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Sean Hannity
Sean Hannity
Fox News’s loss of three-quarters of a billion dollars for broadcasting outrageous lies about voting machines fraudulently flipping millions of votes from Donald Trump to President Biden will do absolutely nothing to stop Fox from constantly lying to anyone gullible enough to believe them.
We know that because the Fox announcement of its $787.5 million dollar settlement with Dominion Voting Systems included another preposterous lie: “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”
For more than 26 years, Fox News has never been committed to any journalistic standards at all. Fox is not in the business of journalism. The business model of Fox News is telling rightwing political lies to an audience that’s eager to believe them.
Fox has never been embarrassed about lying to its politically biased viewers who were easy marks. For more than two decades, it shamelessly used the slogan “Fair and Balanced” to describe its news coverage that was just the opposite. It's no mere coincidence Fox abandoned that slogan as laughably absurd in 2017 when Trump’s presidency began. That’s when Fox and the Republican party started down the dangerous path that’s threatened the future of American democracy ever since.
Sleazy Politics
The phrase “Stop the Steal” was originally coined by Trump’s sleazy political advisor Roger Stone in 2016 to be used to discredit Hillary Clinton’s widely expected election victory predicted in the polls. It wasn’t only pollsters and most Americans who were surprised when Trump won. So was Trump.
Trump’s presidential candidacy had always been a corrupt fund-raising scam just like Trump University. Trump’s presidency was an unexpected gift enabling him to run continuous scams ever since raising millions.
Fox News has been Trump’s constant MAGAphone all the way. No Trump ally, foreign or domestic, was too vile for Fox to promote. That included Vladimir Putin’s massive Russian internet troll campaign boosting Trump’s candidacy to embarrass American democracy and the armed militias who violently attacked the US Capitol to overthrow Biden’s presidency.
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Fox’s recklessness in knowingly publicizing the lies about voting machines by a self-described Trump “wackadoodle” who “time-traveled in a semi-conscious state” forced it to pay the largest defamation settlement in US history. That $787.5 million settlement will wipe out more than half the company’s profits from last year.
“Mind-Blowingly Nuts”
The public benefit for all the rest of us has already been accomplished. Before the trial began, Dominion publicly released evidence from the depositions of Fox chairman Rupert Murdoch and on-air personalities showing they knew exactly how “mind-blowingly nuts” all the lies they were broadcasting really were.
Not only that, but Fox news executives and rightwing personalities were angry when Fox told its viewers the truth by calling President Biden’s victory in previously Republican Arizona on election night before any other network.
“The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us,” Fox CEO Suzanne Scott chastised the staff in a memo. The two editors making the decision were pushed out two months later. Sean Hannity texted Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham that accurately calling the election “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”
Fox compromised its brand as a TV network by reporting the truth. They’re all determined not to let it ever happen again. All Fox learned from losing nearly a billion dollars was it was sloppy to lie about a wealthy private company that could afford to sue for damages. Fox will go back to lying about Democratic politicians and vulnerable Americans who can’t do anything about it.
Believe it or not, we wouldn’t want to live in a country that passed laws preventing television networks from running whatever political opinions they wanted on the air. That’s the world rightwing extremists like Trump and his Republican imitators want to create by controlling what ideas can be discussed in classrooms and the books children can read in libraries.
There have long been laws against promoting political violence that leads to death and destruction. The Justice Department is building its case against Trump and other instigators of the most deadly and destructive political insurrection in our lifetimes.
The continuing support of Fox News and the Republican party for Trump’s anti-American attacks on accepting the results of .S. elections have produced record voter turnouts and major Republican losses in election after election.
The overwhelming majority of Americans support democracy and want their votes to continue to be counted. The white supremacists who support Trump were on society’s fringes for good reason. They oppose the racial, gender and ideological diversity of America where equality and the constitutional rights of everyone are protected.
Opposing America is a terrible business plan for Fox News and an even worse ideology for an American political party.
