After Trump's legal dream team held a press conference to give an overview of the allegations about massive election fraud, the media, from CNN down to Fox, went on the attack.  Even Tucker Carlson attacked Sidney Powell for allegedly failing to produce evidence supporting her claims against Dominion.  By Friday, Powell explained why she didn't appear on Tucker's show — and what she said didn't reflect well on everyone's favorite conservative analyst.

As always with all the news nowadays, there's a back story here: ever since Rupert Murdoch retired, and his left-leaning sons took over, Fox News has systematically and incrementally been recasting itself as CNN lite.  It kept the big-name conservatives front and center, but, in the background, it began to tweak here and there.

Quisling Paul Ryan, a NeverTrump, joined the Board.  Donna Brazile, who helped Hillary cheat during the 2016 campaign, got added to the line-up.  Newt Gingrich was censored when he tried to mention how George Soros buys left-wing prosecutors.

And then, on Election Night, Fox announced, all evidence to the contrary, that Biden had won Arizona.  At the same time, it refused to call Florida, Ohio, and Texas for Trump, even though there was no way Biden could win in those states.

Within days, roughly 40% of Fox News's conservative audience had abandoned it.  However, the audience remained loyal to Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, all three of whom seemed to retain their position as conservative stalwarts who were not accepting the Associated Press's claim that Biden had won.  (The entire Democrat infrastructure, from the party itself to Big Tech to the media, seems under the impression that the Founders inserted a clause in the Constitution holding that when the AP calls the election, it's a done deal.)

Then Ingraham decided to offer Trump advice about how to concede.  Was she feeling pressure from the people writing her paycheck?  Only she knows.

But the real coup de grâce, as far as Fox viewers were concerned, came when Tucker Carlson called out Sidney Powell on his show.  Repeatedly patting himself on the back for his journalistic integrity, Tucker claimed that he'd politely asked Powell to produce evidence for his show but that she'd not only rebuffed his efforts, but angrily attacked him:

On Friday, Powell appeared on Maria Bartiromo's show on Fox Business (a separate entity from Fox News) and, in Wokerati speak, "clapped back" at Tucker.  According to Powell, she offered him a compelling affidavit that she hadn't even filed with the court.  She also explained that, because she is not a numbers person, she would provide him with a statistician who could competently expand upon the statistical problems with votes recorded on the Dominion systems:

For a lot of people, this was a "you have to pick sides" moment.  Do you pick the clever, funny, charming, interesting television personality?  Or do you pick the lawyer who forced the government to disgorge information showing that the Obama White House, the FBI, and the DOJ set up General Flynn to destroy him and to take Trump down with him?  Much as I like Tucker, I'm going with Powell on this one.

UPDATE from Thomas Lifson: On his Friday evening broadcast, Tucker Carlson allowed for the possibility that Sidney Powell may have the goods on genuine massive fraud.  Curtis Houck of NewsBusters provides the highlight, and then the complete comments, in two tweets:

#Tucker doubles down on his stance about Sidney Powell's voting machine claims. Citing other Trump lawyers, he says they haven't seen her "evidence either, no testimony from employees inside the software companies, no damning internal documents, no copies of the software itself." pic.twitter.com/35LSF26nwe

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 21, 2020

Below is #Tucker's comments in full from tonight about Sidney Powell and her claims about voting machines pic.twitter.com/DVWEsfEzRl

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) November 21, 2020

Having said this, I'm not giving up on Tucker.  I find his show delightful, and he's still more intellectually honest than 99.99% of anyone in the media.  I boycotted his show on Friday just to make a stand in my own mind, but I'll be back on Monday, giving him another chance.  However, there are only so many chances anyone, even Tucker Carlson, is going to get.

Image: Sidney Powell. Twitter screen grab.