we are grateful. the beat with ari melber starts right now. i m ari melber. the top story rocking conservative politics and fox news tonight is a huge new leak about this moment in 2020 when fox news accurately reported biden won arizona, which stoked a maga backlash which upended the network, fed the series of journalists that fox now is facing potential accountability for, potentially over a billion dollars in lawsuit fines. it s also now led to the absolute blockbuster leak to the new york times. if you re think, or i heard about other leaks, this one is different and new and narrates a secret meeting between fox execs and hosts about that arizona call. an internal freakout where viewers were mad and bailing on fox because they reported in that instance, one, undeniable fact about the election. and the executives and anchors, great bare and mar that mccollum, on this call they discuss they were losing viewers because they correctly called arizona for biden. and the
mean, rupert murdoch is i think over 90, he s quite old. 91. 91. just the back and forth, and one thing that comes out is this is what happens when you re a corrupt news organization. one of the benefits of being a real news organization is that you keep basically on track by needing to cover the news, right? you re not in fights with the presidential candidate who you run or runs you or something like that, or trying to get all this kind of stuff. as you said earlier, there are lots of problems with, you know, the big corporate news organizations. sure. but this is something that generally keeps them on track is that you always know that you are supposed to report at least what you think is the truth at the moment, right? and that can change. you can be wrong.
agreed it was important to be right buck quote, i think we re living in a new world in a sense, where half the voting population doesn t believe in big corps weighs, big media. there s a lack of trust. this is such b.s. i want to you make sure you understand exactly what it is, because it s an echo you might hear from someone as a dinner party or barbecue. those people on your screen you re seeing now lie to you. they undermine trust. then refer to a, la of trust, which is their justification for what they re doing, and to tell you the obvious tonight, because sometimes i do that, it is illogical to say you can t report the truth if half the pop las vegas disagrees wts truth. we re back to 101 here. the whole role of a legitimate news organization is to report facts regardless of people s disagreement and especially when there s a coordinated attack on the facts. in this case, an attack from the outgoing government trying to overthrow the election where
fact about the election. and the executives and anchors, great bare and mar that mccollum, on this call they discuss they were losing viewers because they correctly called arizona for biden. and then they discuss whether the company should reverse that call, as a kind of lie to appease angry trump viewer or change their entire election coverage going forward, basically saying, telling the truth in this instance has reverberated so poorly, maybe we should stop telling the truth. this is absolutely damning and incriminating stuff. keep in mind before we go further, and i m going to show you the receipts news outlet do not autocracy off reporting to the highest audience. they don t state knowing falsehoods only for ratings. of all the valid critique for media, and there are many, this type of thing, just canceling an election call or reversing it, this doesn t even come up. no legitimate news organization
has faced evidence of anything like this in its election coverage in the modern era. in order, if you re listening to this story and going, well, i have a lot of friends who criticize the press, sure, those critiques are valid. the a critiques about the press, bias, selective coverage, corporate interference, none of that goes anywhere close to this a fox ceo now caught on tape saying, if we hadn t called arizona accurately, our ratings would have been higher. and gives away the game by saying it was bad that fox s election effort told the truth about arizona, saying, again, from this newly leaked call it was not to do actual election coverage it was to, quote, protect the brand. when fox s own election expert pushes back we re seeing behind the curtain of high level stuff you never normally see. the expert pushes back, says they had the call right, which is true. then the new york times reports that the fox ceo scott