Newly released court filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News only add to the pile of evidence exposing the network as a farce.
Case documents publicly released on Tuesday reveal more text exchanges that suggest Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham promoted Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies despite appearing to suggest in private that the claims were baseless. (Fox News denies any wrongdoing and is vigorously contesting Dominion’s lawsuit.)
For me, these revelations evoked a timely personal memory that’s helpful in putting Fox News in its proper context as a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. And with that: I’d like to tell you what Sen. Mitt Romney, GOP strategist Karl Rove and a room full of right-wingers taught me about conservative fragility … and Fox News’ role in it.
*begin dream sequence*
Let’s go back in time to roughly a decade ago.
It’s election night in November 2012, and the setting is the Arizona GOP’s watch party in downtown Phoenix.
I was a college reporter at the time, granted access to the watch party for a course at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, and I took full advantage. I remember thinking the hors d’oeuvres — bland cheese and crackers, I believe — were lacking for a gathering of Arizona’s conservative elites. But I made do. (Republicans were big on austerity then. I guess flavor was first on the chopping block.)
There I was: a tall, Black progressive in a room full of Mitt and Ann Romney lookalikes — some besuited, some bejeweled, and others khaki’d down to the socks.
Rest assured, I was gleeful over the opportunity to watch the evening unfold as the target of their angst — Barack Hussein Obama — was declared the winner of the presidential race.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the observations I made that day would become useful a decade later — in the present day — with Fox News at the fore of a more prolonged phase of election…
Read the full article here
