On Monday, The Daily Beast reported that Fox News was thrown into turmoil by the leak of unaired footage of their interview of Trump-loving rapper Kanye West — and they are desperate to find the leaker.
“Fox News executives are ‘full-on freaked out’ about the leak of never-aired clips of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kayne West, Confider has learned, and the network is closing in on the ‘mole’ who was the source of the embarrassing breach,” reported Lachlan Cartwright and Andrew Kirell. “A few weeks ago Carlson interviewed West, who now goes by the mononym Ye, and touted him as a brave truth-teller dismissed by liberal elites for his increasingly far-right beliefs and stunts like wearing a ‘White Lives Matter’ shirt to Paris Fashion Week.”
“Fox may be closing in on the leaker, but it’s now almost a week since Vice published the videos. This is a notable detail because in 2012, the last time the network dealt with a major video breach, it found and escorted the leaker — Bill O’Reilly’s then-associate producer Joe Muto — out of the building in less than 24 hours,” the report noted. “‘This new leaker learned from my mistakes,’ Muto told Confider. ‘The main reason I got caught is that I wasn’t covering my digital trail particularly well. They’re obviously doing a better job than I did if they haven’t been found yet.'”
As The Washington Post noted last week, Carlson broadcast a highly excerpted version of this interview, telling his audience, “Is West crazy? You can judge for yourself as you watch what we’re about to show you.”
“Even in what Carlson showed, there were questionable comments,” noted the Post‘s Philip Bump. “What was excluded, according to the footage from Vice, was more disconcerting. Ye claimed that he’d rather his kids learn about Hanukkah than Kwanzaa since ‘at least it would come with some financial engineering.’ His assertion that ‘professional actors’ had been ‘placed into my house to sexualize my kids.’ He said he trusted Latinos more than ‘certain other businessmen’ — a vague descriptor he used to ‘be safe.’ Ye also told Carlson that he had ‘visions that God gives me, just over and over, on community building and how to build these free energy, kinetic, fully kinetic energy communities.'”
This was leaked shortly after West took to Twitter to proclaim he was going “death con 3” on Jewish people, which led to his ban from the platform.
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West has subsequently announced a move to buy the struggling right-wing Twitter alternative Parler, which would ironically make him a direct competitor to Trump, who already commands the other right-wing Twitter alternative Truth Social.
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