Aug. 16, 2023: Best of BPR Interview with Preston Padden and Bill Kristol

On August 16, 2023, Boston Public Radio interviewed Preston Padden, former Fox executive and Bill Kristol, conservative commentator and former Fox-News analyst about the origin of, and the rationale for, the effort to deny Fox local TV licenses.

When asked why he brought the petition, Padden described how the views Rupert Murdoch was exchanging wiht him in emails was totally at odds with what he was seeing on Fox News regarding both the election and Covid and that Rupert knew that Trump lost the 2020 election. Padden said that he believed the “election fraud nonsense in [his] opinion led directly to the riot in the Capitol on January 6th, so I decided that I needed to do something and got together with the Media and Democracy Project.”

Bill Kristol said that “I don’t know what the right remedy is but I know what the right remedy is not” which is to pretend the lies did not occur. He continued Fox “just agreed that they had knowingly lied”. The FCC “has a legal obligation” to hold a hearing and “see what they can do to make sure this cancer doesn’t spread further through the broadcast stations.”

Padded added that “never before in the history of the FCC have they been confronted with a written judicial decision by a court holding that it was crystal clear that the renewal applicant in front of them presented false news and if the character qualification means anything it’s got to mean not presenting false news.”

The podcast can be found here (first 24 minutes of the segment).