A brief filed by election technology company Dominion Voting Systems as part of its $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News and released on Thursday provides the clearest picture ever of the right-wing network’s operations — and the portrait that emerges is not flattering.
Wielding internal emails and text messages obtained through discovery, as well as numerous depositions with Fox’s on-air talent and brass, Dominion’s lawyers reveal that the network was feeding viewers information about fraud in the 2020 election that its executives, hosts and producers knew to be false. Out of fear that Fox News’s audience was leaving for its competitors, the brief alleges, the network chose to buttress President Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been stolen from him, helping to set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Fox hosts are knowingly deceiving their viewers because they think that is what the viewers want.
Perhaps the brief’s most revealing piece of evidence comes in a text message between prime-time hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. In the Nov. 18, 2020, conversation, the Fox stars shared their contempt for Trump’s conspiracy-minded lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. Carlson told Ingraham that he personally found their lies “unbelievably offensive,” but added: “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” (The network, in a statement to NBC News, suggested that the filing was “a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners” that distracts from the First Amendment issues at play.)
When I tell people that I’ve spent 15 years studying Fox News and the right-wing outlets in its orbit, the question I get most frequently is, “Do they really believe what they are saying?” In other words, are Fox’s biggest stars actually bigoted conspiracy theorists, or are they playing a role for the cameras that fulfills their viewers’ expectations? My typical answer…
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