A reporter at the Fox news affiliate in Houston says her former bosses required her to follow a “narrative” and interjected their opinions into news stories.
Fox 26 fired the reporter, Ivory Hecker, after she attacked the station on a live broadcast, during which she said she would release tapes of her superiors to Project Veritas.
Her superiors, the tapes show, ordered her to stop reporting and posting to social media about the success of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the China Virus. One said black viewers were uninterested in hearing reports about Bitcoin.
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The Tape
The 32-year-old Hecker was a reporter for the dinnertime broadcasts at the affiliate. On Monday, Hecker was outside for a story on the Lone Star State’s relentless heat wave when she teased the story and recording she gave to PV.
For Fox26, the heat wave turned into a Texas twister.
“I want to let you the viewers know that Fox Corp has been muzzling me to keep certain information from you, the viewers, and from what I’m gathering I am not the only reporter being subjected to this,” she said:
I am going to be releasing some recordings about what goes on behind the scenes at Fox because it applies to you, the viewers.
Then came the sit down with PV’s James O’Keefe.
“What’s happening within Fox Corp is an operation of prioritizing corporate interests above the viewer’s interest and, therefore, operating in a deceptive way,” Hecker said.
Example: The station’s news director Susan Schiller, told Hecker to “cease and desist” reporting about hydroxychloroquine after she interviewed a local doctor who said he had used it with “great success” to treat the China Virus.
Hecker pursued the story, she said, after receiving tips from viewers — and orders from her superiors. “I just wasn’t supposed to ask that question,” Hecker said.
After the report, Schiller told Hecker she “failed as reporter” because she didn’t review a drug study in the New England Journal of Medicine. The comment is somewhat revealing. The leftist mainstream media invested great effort last year in trying to convince readers and viewers that the anti-malarial drug was ineffective.
“There’s a narrative,” she told O’Keefe:
Yes, it is unspoken. But if you accidentally step outside the narrative, if you don’t sense what that narrative is and go with it, there will be grave consequences for you.
That “carefully crafted narrative in some stories” deceives viewers, she said.
Lee Meier, the station’s assistant news director, told Hecker that stories aren’t just about the viewers. “It’s about what our CEO reads. It’s about what our GM reads.”
Hecker also recorded another of Meier’s inflammatory remarks: “A poor African-American audience,” she said, wouldn’t be interested in news about Bitcoin.
CDC Ads
But orders not to report on what a doctor called a successful treatment for the China Virus aren’t the only problems at the affiliate.
PV itself recorded the station’s advertising sales coordinator on tape. Jennifer Bourgeois confessed that the federal Centers for Disease Control can control how the station covers health issues.
“Yeah, they are spending money,” she told an undercover PV reporter. “They are spending money because they can. Yeah, they can. They [CDC] are in the pocket. You know? They’re there.”
Hecker explained what China Virus vaccines mean for the network:
Vaccines are a potential money maker for Fox. Fox gets paid for that. As a viewer you need to look at who is advertising on this TV station, and you’ve got to realize surely that the TV station doesn’t want to hurt its advertisers.”
Hecker said she turned on her employer because “viewers are being deceived by a carefully crafted narrative in some stories.” Though some of the station’s offerings are “fantastic journalism,” other stories “have an incredible slant. If you accidentally step outside [the narrative], they try to internally destroy you — as I’ve witnessed firsthand.”
H/T: Daily Beast
