Mandatory Credit: Photo by Gina M Randazzo/ZUMA Press Wire/REX/Shutterstock (13749574p) A person holds a sign with images of Tucker Carlson & George Santos that reads ''Fox Made Lying Normal'' outside of Fox News Network. "Stop Killing Black People" Protest At Fox News, New York, USA - 31 Jan 2023" width="1000" height="600" class="gu-image" /> If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to how Fox News operates, the recent revelations from a legal filing come as no huge surprise.
From the moment it was founded in the mid-1990s, Fox has been a partisan outlet – very much by the design of its founder, Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and its founding chief executive, Roger Ailes. It never was the “fair and balanced” news source that its motto claimed. Calling it “conservative” has always been putting things far too mildly; but for a time, it observed a modicum of journalistic standards.
But Fox became much more extreme over the years, moving well outside the journalistic mainstream and turning into a propaganda arm of the US right wing. As it stoked outrage on immigration, race, vaccines and abortion, it dedicated itself to maximizing market share and seldom letting the truth get in the way.
Through a strange alchemy, it transformed polarization into profits and, in the process, harmed our democracy and culture.
But paradoxically, it is shocking to read the specific details that have emerged from a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems. (The complaint is that Fox allowed damaging lies to circulate about how the election was rigged, with Dominion supposedly flipping votes from Trump to Biden.)
The shock doesn’t come from what these details indicate about the network’s mission; that much we already knew.
But the volume, the specificity, the pervasiveness of how lies about the 2020 presidential election were not just tolerated but encouraged? All of that would have been hard to believe if it weren’t right there in internal messages and in the deposition testimony that has now been made public.
“It’s a media defense lawyer’s worst nightmare,” author and US Naval Academy professor Jeff Kosseff, told me in an interview this week.
A former first amendment lawyer, Kosseff said he has never seen anything like these revelations and was startled by “the sheer barrage of acknowledgment, from the very top, that the things being said on the air were false”. He also found it bizarre that such correspondence took place so blatantly and was retained so long in discoverable form.
In one instance, Murdoch messaged CEO Suzanne Scott (“Everything at stake here”) with seeming panic about the growing anger of the core viewership. Those Trump loyalists were enraged after the network accurately predicted on election night that Biden had won Arizona, a key battleground state. Fox’s ratings were sliding radically as Maga Nation moved toward smaller outlets that were even more unhinged from the facts.
In another example, the network’s most influential star, Tucker Carlson – who clearly knew that there was no significant election fraud – told colleague Sean Hannity that he wanted a Fox reporter fired after she tweeted a fact-check of Trump’s voting conspiracy theories.
And although Fox’s defense attorneys claim such examples are handpicked to create a false impression, the cherry harvest certainly is abundant. (They also insist that the network merely was engaging in free speech, protected by the first amendment and codified in longstanding case law.)
The suit has excavated an ugly reality: that the corporate culture at Fox is less about the truth than about protecting profits and market position.
And it matters. The election lies that swirled on Fox News and throughout rightwing media during and after the 2020 presidential election have caused destruction.
The violent assault on the US Capitol might never have happened without this propaganda in the service of profits. And the deep political divisions in the United States can be laid to an alarming degree at the feet of this single media organization, which is the most popular and richest of the cable news networks.
But a vexing question arises: what’s to be done about it?
Advertising boycotts are almost pointless since Fox gets its massive revenue largely through carriage fees – the money that cable and satellite providers pay to individual networks; Fox is able to demand and get disproportionately high rates because it has such a fervent audience.
“Fox could get zero in ad revenue and still have a huge profit margin,” Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal media-watchdog organization Media Matters for America, told me.
But the $1.6bn potential price tag of this lawsuit?
That’s real money – not enough to put Fox out of business, but possibly enough to make coverage more responsible. It also would send a strong message to the public and to the company’s shareholders, both of which matter to Fox’s top brass.
Carusone also wants to see mainstream journalists stop legitimizing the network by treating their reporters as esteemed colleagues.
“The news industry is Fox’s biggest enabler,” he said. Because of the network’s more respectable past, that acceptance “has gotten grandfathered in”, he said.
If Dominion prevails, Fox News may be forced to become less reckless. For a media company that’s caused so much harm to American society, that would be a very welcome reform.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
