Conservative news network got outfoxed in court, done in by its own pundits | Opinion
The drumbeat of election deniers reached a crescendo on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which the rioters had been led to believe was rigged.
As subsequent Congressional investigations made clear, Donald Trump incited the mob and did nothing to stop the ensuing riot. Yet the stage for this awful day was set much earlier, and the Fox News Channel, where Trump’s allies made frequent appearances, played a leading role.
One of the Trump allies’ key narratives held that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were rigged to transfer Trump’s votes to Joe Biden. Fox gave airtime and lent credibility to those baseless claims.
Moreover, they did so even though their private emails and texts — revealed during the discovery phase of the legal proceedings — confirmed that they knew the claims against Dominion were false and that they had the utmost contempt for the election deniers they were interviewing.
As the mainstream media have gleefully reported, in response to those damaging falsehoods Dominion filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox’s parent company. Now Fox will have to pay in more ways than one.
Costly settlement
First there’s the money. In a settlement agreement reached on Tuesday to avert a lengthy civil trial that might have set a worrisome precedent for the media’s First Amendment protections, Fox agreed to pay Dominion more than $787 million.
Then there’s also the damage to Fox’s credibility as a legitimate news organization rather than a worshipful defender of all things Donald Trump. Until Fox caved to Trump, who frequently used the channel to funnel his message to his base, Fox News had a decent reputation as a right-of-center alternative to left-leaning mainstream media outlets such as ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and MSNBC.
Unfortunately for the hard-working and competent reporters working at Fox then and now, the channel’s top executives and the parent company’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, freaked out when the network’s ratings dipped after it briefly looked as though Fox was no longer in lockstep with Trump regarding the election he lost.
Indeed, a worrisome number of Trump loyalists among Fox’s longtime viewers had shifted to Newsmax, a much more conservative cable channel founded in 1998 by Christopher Ruddy, one of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach pals.
From election night in November until Jan. 6 and thereafter, Fox and Newsmax were vying for viewers in a competitive business where ratings are a major factor in the bottom line.
Yet suspicions that the 2020 presidential election might be rigged existed long before election night and had grown much stronger during the summer of 2020 as elections supervisors struggled to deal with challenges caused by the pandemic.
Moreover, suspicions and doubts about the 2020 election were being widely peddled even before the pandemic arrived. For instance, in February 2020, an influential national publication featured an article titled “The Hack Next Time.”
‘Leftist and woke’
Which national publication? The magazine version of Newsmax? No. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal? An emphatic “No!” Indeed, The Journal — arguably one of America’s best newspapers — has been consistently critical of Trump.
No, this article, which gave the suspicions a nine-month-long gestation period, was featured in the leftist and woke monthly Rolling Stone. The article laid out a scary scenario in which Russian interference would rig the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump.
The Rolling Stone article warned that some of the rigging would be facilitated by Russians hacking into election supervisors’ databases and installing malware, thereby damaging the accuracy of voter rolls and, thus, the election’s outcome.
In particular, the article cited a report that Russian hackers posing as elections officials had installed malware into VR Systems, “a software company that manages voter rolls.” Luckily for Rolling Stone, its article did not get around to impugning the reputation of Dominion Voting Systems.
The point is that conservatives aren’t the only ones who’ve sown doubts about the integrity of our elections. Indeed, after Trump won in 2016, one of the most vocal election deniers was Karine Jean-Pierre, who, as the current White House press secretary, has the unenviable job of trying to help reporters make sense of the often incoherent remarks Biden makes when he strays from the scripts.
Worse, Jean-Pierre not only claimed that Trump had stolen the 2016 presidential election, but that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp had stolen the 2018 gubernatorial election from Democrat Stacey Abrams.
Few things are as damaging to the foundation of a democratic republic as undermining the voters’ confidence in the outcome of free and fair elections. Shame on Trump and Fox News for doing so, but shame on all the other election deniers as well.
