. It presumably has lost any chance of ever selling another Dominion machine, at least under that brand.