Dominion Suit Hammers Fox News’ Credibility - Horowitz

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™

 

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The Biden presidency has been just what the doctor ordered for Fox News.  Drawing on its tested formula of offering highly critical news coverage and harshly negative opinion, whenever a Democrat resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Fox has returned to rating dominance. The conservative news network is now fully recovered from several shaky months during the presidential transition period when its difficulty navigating Donald Trump’s failed and falsehood-riddled attempt to overturn the election results, resulted in a marked drop in ratings.

Unfortunately for Fox News, however, its actions during that pivotal time are now subject to new scrutiny. This current unwelcome attention is a result of disturbing revelations generated by Dominion Voting Systems’ public release of some of the fruits of the discovery process in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the news network. Dominion charges that Fox uncritically broadcast and amplified Mr. Trump’s and his allies’ charges that the voting machine company rigged the machines to produce votes for Joe Biden, despite knowing the allegations were false.

“In the election’s aftermath, Fox ended up with the worst of both worlds.” I wrote in a 2021 column. That is primarily because a slice of strong Trump supporters turned away from the network due to their anger at the Fox News’ decision desk early--and as it turned out correct call-- of Arizona as well as the fact-checking by some of the network’s news anchors and afternoon hosts on the then president’s false claims the election was stolen. They temporarily tuned into Newsmax and One America News Network, right wing outlets that fully backed the stolen election narrative.  At the same time, Fox’s primetime hosts mainly uncritical embrace of false election conspiracy theories, enthusiastically joined by other vocal Trump supporters on the network, including Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro, also limited any credibility gains Fox would have made with the larger than one might think segment of its audience comprised of moderate Republicans and even some Democrats and resulted in the damaging Dominion suit.

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As the publicly released documents now make clear, at the time, Fox News higher-ups and its highly rated prime-time hosts were far more concerned with the potential abandonment of some Trump supporters than with damage to the credibility of its news operation.  A Tucker Carlson text is particularly instructive. Pointing to Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeting, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” in response to a Trump tweet that made false vote rigging charges against Dominion, Mr. Carlson texted the following to his fellow prime time hosts, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham:  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.”  

 

Echoing Carlson’s sentiments, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott declared, “If this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”  While Ms. Henrich was not fired, she was forced to delete the tweet. 

 

Commenting on the original sin of correctly calling Arizona for Biden, Sean Hannity sounded a similar note: “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable,” the longtime 9:00 PM host texted his colleagues.

 

It is important to recognize that none of the executives nor the primetime hosts contested the accuracy of Ms. Henrich’s tweet or the Arizona call.  They all realized that Mr. Trump’s charges about Dominion and his other election conspiracy theories were patently false.  Their concern was that there was a segment of their audience who didn’t want to hear the truth.  

 

This led to the Orwellian formulation put forward by Mr. Hannity and Ms. Scott of “showing respect for the audience.”  In their view and the view of key others at Fox that meant giving credence to its belief in Mr. Trump’s false claims.  As Ms. Scott told her bosses, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, in the wake of the Arizona call, “We will plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them…We can fix them but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”  In other words, the Fox version of respect for its audience is confirming their biases and telling them what they want to hear even if there is no reality to it.  

 

This all calls to mind Jack Nicholson’s famous line in the movie “A Few Good Men,” referring to the American public: “You can’t handle the truth.”  Or as The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg put it in describing Fox’s unique flavor of respect, “It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.”

 

It is the case that in today’s niche national media structure, cable news networks cater to a slice of the overall viewing public based on ideology and partisan affiliation with the overwhelming majority of Fox viewers supporting Donald Trump and the overwhelming majority of MSNBC and CNN viewers supporting Joe Biden.  This shapes story selection and point of view at nearly all the cable news networks.   Still, there is a major distinction with reporting or commenting on factual information from a partisan or ideological point of view and giving credence and oxygen to information that you know is false.

 

That is the line that too many at Fox News stepped over during that pivotal time.  The costs of amplifying these falsehoods became all too apparent on January 6, and we are still paying the price today with a majority of Republicans still believing that the 2020 presidential election was stolen at least in part because of Fox News opinion hosts deliberately misleading their audience.

 

As a result, the greater cost to Fox News from the Dominion suit is likely not to be the millions of dollars they may end up paying out; it is the major blow to the credibility of its news operations and top hosts, stemming from what we are learning about the network’s internal workings.  And we can be fairly certain that there are more damaging revelations to come.  

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.


 

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