Fox lied about election fraud

Congresswoman actually suggests Civil War scenario

By Ken Tingley

Fox News producers and personalities knew what they were broadcasting about the 2020 presidential election was untrue, but did it anyway.

But it is worse than that.

They knew it was ridiculously untrue and the people they were putting on national television had no evidence to support their beliefs. They ridiculed those people in private conversations and joked about it while betraying the viewers they were pretending to serve.

It all came out in court documents filed as part of Dominion Voting Systems $1.6 billion lawsuit against the Fox Corporation this week. These were not accusations, but texts, emails and testimony from some of Fox’s biggest television stars.

That’s a shocking and gross dereliction of duty for anybody even pretending to be a journalist and none of it surprised me.

Last November I attended a pair of lectures at the University at Albany. One was called “Truth in the Media” and the other “Politics and Disinformation.”

The panelists were well known - Brian Stelter (CNN), Jonathan Lemire (AP, MSNBC), Devlin Barrett (Washington Post) - and they all had written books. There were no representatives from Fox News.

But Stelter, the former host of “Reliable Sources” on CNN, related a fascinating message from his book, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”

Stelter, who has built his reputation on holding the media accountable, told a story that is less about Trump and more about Fox News’ mission to make money by reporting stories that keep their ratings high and readers happy.

He related a story from the book where Fox’s medical analyst, Dr. Marc Siegel, told Sean Hannity in the early days of Covid (March 6, 2020) that “at its worst, it would be a bad case of the flu.”

“This was shockingly irresponsible stuff — and Fox executives knew it,” Stelter wrote,  “because by the beginning of March, they were taking precautions that belied Siegel’s just-the-flu statement. The network canceled a big event for hundreds of advertisers, instituted deep cleanings of the office and began to put a work-from-home plan in place. Yet Fox’s stars kept sending mixed messages to millions of viewers.”

It probably cost thousands of people their lives.

That same type of message was revealed last week when Fox hosts were caught discussing their disbelief about election fraud during the 2020 presidential election, while promoting and confirming there was significant cause for concern about the election.

It has put our democracy at risk.

Fox’s defense in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems has been the First Amendment.

The First Amendment is sacred to those of us who spent our careers defending it, even when it applied to the National Enquirer. Fox made no attempt to get this story right. They broadcast information they knew not to be true.

“You may have a first amendment right to report on what the president said but you have no right to validate a statement that you know to be false,” Steven Shapiro, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and counsel or co-counsel on more than 200 supreme court briefs, told The Guardian this week.

That puts Fox perilously close to losing its lawsuit.

“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

Consider that for a second.

Lying as part of their business model.

It confirms what Stelter has previously reported in his book.

News networks and newspapers have a long reputation of serving the public. Without credibility, they cannot do that.

I don’t see how any regular viewer of Fox could ever trust them again.

But when the details of those court filings were being revealed over the past week, Fox was busy covering immigration, then the tanker derailment in Ohio.

If Fox loses this case, there needs to be more than just compensation to Dominion. Fox should be instructed to run a prime time special hosted by its top professionals that explains the lies and their reasons for doing it.

Without their credibility, news organizations have nothing.

Fox has lost that credibility, but will their viewers care?

National Public Radio did a detailed fact check about what Fox knew and when it knew it and you might want to check the details.

Stunning Tweet

I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter, but one Tweet Monday was startling by the worst of social media standards.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted the following:

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous American Last politics, we are done.”

She seemed to be suggesting Civil War-style secession.

That would be treasonous.

That would violate her oath of office.

And despite the fact that President Biden carried the state of Georgia in the last election.

Doctor burnout

Earlier this month Dr. Eric Reinhard, a political anthropologist and physician at Northwestern University, wrote a guest essay in the New York Times arguing that doctors were dealing with “demoralization syndrome.”

Reinhard points out that one report estimates 117,000 physicians left the workforce while fewer than 40,000 joined it. If you have to wait months for a doctor’s appointment, that might explain why.

“What’s burning out health care workers is less the grueling conditions we practice under, and more our dwindling faith in the systems in which we work.”

Reinhard explains that many doctors don’t believe their work is for the greater good of their patients, but part of a larger money-making machine.

That is a stunning conclusion and another reason our health system needs to be improved - for everyone.

Perhaps, the House of Representatives should investigate that.