It’s not often that a political commentator is so outraged by the news that they’re unable to actually report it, but that’s exactly what happened to Joe Scarborough on “Morning Joe” Wednesday while discussing Fox News’ settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. The MSNBC host became so enraged that he didn’t even allow his co-host Mika Brzezinski to finish reading Fox’s official statement.
“We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” Brzezinski read.
That was about all Brzezinski got through before Scarborough cut her off around the sentence about Fox News’ “commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”
“I don’t even wanna hear this… Go gaslight somebody else!” he said, moving on to bring two additional panelists into the conversation.
On Tuesday, a massive two-year legal battle between Fox News and Dominion Voting Services came to an end after the network agreed to settle for $787.5 million. The defamation case accused Fox of making false allegations that Dominion’s machines and software had flipped pro-Trump votes to Biden during the 2020 election. With the settlement, Fox has avoided what was sure to be an intense weeks-long trial. This has also gone down in U.S. history as the largest publicly known defamation settlement involving a media company.
“This is an American tragedy that has been unfolding now for over three years, a lie that has cut at the very heart of American democracy,” Scarborough said, emphasizing that “there is nothing gleeful here,” which Brzezinski echoed with, “No, this is an awful situation.”
Scarborough said that Fox News’ spreading of misinformation about the 2020 election turned “good law-abiding Americans … into criminals” with the January 6 insurrection. “Turn into rioters, turn into convicts who are in prison now suffering for the sins of millionaires and billionaires. That is the reality.”
He continued, saying it’s “the truth that has been slayed every day and every night cynically by people who lied on the air and off the air mocked the very people they were lying to. So no glee here. No glee. Nothing to be happy about. This is an American tragedy for anybody who gives a damn about this democracy and who gives a damn about universal freedoms and human rights and Western values.”
