The news of this week’s settlement in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News was greeted with general enthusiasm across the political spectrum – except for viewers of Fox “News,” which barely reported on the decision and downplayed its significance. Because of course they did.
For those of you in the back – the nightly programming on Fox is organized under its entertainment division, not its news division. The discovery process for the Dominion lawsuit proved beyond any doubt that the Fox commentators in the evening – Carlson, Bartiromo, Pirro, Hannity, and the like – lied constantly and knowingly about the 2020 election. While they were proclaiming on the air that the election was stolen, behind the scenes they were acknowledging that they knew Biden had won and Trump had lost, but they reported on the made-up “steal” in order to avoid losing viewers to further right news outlets like OAN and Newsmax. Behind the scenes, they made fun of TFG and discussed how much they despised him while on-screen they played kissy-face with him. Once the jury in the Dominion case was seated and it was time for opening arguments, Fox caved and paid Dominion almost $800 million.
For those who think that this settlement somehow lets Fox off the hook, the chart at the beginning of this essay tells us what’s coming. Dominion (the maker of the voting machines Fox and others regularly impugned) still has outstanding lawsuits against a bunch of news outlets and individuals. These lawsuits have two components – the lies that Fox told and the damage inflicted by these lies. What Fox settled for accepts that they knowingly lied – which basically settles the first issue for the other lawsuits. What the settlement didn’t get to was the issue of the extent of the damages.
Smartmatic (the developer of the software used by Dominion machines) is also suing Fox (for more than $2 billion, and the other outlets and individuals as well. Fox’s decision to settle the Dominion case paves the way for settlement in the other cases. By admitting that they lied in the Dominion lawsuit Fox has basically given up that argument for any other cases. Fox knows it but isn’t telling its viewers. Smartmatic stated yesterday that the amount of money awarded to Dominion is the least they will accept in a settlement of their case.
An irresponsible “press” organization like Fox endangers democracy. There can be no doubt about it. With the 1987 abolition of the FCC “Fairness Doctrine,” media organizations were freed to tell whatever story they damned pleased in their programming. In the 1990s this gave us Rush Limbaugh and the early Fox programming; by the 2010s, it gave us the preposterous programming millions of Americans watch on Fox. Overall, Fox is home to nine of the 10 most-watched cable “news” shows of 2022. A number of studies over the years have shown that viewers of Fox actually know less about what’s actually going on in the news than people who don’t watch TV news at all. That’s saying something.
Fox created and supported the “Stop the Steal” momentum that resulted in the January 6 insurrection on the Capitol Building. The evidence produced prior to the expected trial proved beyond any doubt that the Fox commentators and executives knew this was fraudulent even while they were broadcasting it.
The damage done by Fox isn’t limited to the election denialism that continues to be promulgated within the Republican Party. Here are some other ways Fox has contributed to what people lament as the growing divisions in America:
The anti-vaccine narrative that led to hundreds of thousands of excess COVID deaths (much higher mortality in red states where more people watch Fox). The dopes killed their own voters.
Birtherism (the lie that President Obama was a Muslim who wasn’t born in the United States)
“Pizzagate” – a series of arguments that led one deranged individual to shoot up a pizza parlor in northwest DC because he believed that the Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement.
The continuing “Seth Rich” story that claimed (with no evidence) that the murder of a Clinton campaign staffer was actually committed by the Clintons. In response to a lawsuit by Set Rich’s family, Fox quietly reached a seven-figure settlement in October 2020. They didn’t tell their audience about this either.
The ongoing (and inexplicable) support for Putin’s Russia in the war in Ukraine and more widely as well.
The racism embodied in Fox’s anti-immigrant and “replacement theory” ideologies has taken hold across America. Black children are shot when they knock on the wrong door. Law enforcement across the country has been emboldened by the support they get from Fox and other such organizations as they openly engage in discussions of biased law enforcement and mistreatment of black and Hispanic suspects. The US military has been infected by this mentality; Fox is the station played in open spaces on military bases across the country. It’s not accidental that veterans play an important role in right-wing groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters.
