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There’s a very simple reason why Fox News personalities and their guests relentlessly spread President Trump’s election lies throughout 2020 and have ever since. That’s the rightwing television network’s financially successful business model.
In the colorful phrase of billionaire Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch’s arrogant deposition in response to a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems: “It is not red or blue—it is green.”
Unfortunately for Murdoch and Fox News according to legal experts, for nearly 60 years libel and defamation laws haven’t supported media companies that knowingly spread lies to increase their corporate profits.
Under New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision setting the rules for collecting financial damages Dominion must show Fox spread falsehoods about its voting machines with “actual malice,” meaning it was done “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
“Mind-blowingly Nuts”
To prove that, Dominion submitted internal emails from Fox hosts and executives describing the claims Trump’s lawyers made on their shows about Dominion voting machines flipping millions of votes from Trump to Biden as “ludicrous” and “mind-blowingly nuts.”
“Mind-blowingly nuts” is the perfect description of the “Election Fraud Info” memo Trump lawyer Sidney Powell forwarded to Fox host Maria Bartiromo shortly after Trump lost the 2020 election. That memo led to at least a dozen shows on Fox featuring Powell promoting the memo’s absurd election lies to Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson.
The author of that election fraud memo has never been publicly identified, but she included bizarre details about how she received the information. She said the wind talked to her while she was experiencing something “like time-travel in a semi-conscious state.”
In a separate email that Powell shared with Bartiromo and Dobbs, the author added several more disturbing personal details about herself: “Who am I? And how do I know all of this? … I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl. I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”
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Unconcerned with Lies
The sheer lunacy of those two paragraphs makes a mockery of the Fox News claim to be a professional news network responsibly broadcasting factual news. It made no attempt to determine the credibility of its news source who clearly had none.
Additional internal communications uncovered by Dominion showed top Fox News executives were totally unconcerned about all the election lies by Powell and Rudy Giuliani broadcast on Fox night after night. They were far more upset that Fox News broadcast the truth on Election Night when it became the first network to correctly call Biden’s victory over Trump in traditionally Republican Arizona.
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott complained to the staff: “The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and have damaged their trust and belief in us … We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” Sean Hannity emailed Laura Ingraham and Carlson that calling Arizona for Biden “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”
Imagine the shock. After lying to their viewers for a quarter of a century, Fox News had suddenly shattered its credibility with its most loyal followers by telling them the truth about an election.
To begin repairing the damage, Carlson asked Hannity to join him in urging that reporter Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she tweeted that “top election infrastructure officials” confirmed “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Lethal Disinformation
Carlson texted Hannity: “Please get her fired … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Legitimate news operations don’t get rid of journalists for accurately reporting the news because viewers don’t want to hear it or it hurts the stock price. Two months after the election, Fox News vice president and managing editor Bill Sammon and political editor Chris Stirewalt who made the decision to call Biden’s victory in Arizona lost their jobs.
Fox News has always been an oxymoron like jumbo shrimp and military intelligence. The network finally dropped its ludicrous advertising slogan “fair and balanced” in 2017. No could utter the phrase on the air with a straight face with Fox promoting the constant stream of lies from Trump and his political ally Vladimir Putin.
We all witnessed on January 6, 2021, how lethal disinformation can be when an armed mob of people prone to violence believe their TV network is giving them an accurate picture of the world around them.
Sticks and stones can break our bones and constant lies about national elections will continue to hurt all of us until both political parties come together to support American democracy.
