Internal documents show that conservative US cable network promoted LGBTQ causes to its staff, Matt Walsh has said
FOX News main office in New York City. © Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty Images
The parent company of Fox News has been quietly imposing “woke” values on its employees while pretending to cater to Republican Party voters, podcast host and pundit Matt Walsh has claimed. Internal documents obtained by the Daily Wire, a conservative news and commentary website, show Fox used an AI service to monitor the employees’ compliance, Walsh also said.
“Fox Corp is celebrating Pride by encouraging employees to read about ‘glory holes’, supporting a group that gives sterilizing hormones to homeless youth, [and] deployed woke AI to monitor everyone,” Walsh tweeted on Thursday evening.
In the thread that followed, he posted what he said were screenshots from the Fox Corp internal employee portal. In one instance, the company urged employees to donate to groups such as the Trevor Project and the Ali Forney Center – even though the former has been accused of running sexually explicit chatrooms for minors and the latter “appears to admit” injecting the homeless youth with hormones, Walsh noted.
The reported recommended reading list for employees includes a book that contains graphic depictions of various homosexual acts, a gay romance between the son of a fictional US president and a British prince, which also calls the US a “genocidal empire,” as well as a LGBTQ-themed children’s book.
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Some employees seem to be fully on board, Walsh argued, bringing up the Instagram profile of one LGBT-activist and Democrat – whose name was redacted – who celebrated the election of President Joe Biden and praised the Catholic-mocking drag activist group Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
To monitor employees who might not be so enthusiastic, Fox reportedly used an AI-powered platform called Eskalera, which would help them “deepen” their understanding of identity politics by generating a “peer comfort index” and a “diversity index,” based on how often employees practiced “micro-affirmations,” among other things.
According to Walsh, executives at Fox do not care about their conservative audience, seeking instead to please institutional investors such as BlackRock and the Vanguard Group. “They are Fox’s real customers. And they’re getting exactly what they want,” he tweeted.
Fox News used to be the undisputed king of American cable news ratings, catering primarily to conservatives and Republicans. In late April, however, the network’s ratings collapsed when Fox abruptly fired its highest-rated host Tucker Carlson. Not only did the move wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in market value, Fox’s viewership slipped far below the rivals MSNBC and CNN.
Carlson made a comeback on Twitter earlier this month, with a ten-minute video seen more than 117 million times. Fox News has since threatened him with legal action, claiming that doing any sort of video commentary violates his contract, which runs through 2025.