“Woke” has become a standard epithet that stands for – well, anything that the people who use it don’t like. There are serious discussions to be had about diversity, equity and inclusion, but the bellows of “woke” and “Don’t Say Gay!” overwhelm the public square.
Books are banned and history is rewritten under the guise of “protecting the children.” Yet programs that really protect children – healthcare and access to quality education – are shouted down as “socialism.” It’s easier to propose and support culture-war policies that don’t actually solve any problems or cost any money.
Attacks on the rights of anyone who doesn’t fit into the MAGA voter base — anyone who isn’t white and straight and “born here” — proliferate as Fox catastrophizes any perceived threat to that base. All you have to do is look at the draconian restrictions on fundamental health care for women or for trans people to understand how this works.
Name-calling has supplanted political argument. People like Representative Marjorie Taylor Green feel free to call a government official a “liar” when he testified before a Congressional Committee this week. When she is rightfully silenced by the Republican chairman of the committee, she goes to Twitter and defends herself, to the resounding “likes” and “retweets” by the MAGA base. The leader of the MAGA movement routinely applies disparaging nicknames to his political opponents; Fox joins in, encouraging the millions of Fox viewers to treat political arguments with the same viciousness and lack of creativity. The playground bullies dominate Fox airways. Jeering, “gotcha,” and “oh yeah, sez who?” take the place of analysis and complexity.
With the support of the Fox disinformation stream, pockets of nutjobs around the country threaten violence when things don’t go their way. They flex and cosplay, exploiting their self-perceived victimhood. They think they are the colonial militias in 1776 when in fact they are little boys playing army. They will never be organized enough to conduct anything like the “Civil War” they threaten, but they will be chaos agents whenever they decide it will get the attention they can’t get through any positive achievements. Kind of makes me wish their mommies had loved them.
More deeply and fundamentally, Fox has systematically fed an anti-government mentality begun by Ronald Reagan and continued by the GOP since then. Public confidence in all institutions of government has declined precipitously since the 1980s as the “Deep State” narrative took hold and grew. Modern GOP proposals to abolish the career Civil Service and the IRS, defund the FBI, or severely limit the appeal of career federal government jobs are a response to this narrative. Expertise and experience are now called “elitist,” and people “do their own research” on Google and use their superficial knowledge to challenge people who actually understand complex issues.
And a quick response to the “both sides do it” argument. Mainstream media have faced criticisms about its liberal bias for a very long time. In the 1960s, Nixon complained about it and his VP, Spiro Agnew, famously labeled journalists as the “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Nixon resigned the presidency because he knew that he was going to be impeached and removed from office – yet a core group of his supporters claimed that he hadn’t done anything different from what other presidents had done, and that he was taken down by a liberal media aligned against him. This is the mentality that led the Reagan administration to abolish the Fairness Doctrine and that allowed Fox to emerge in the first place.
CNN and MSNBC are not the “Fox News of the left.” They are not “fake news.” The New York Times and Washington Post are not “failing,” as TFG frequently comments. They employ routine measures of reportorial integrity – fact-checking, editorial supervision of content and sources, and responsible research. You may not agree with them, but your responsibility is then to look at the same information they have and assess where their preconceived notions or dismissal of key facts led them astray. Their commentators certainly have a liberal bias on the stories they cover and on the “spin” they employ, but they do not lie. They don’t say one thing on the air and then say other things in private texts or emails. If they make a statement that is later proven false, they tell their viewers about it. They respect their viewers and feel a deep obligation to inform them.
Fox has promulgated the narrative that “liberal elites” don’t care about the little guy. They tell the MAGA base that Democrats hate them. But no one hates the MAGA base, or has less respect for them, than TFG and the Fox TV personalities who continue to lie to them because they don’t think they can handle the truth.
You don’t have to take my word for this. Here’s a link to a recent article in National Review – probably the pre-eminent right-of-center news magazine in the country. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-and-us/ Read it and understand that conservatives like the author of this article are as appalled by TFG and by Fox as are those of us on the left. Unfortunately, the MAGA base is never going to read a news magazine. They’re parked in front of their TVs, watching Fox, instead of engaging in any critical thinking.
Thanks for your well written analysis. Have you considered sending it to the NYT Opinion page? 😎
What Ann said!