This has been a blue-ribbon week in exposing the hypocrisy mill known formally as Fox News. E-mails released prior to the soon-to-be-tried Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News Networks and its parent company, Fox Corp, reveal that in private Fox on-air personalities disparaged the false voting fraud claims that they pushed on their shows. Perhaps the most outrageous dichotomy between private and public proclamations about the election was evidenced by the network’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson. As the New York Times pointed out,
Mr. Carlson — who ridiculed claims about a plot to steal the election as “shockingly reckless” and “absurd” in his November 2020 text messages — also continued to give credence to lies about widespread voter fraud this week.(1)
In fact, Carlson in an e-mail has stated, “I hate [Trump] passionately.”
But that was in private. In public, the following picture seems to be more in character.
Why did Fox News, despite acknowledging behind the scenes the falsity of its claims, pivot to support of Trump’s stolen election fantasies on its shows? As News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch said about allowing Mike Lindell, an avid conspiracy theorist, to run MyPillow ads on the network, it was purely a purely financial decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green.”(2)
After the network correctly called Joe Biden the victor in the voting in the state of Arizona, thereby putting up enough electoral votes for the Democrat’s victory, hordes of rabid MAGAs defected to (fake) news outlets even crazier than Fox, leaving the latter to worry about falling profits.
Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”(3)
Thus the decision to appease the MAGA faithful—to promote false narratives that would keep the pointy-headed rabble tuned to Fox and their $$ on the company’s balance sheet.
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Trump, himself, the other day paused long enough from crying into his Diet Coke about the “stolen election” to claim that he could end the Russian-Ukraine war by practically snapping his fingers. According to the UK’s Daily Telegraph, “Donald Trump indicated that he may have ‘made a deal’” with Vladimir Putin “if he were president at the time of the invasion.”(4)
The great master of “The Art of the Deal” claimed, admittedly in his usual inarticulate manner:
I could have negotiated. At worst, I could have made a deal to take over something, you know, there are certain areas that are Russian speaking areas, right, like, but you could have worked a deal.”
Now that “deal” sounds just like Trump, a man who gives nothing of his own to charity; he asserts the right to steal from others (the Ukrainians, who obviously would have no voice in this) and hand their land over to a beady-eyed tyrant.
Does this remind you of anything? Hint: I used the verb form above. That’s right: Appeasement —The Munich Agreement, (September 30, 1938), the settlement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia.(5)
Of course, we all know how that deal worked out.
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(2) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/feb/28/rupert-murdoch-deposition-fox-news-dominion-voting-systems
(3) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/fox-news-dominion.html?searchResultPosition=1
(4) https://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-d-let-putin-194231988.html
(5) https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement
