The Damage Fox News Has Done To Our Democracy

Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | April 20, 2023

After former President Donald Trump, Fox News apparently did more than anyone else to promote and spread the false claim and accompanying lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

In doing so, Fox made a dangerous contribution to undermining the confidence of millions of Americans in the honesty and integrity of our elections and to greatly damaging our democracy.

The Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox for knowingly broadcasting lies about Dominion was settled this week with Fox agreeing to pay a historic $787.5 million.

But, left out of the settlement was any requirement that Fox inform its audience about what it had done in spreading false information and lies about the 2020 presidential race. Fox ultimately had some of its anchors read a brief three-sentence statement on Tuesday acknowledging that the court had determined “certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

We can expect that Fox will make no real effort to correct the enormous damage it has done to our country.

The overriding reason that Fox broadcast the lies that they apparently knew at the time were false and misleading was MONEY.

Fox executives, we learned from text messages that were made public, were afraid of losing their audience by broadcasting information they knew many of their viewers did not want to hear. So, they continued to feed them the false claims of Trump’s team. (That alone is reason why “News” in the organization’s name is an oxymoron.)

The settlement was a victory for Dominion Voting Systems, its investors, and its employees. And, through the evidence Dominion gathered that became public, it was important exposure of Fox’s fundamental flaws.

But it did not help correct the alternate universe in which too many Fox viewers live, in good part thanks to Fox’s repeated false claims that the election was stolen from Trump.

That alternate universe is an integral part of our politics today.

It also can be seen in the workings of the House MAGA Republicans who are determined to protect Trump at all costs, ignoring his leading role in the attempted presidential coup and the January 6 insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan is an example of this blind loyalty.

Jordan is using his congressional powers to attempt to interfere with the criminal case brought against Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Jordan has threatened to subpoena Bragg and also to seek documents involved in the ongoing criminal prosecution.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer has joined Jordan, pledging that he “fully expect[s] to see Alvin Bragg answering questions in front of Congress as soon as we can make it happen.”

Jordan, Comer, and House Administration Chair Bryan Steil have gone so far as to say that they might consider legislation to “insulate” current and former Presidents from “politically motivated state and local prosecutions.”

These efforts to harass Bragg and interfere with his prosecution of Trump are taking place despite the fact that the Supreme Court has held there is a “fundamental policy against federal interference with state criminal prosecutions.”

Citizens who live in this Trump-led alternate universe are following in his footsteps – they don’t believe in truth or facts, they don’t care about the rule of law, they won’t accept an election unless their candidate wins, and they lean toward Trump’s autocracy over our Founding Fathers’ democracy.

The fundamental test for our times is to ensure that our democracy and the rule of law prevail over the autocracy and lawless challenges we face.

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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.