FOX serves as propaganda arm

by Tom Maertens 

"Fox is a hostile media platform. It has damaged our democracy and the people’s trust in government more than any foreign adversary. It promotes fake news in order to make Murdoch more money. Nothing less than a large financial judgment, including punitive damages, would persuade Fox to change its ways."

Anyone who still believes Fox News is “Fair and Balanced” hasn’t been following the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. In fact, it’s not a news network at all, but a propaganda arm of the Republican Party and Trump campaign that spreads lies as part of its business strategy.

We have this on good authority: the CEO Rupert Murdoch admitted in a recording obtained by The New York Times that the fraud claims by the Trump camp were bogus — “really crazy stuff.” In a separate deposition, he said Fox repeats the lies for the money. A 92-year-old multibillionaire is still obsessed with money. Is he planning to take it with him? Murdoch also revealed private information about Joe Biden’s planned campaign ads on Fox.

In addition, Dominion has obtained thousands of internal emails and text messages from Fox employees through discovery proceedings as part of its $1.6 billion defamation suit, including from prominent fabricators Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, on the sister Fox Business network, were similarly implicated in the charade, as were some of Trump’s lawyers. Dobbs has been fired.

A Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, was singled out by several Fox personalities as “nuts” for her absurd claims about vote fraud. Tucker Carlson, in an e-mail, said “Sidney Powell is a “lying fing b.”

Fox continued to invite her on regularly, even after finding out that one of her principal sources was a woman who claimed to talk to the wind, and who volunteered in a memo that the wind tells her that she’s a ghost, though she doesn’t believe it. She also claims to have been decapitated in a car accident decades ago but is still walking the earth.

Laura Ingraham said in writing “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy (Giuliani),” whom she separately described as an “idiot.”

Fox was panicked that viewers were leaving them for farther-right alternatives such as Newsmax or One America News. That led to decisions inside Fox to continue peddling lies that almost everyone at Fox acknowledged in emails were false, but which people inside the network thought they had to repeat or they would lose their audience.

They had created a far-right monster which they had to continue feeding. Murdoch admitted in his deposition that Fox News had failed to do enough to prevent its personalities from pushing lies about the election.

That belief led Murdoch to order the firing of a senior Fox News manager, Bill Sammon, for projecting — correctly — that Biden had won the election in Arizona, a call that had angered Trump and his followers. In the corrupt world of Fox News, Sammon, who had called every election correctly over 12 years at Fox, was fired for being right.

If a jury concludes from the messages, including the 3,600 messages from Dominion to Fox, that it knew what they were putting on the air was false, and displayed actual malice in continuing to broadcast them, it could award Dominion substantial financial damages, and could levy punitive damages which might bankrupt the network.

Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull asserted to NPR last year that Fox News has played, by far, the largest single part in the polarization of American politics, in the “amplification of political hatred.” He added: “I would challenge anyone ... to nominate which individual alive today has done more to undermine American democracy than (former Australian citizen) Rupert Murdoch.”

It was Murdoch’s Fox that amplified Trump’s lies. Among them, Trump was the single largest promoter of lies about COVID, according to Cornell University researchers, who analyzed 38 million English-language articles about the pandemic.

Subsequent events have demonstrated again that it is easier to con people than to make them understand they have been conned. It’s worth recalling that Fairleigh Dickinson PublicMind poll some time back found that people who watched or listened to no news at all were better informed than those who watched Fox.

A University of Chicago survey in September 2021, found that 21 million Americans believe Biden is “illegitimate” and Trump should be restored by violence. They didn’t arrive at this conclusion by talking to the wind.

Turnbull is right: Fox is a hostile media platform. It has damaged our democracy and the people’s trust in government more than any foreign adversary. It promotes fake news in order to make Murdoch more money. Nothing less than a large financial judgment, including punitive damages, would persuade Fox to change its ways.

Tom Maertens served in the White House under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.