Opinion Fox News is worse than you thought
News organizations rarely look good when their internal emails and text messages surface in the public square. A filing Thursday from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News is not only no exception, it’s a watershed of journalistic misdeeds.
The network’s prime-time stars — Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, along with other top names — care about ratings first, second and third, a consideration that eclipses the truth and other principles of journalism. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote on Nov. 16, 2020, to a producer about President Donald Trump’s lawyer, who played a leading role in pushing far-out theories about election theft. The Dominion filing makes clear that the stars and Fox executives knew there was no evidence behind the election-denial lies repeated on the network’s broadcasts — a bombshell that is likely to take Fox years to live down.
Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6 billion on March 26, 2021, for repeated false claims about election fraud made by the network’s hosts and guests. (Video: JM Rieger/The Washington Post)
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
Even the generous protections of U.S. libel might not save Fox News in this case. “Fox, one of the most powerful media companies in the United States, gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little-known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain,” reads Dominion’s March 2021 complaint. The company argues that Fox News defamed its work across jurisdictions in 28 states in the 2020 elections and is seeking summary judgment from a Delaware court. The programming in question spanned the November 2020 presidential election and the tumult of January 2021, a time when Fox News found itself in an audience dogfight with other conservative cable networks — Newsmax and One America News (OAN) — for pro-Trump viewers eager to hear that their candidate had been cheated out of a second term.
Panic over audience desertion got going early at Fox News, correspondence cited in Thursday’s filing shows. On election night, Fox News was the first news outlet to call Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, a decision that infuriated the Trump campaign. Disenchantment trickled down to the Trump faithful. “We worked really hard to build what we have,” Carlson wrote to a producer, according to the Dominion filing. “Those f---ers are destroying our credibility. It enrages me.”
A familiar network fault line emerged, as the prime-time opinion stars sought to keep MAGA viewers happy while news-siders provided more fact-based analysis. Bret Baier, anchor of the weeknight program “Special Report,” expressed incredulity that Powell had gone on Lou Dobbs’s evening program three days after the election to discuss a far-out theory on voter fraud. “What is this? Oh man,” Baier asked Jay Wallace, president and executive editor of Fox News Media.
On Nov. 7, Fox News called the race for Biden. That night, top communications official Irena Briganti wrote, “Our viewers left this week after AZ.” And Carlson wrote, “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real....an alternative like newsmax could be devastating to us.”
Apparently Fox News’s ruling class isn’t exempt from Carlson’s endless attacks on America’s ruling class.
Fearing an all-out ratings crisis, Fox News executives “made an explicit decision to push narratives to entice their audience back,” the Dominion filing says. Journalism wasn’t one of those narratives. On Nov. 9, Neil Cavuto, an afternoon host known for his affability and independence, cut away from unsupported remarks by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on air. That moment triggered a notification from an executive at parent company Fox Corp. about the “Brand Threat” from Cavuto’s actions. An email from Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott to other executives following the incident is redacted from the filing.
(Not redacted but notable from the filing? Fox Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch noting the election-fraud lies are “terrible stuff damaging everybody” and that it is “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere.”)
Collegiality followed journalistic principles out the window on Nov. 12, when reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted out a fact check of Trump, who had cited reporting by Hannity and Dobbs (whose eponymous Fox program was canceled in 2021) and mentioned Dominion. Election officials, Heinrich pointed out, claim there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” Having spotted Heinrich’s tweet, Carlson told Hannity via text, “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the f---? I’m actually shocked … It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Hannity took his concerns to Scott, who apprised other colleagues: “Sean texted me—he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”
Think about that statement — the top official at Fox News choosing falsehood over fact, for the sake of ratings. Fox News viewers, the correspondence confirms, get “disgusted” when their favorite network stops feeding them conspiracy theories.
Yes, we know: The internal correspondence and testimony Dominion cites are part of a filing in a defamation case relating to “actual malice,” damages and so on. There will be time to evaluate those matters, which are scheduled to go before a jury in mid-April. For the moment, let’s pause on how effectively a well-crafted lawsuit has pierced one of the country’s most powerful, and opaque, media organizations.
Scott, Hannity and Carlson, after all, don’t publish their own messages."
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