The idea that the 2020 election was “stolen” from President Donald Trump was something that die-hard conservatives and the Christian evangelical Army of God folks really wanted to believe in, even though there was no proof of election fraud.
Predictably, major Fox News personalities and their on-air guests went beserk with indignation and blame-throwing as soon as the election results came in, alleging all manner of crimes, malfeasance, and dereliction of duty by elections officials in all of the critical “battleground” states that Trump (and Fox News) had hoped would vote Red.
In the post-election run-up to the January 6, 2021 certification of the results by Congress, Fox News hosted a number of personalities (including the My Pillow guy and Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell) who claimed that Dominion Voting Systems’ (maker of voting machines for many jurisdictions) technology had been used to rig the Presidential election against Donald Trump.
On air, the Fox News hosts (including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs , Maria Bartiromo, and Laura Ingraham) amplified the conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and other alleged voting frauds that had occurred to steal votes from President Trump.
Dominion Voting Systems later filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News for misinformation it broadcast which undermined customer confidence in the Dominion product. That lawsuit is ongoing and “discovery” by Dominion attorneys has revealed extremely compromising text messages and email from within the Fox News hierarchy.
It turns out that the prime time Fox on-air “journalists” (Carlson, Hannity, Dobbs, and Ingraham) knew early on that Trump campaign agents’ claims against Dominion were bogus, but higher-ups in the Fox News organization wanted their on-air host to fan the flames in order to avoid losing Trump-supporting viewers.
Trump supporters were incensed on November 7th when Fox News “called” the Arizona election in favor of Joe Biden, even though the contest appeared to be a dead heat. (It turned out to be the right call, by the way.) However, the on-air talent at Fox News felt betrayed by Fox’s demographic/elections forecasters, as they had focused their pre-election broadcast on supporting the Trump message and predicting victory in most of the “swing” states.
That’s right, folks, a supposed “news” organization that had blatantly supported one candidate over another.
It was no news to viewers, as they watched Fox News religiously to hear candidate Trump’s virtues, his boasts, his disparagement of Democrats, and all of the assorted misinformation that the Trump campaign was disseminating. From the Fox News coverage, it seemed that a Trump re-election was guaranteed, as everyone that the news anchors featured on-air sang the Trump tune.
It is no wonder, therefore, that Trump supporters, on election night and following, believed that a Trump victory had been “stolen” by Joe Biden through nefarious means. Consequently, this cohort was looking for “proof” of this criminal act and they wanted it pronto, before Joe Biden could be declared the winner.
Fox News was in competition with other cable news outlets (particularly Newsmax, another favorite of conservative viewers) and wanted to claim the high ground in this big story. So, it appears from the discovered Fox text and emails that Fox executives directed their front-line talking heads to boost the alleged Dominion Voting Systems effort to rig the election against Donald Trump.
This despite Rupert Murdoch’s personal belief that the idea of a stolen election was “really crazy stuff”. Apparently, not crazy enough to rein in his own crazies who were presenting the prime time Fox News.
The Dominion “scandal” that Fox News helped amplify was based on conspiracy theory misinformation that Trump’s attorneys knew was bullshit and the Fox News on-air talent also knew was devoid of actual fact. Many of the texts and emails within the Fox News organization, discovered by Dominion’s attorneys, are emphatic that the “news” that the on-air talent was broadcasting on the Dominion matter was absurd, whackadoodle, laughable, wild, “shit”, etc.
Nevertheless, on November 12th, Fox News host Lou Dobbs invited Rudy Giuliani to spew lies about Dominion Voting Systems on his popular program and then said the following: “It’s stunning… they have no ability to audit meaningfully the votes that are cast because the servers are somewhere else… This looks to me like it is the end of what has been a four-and-a-half… the endgame to a four-and-a-half year-long effort to overthrow the president of the United States.” Dobbs continued to broadcast these false charges throughout the week and for nearly a month.
Why was Fox News acting this way, broadcasting a conspiracy theory that they knew was bogus? Two reasons: (1) They were paranoid that competitor Newsmax was going to capture the conservative viewing audience, so they needed to own the Dominion story and out-shock the competition; and, (2) Not wanting to antagonize Trump further (by shattering his dream with the actual facts).
As a Fox executive said at the time (within the organization), Fox “needed to do a better job respecting our audience”. In other words, tell them what they want to hear and fan the flames of outrage.
As one commentator said at the time, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”
It’s not that remarkable, really, considering who we are talking about in this case. Fox News is a cleaned-up version of the yellow journalism that Rupert Murdoch has been peddling his entire life. His “product” has always been hard-to-believe, breaking news that excites the reader or viewer… even though it isn’t true or may not be true. Murdoch made millions in the tabloid press with stories of aliens, celebrity scandals, juicy tell-alls from ex-employees of Queen Elizabeth, nasty “scoops” on Democratic politicians, and so forth. The only constant that Rupert Murdoch concerns himself with is “will it sell”.
Murdoch figured out long ago that right-wing viewers wanted to hear how “Liberals” were taking the country down the toilet, so he designed a cable “news” network that continuously fed that audience 24/7 information that would reinforce their political beliefs. By definition, what Fox News was distributing was propaganda, which is the opposite of “news”.
Murdoch’s empire is now on the hot seat, legally, as the Dominion Voting System lawsuit has begun to unmask what has really been going on since the 2020 election.
It’s ugly, embarrassing, scandalous, and true, but I doubt that this legitimate news story will receive much coverage on Fox News.