The Cunning Fox

Depending on the culture, the fox in literature represents cunning, deceit, slyness and/or wickedness.  This means that the most honest part of Fox News is the symbolic connection to its name.

Okay, I know that Fox News got its name because the Murdoch family bought 50% of Twentieth Century Fox and spun off a cable news channel to compete with CNN.  And I will freely admit that I don’t find Fox News too significantly different or more politically biased than MSNBC, CNN, or any of the other flavors of news that cater to an increasingly divided market.  All of the various news organizations deliver the news with about the same level of honesty…which is admittedly a bar set very low.  Among the many things not to survive into the 21st century, we can add journalism and honest news reporting.

For years, I have listened to people on the left berate Fox News while people on the right berate MSNBC and their whole pointless arguments have bored me to tears.  All of the networks have smiling political pundits who are just barely intelligent enough to read the teleprompters while not messing up their perfect hair.

Everyone wants to believe that the network that reinforces their own cherished beliefs is better than the network that disagrees with them.  The networks know this and count on it to create and hold an audience, and this is why we don't have a more balanced and unbiased network.  Even a fox knows that the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill.

After the last presidential election, however, Fox went way too far and committed an unforgivable sin.  After Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, he began claiming that the election was “stolen from him”’.  Now Trump is entitled to express his opinion, and while I personally believe that giving voice to those unfounded opinions does harm to the country, he is entitled to his opinions and all of the news organizations were justified in reporting that Trump held such beliefs.

In the weeks and months following the election, despite extensive investigations by state and federal election officials, by the FBI, by politicians, by newspapers, and by television news—none of them has found any credible evidence that President Biden did not fairly win that election.  But during those months, news commentators on Fox continued to state that the election “was stolen.” 

Doing so brought Fox additional viewers, particularly those upset that their candidate, Trump, had lost a close election.  Disappointed at the loss, many of these viewers were more than willing to accept the myth that the election was stolen.  The Fox News organization realized the potential to attract more viewers and repeated the myth on most of its evening shows.

One of the key components of the false claim of the stolen election was the oft-repeated story that the widely used Dominion voting machines had been programmed to falsify the voting results, thus tipping the election away from Trump.  Anyone who knows anything about the technology used knows that this is about as likely as hackers breaking into a toaster oven and turning it into a Formula One race car.  Seriously, if the Dominion machines had been programmed to steal the election, pulling it off it would have taken a conspiracy involving thousands and thousands of people—in multiple states and in both political parties.  It would be easier to believe that Elvis was alive and married to Amelia Earhart.

This still would have been acceptable if those commentators—people like Lou Dobbs, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—had actually believed they were reporting the truth, but they didn’t.  Carlson and Hannity privately believed that Trump had legitimately lost the election but continued to deliberately spread falsehoods on the air.  That they deliberately misled the American people is no longer a supposition:  we have their sworn testimony from the depositions in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox.  You can read it for yourself here.  

Dominion sued Fox News and just this week, despite its claims that their reporting was protected by the First Amendment, Fox settled out of court for $767 million, which amounts to a rather obvious and expensive admission of guilt.  While the amount seems staggering, it doesn’t even put a small dent in the budget of Fox News, which generates billions of dollars a year in profits.

I deeply believe in the right of free speech, but I also believe that every American has the right to believe that his vote matters and that our elections are fair and honest.  Personally, I have never believed that voter ID was necessary, since the small number of illegal votes cast would be both statistically negligible and spread across both parties.  But, if using voter ID would mean that that more people believe that our elections are free, then go ahead and require identification to vote.  (The United States is, in fact, one of only two countries that do not require an ID, and the requirement doesn’t seem to put an undue burden on voters in the rest of the world.)

Every American needs to be able to have faith in our election process—to be able to believe that our country truly has a government by the people, for the people, and of the people.  What Fox did was to deliberately undermine that faith and to deliberately spread fear just for the sake of ratings.  Fox wanted more viewers and did not care that it was shaking the very foundations of our republic.  Essentially, Fox News was shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.  

The Dominion settlement was far too little.  Perhaps, a just settlement might have been enough to bankrupt Fox, but it should have been at least enough to ensure that neither Fox nor anyone else behaves so recklessly in the future.