Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News hasn’t just devastated the network’s reputation. It’s posing the biggest legal threat the channel has ever faced. This danger could have been avoided if better judgment had been used not only in Fox’s newsroom but at the most senior levels of management. According to a recent filing by Dominion, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch conceded that he could have stopped Fox from bringing Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani on air to lie about Dominion, “But I didn’t.”
What went wrong? An answer came when Murdoch was asked in a deposition why Fox continued to give a platform to My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who was spouting misinformation about Dominion voting machines. “The man is on every night,” Murdoch testified. “Pays us a lot of money … ”
Two pernicious ideas came together to destroy the reputation and the business model of Fox News. The first is rejection of objective truth. The second — less well documented, but equally pernicious — is the prioritization of corporate profits above all.
Two pernicious ideas came together to destroy the reputation and the business model of Fox News.
Fox News was founded as a platform that mixed reported news with conservative political opinion. But over the years — especially once Donald Trump was elected president — the platform shifted to sometimes, perhaps often, abandoning news altogether. Other media outlets recoiled from what Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, called “alternative facts.” But Fox News entered a postmodern world in which factual truth is relative, and one person’s story is just as valid as another person’s story.
This destructive approach was on display again this week with Tucker Carlson’s deceptive account of Jan. 6. If the story that the insurrectionists were patriots is more appealing to Fox viewers than the truth that they were violently trying to overthrow the United States government, than who’s to say…
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