welcome to morning joe at 6:00 a.m. in the morning willie geist not with us today, trying to relive some of the more exciting mornings of the 70s yes, that s him on chopper 5 going across it is not. see the little chopper 4, i m sorry. get it right. in the 70s, we didn t really numbers didn t count channels didn t counfreelancersi and i were. you were just there. beautiful look at new york city over the morning. it s friday. yes thursday was a very rough day for elon musk. oh, i don t know about that $3 billion rocket exploded. i m going to question that framing. they get a lot of great data out of that. it exploded. but it was a planned explosion. no. it was they got what they wanted they got massive data. it was a step forward. it was an unscheduled disas disassembly, as they call it. i have had many of those. exploded. i ve had many of those. then he planned to make people pay for twitter verification his plan to do that bl
the lawyer is saying, we re taking it to the end. something perhaps more troubling for fox news, if you have a company like smartmatic that is saying, we re not going to just get a billion or two dollars and get out of this business, we re in this business to stay we have to stay in this business, so we need an apology. just for you all at home to know how badly these people s business has been challenged, and some destroyed, i have friends who are election officials, who run elections, who say they get yelled at and accused of having smartmatic machines they say, they re only in los angeles right now. or dominion, they have dominion machines they re like, no, they do four counties over but we don t. they re getting screamed at. every election official has been taken to task because they were
defaming a company with deep pockets when promulgating the next big lie bragg and dominion may win their battles, but the electorate may lose the war gene robinson well, that s a frightening pro prospect, andrew so how do we break this cycle? i mean, i know a lot of people in media who were appalled at what fox did in defaming dominion and who were rooting for fox to lose. at the same time, who worried that an adverse ruling to fox, if they d gone to trial, might have an impact on the governing supreme court decision, sullivan v new york times, that gives wide latitude to reputable news organizations. that is kind of potentially a
you don t understand, and i don t understand, and i don t think we ve gotten answers to why fox, if it was going to settle, didn t pony up the money before these damaging emails and texts that showed what people were thinking. all i can think is, sometimes, denial is a big factor, and people are thinking, it won t be so bad we have legal arguments. maybe the judge will rule in ways that are favorable. that may be part of it, and people really were thinking they were going to go to trial and they could drag this out maybe take it to the supreme court. i think maybe one of the key things is when the district judge said at trial, you, dominion, can call rupert murdoch to the stand, as well as all of the key hosts. i think that may have been a bridge too far rupert murdoch said, i am not going to be disgraced like that
in this conspiracy with dominion there is no way any elected official in america can have dominion voting machines or smartmatic voting machines unless this is adequately cleaned up when he says, we have to take it all the way to trial. we have to get an apology, that makes complete sense if they want to stay in this business for the long run that s bad news, of course, for fox news let s bring in and sorry, go ahead. and if you see this sort of tension between reporters asking lawyers questions like, why didn t you ask for ang apology, you know, look, there is frustration within the journalistic community about the way fox handled itself, but the bigger question is the service to the viewers i ll, you know, put all competition aside. fox is a powerhouse. millions of people watch fox every day. millions of people potentially