This report appears as one of many scooplets featured in this week’s edition of Confidential, the newsletter pulling the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, advice and complaints here.
Fox News executives are “utterly freaked out” by 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 behind the embarrassing breach.
A few weeks ago, Carlson interviewed West, who now goes by the mononym Ye, and cast him as a brave truth-teller shunned by liberal elites for his increasingly far-right beliefs and his stunts like wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt at Paris Fashion La Semaine.
Despite Fox News’ celebration of West’s supposed intellectual clout, unaired clips leaked to Vice’s Motherboard showed the rapper and fashion mogul openly peddling anti-Semitic tropes and bizarre claims about using ‘fake children’ to manipulate their children. These more embarrassing and newsworthy remarks never made it into the final broadcast of Carlson’s conversation with the rapper. (The interview was also before You threatened online to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” before being banned from multiple platforms.)
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Fox may be closing in on the leaker, but it’s now been almost a week since Vice released the videos. It’s a notable detail because in 2012, the last time the network faced a major video breach, it found and escorted the leaker – Joe Muto, then Bill O’Reilly’s associate producer – out of the building in less than 24 hours.
“This new leaker learned from my mistakes,” Muto told Confider. “The main reason I got caught was that I wasn’t covering my digital track particularly well. They obviously do a better job than me if they haven’t been found yet.
Following Muto’s leaks to Gawker, the network instituted stricter security protocols for accessing the video, making it harder to access sensitive takes like Ye’s. “It looks like this leaker found a way around it,” Muto remarked.
If you’re Kanye’s video leaker, or anyone else at Fox with some juicy information, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected]
A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment.
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