Murdoch In Big Stateside Trouble

The phone hacking scandal and its continuing fallout have nothing on what is now unfolding across the North Atlantic: there, Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda pushing Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) is embroiled in a lawsuit that could prove financially and reputationally ruinous for the Murdoch mafoisi, and all who sail in them. It concerns the 2020 US elections.

Faced with the increasingly wayward presence of Combover Crybaby Donald Trump maintaining that he won the Presidency, and that if FNC didn’t back him up, he would direct his followers to desert the channel for the even more wacko Newsmax, Fox News began platforming conspiracy theorists and pushing the idea that the election had somehow been stolen.

This culminated in Fox hosts telling their audiences, more or less, that Dominion Voting Systems, which provides voting machines, was part of this conspiracy. Dominion took a dim view of this attempt to defame them while rewriting recent history and called in lawyers. What we would call the discovery phase of the action has brought truly remarkable results.

Murdoch was of the opinion that Trump would concede the election - eventually - but that in the meantime, there were two Senate races in Georgia, and if the Democrats took both seats, the Senate would be tied at 50 seats each. With the casting vote of the Vice President, Kamala Harris, that would give the Dems an effective majority. So what say Rupe?

“Here's Rupert Murdoch telling Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to focus on winning the GA Senate races for Republicans, ‘helping any way we can’” told Will Sommer of the Daily Beast. “Any way we can”? Isn’t that an undisclosed campaign contribution? It got worse: thanks to Dominion’s lawsuit, we now know that Fox does not actually have any formal editorial standards.

Oliver Darcy of CNN mused “This is also really remarkable and distinguishes Fox News from actual news organizations. I've asked Fox for years what the network's editorial standards are. Apparently, they don't have any written down”. Mehdi Hasan from MSNBC added “Like [Lawrence O’Donnell] I refuse to refer to Fox as ‘Fox News’ on my show, because it isn’t”.

But these were mere hors d’oeuvres for a more substantial entrée: that Fox hosts knew the Dominion smear was not true and had said so privately. Starting with wacko lawyer Sidney Powell: Tucker Carlson had said to his producer “Sidney Powell is lying”. Laura Ingraham said “Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is” to fellow hosts Carlson and Sean Hannity.

Fox reporter Lucas Tomlinson said to the channel’s then chief political correspondent Bret Baier “It’s dangerously insane these conspiracy theories”. When Fox’s Executive VP for Primetime Programming was asked “Do you believe as of November 6 that going on television to say that the election was being stolen would be a conspiracy theory?” she answered “I agree that that would not be based in fact at that point”. So that’s a yes, then.

Ms Scott was asked “[Y]ou believe, since at least the time that Fox News called the election on November 7th, that Joe Biden was legitimately elected the President of the United States, yes?” to which she replied “Yes, I believe that”. Even Murdoch himself talked of “Really crazy stuff”.

Norm Eisen concluded “Dominion’s brief tearing the facade off of Fox News is a defining document of the era of election denial, together with the 1/6 Committee report - and the coming Georgia indictment of Trump. ‘Fox knew.’” The channel’s hosts were calling the “election theft” claims “BS” in private.

Could it get worse? As if you need to ask. Ben Collins of NBC News noted that “According to the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, one of the sources for the network's ‘election fraud’ information said she got her information from ‘experiencing something like time-travel in a semi-conscious state’ that allows her to ‘see what others don't see.’” A source of, er, Sidney Powell, once more.

What sums are we talking here? Wikipedia notes “Dominion filed defamation lawsuits against former Trump campaign lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, seeking $1.3 billion in damages from each … During ensuing months, Dominion filed suits seeking $1.6 billion from each of Fox News, Newsmax, OANN and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, while also suing Mike Lindell and MyPillow”. And which lawsuits are proceeding?

“Despite motions by the defendants to dismiss the lawsuits, judges said the cases against Fox News, Lindell, and MyPillow could proceed”. Like the actions against Associated Newspapers in the UK, Dominion’s pursuit of conspiracy theorists could damage not just the credibility of FNC, but its viability. Not only has Fox lied, its people knew it was peddling lies.

If Rupert Murdoch thought the law was for the little people, he thought wrong.

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