This reporting appears as one of several scooplets featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
Fox News executives are “full-on freaked out” about the leak of never-aired clips of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kanye West, Confider has learned, and the network is closing in on the “mole” who was the source of the embarrassing breach.
A few weeks ago Carlson interviewed West, who now goes by the mononym Ye, and touted him as a brave truth-teller dismissed by liberal elites for his increasingly far-right beliefs and stunts like wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt to Paris Fashion Week.
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Despite the Fox News celebration of West’s supposed intellectual heft, unaired snippets leaked to Vice’s Motherboard showed the rapper and fashion mogul peddling openly antisemitic tropes and bizarre claims about “fake children” being used to manipulate his kids. These more embarrassing, newsworthy remarks never made into the final broadcast of Carlson’s chat with the rapper. (The interview was also before Ye 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 almost a week since Vice published the videos. This is a notable detail because in 2012, the last time the network dealt with a major video breach, it found and escorted the leaker—Bill O’Reilly’s then-associate producer Joe Muto—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 is that I wasn’t covering my digital trail particularly well. They’re obviously doing a better job than I did if they haven’t been found yet.”
Following Muto’s leaks to Gawker, the network instituted stricter security protocols for accessing video, making it more difficult to access sensitive outtakes like the Ye ones. “It seems this leaker has found a way around that,” Muto remarked.
If you’re the Kanye video leaker, or anyone else at Fox with some juicy info, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at confider@thedailybeast.com.
A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment.
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