Former Fox News journalists ripped into the network for failing to stand up to former President Donald Trump and participating in "the destruction of democracy," in Part II of an Australian TV documentary that aired last week.
"Fox and the Big Lie," which aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corp.'s "Four Corners" program, details the relationship between Fox News and Trump and how it led to the network becoming a propaganda machine for the former president and his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — culminating in the Capitol insurrection.
"Fox News is more responsible than most media outlets because Fox had the opportunity to use its position to tell the truth for the good of the country, and failed to use the power and resources that it had to stand up to Donald Trump," former Fox political editor Chris Stirewalt told Four Corners. "If we don't find in the United States a healthier way to run the news business, we're going to fall apart. This is killing us. We saw the consequences on Jan. 6. We are rapidly, radically eroding public confidence in institutions for the most rotten of reasons, which is profit and power."
As previously reported, Part II of the blistering Four Corners documentary includes a segment in which correspondent Sarah Ferguson brutally grills Trump "Kraken" lawyer Sidney Powell.
"Fox News certainly has participated in the destruction of democracy by promoting the types of things that Donald Trump did. That's a pox on Fox," former Fox News political correspondent Carl Cameron told Four Corners.
Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a longtime former Fox News military analyst, accused the network and its founder, Rupert Murdoch, of "doing direct harm to my country."
"I'm not in favor of censorship of ideas; I'm in favor of combatting lies," Peters said.
"Fox has carved out a market among the people from whom I emerged, among the people with whom my coal-mining ancestors worked, and (Trump has) turned them into an angry lumpenproletariat" Peters said. "These are inherently decent people, the kind of people that join the military, that do the really crumby jobs to make our country go. The Fox I joined did represent those people, did speak to those people. He (Trump) was reflecting their views, but over the years, he became a shaper of their views, deforming their views, corrupting their views. In pursuit of what? More power and money."
"The green room over the last several years, into the Trump administration, when I left, the guests got more and more bizarre, more distasteful," Peters added. "The green room started being like the bar scene in the first Star Wars film. These people are freaks. And then you realized you're one of the freaks."
Asked what he meant by "freaks," Peters responded: "People with no qualifications, who could not even speak cogently, who could only speak the lies they'd memorized, praising Trump as though he were a heathen God that had to be appeased with slavish rhetoric."
Watch below.
Fox and the Big Lie: Trump returns to campaign trail amid 'stolen election' lawsuits | Four Cornerswww.youtube.com
