Fox News Is Learning That Going Fully Off the Cliff Into Paranoid Delusion Programming Has Its Drawbacks
One side effect of the conservative movement going completely off the cliff into a valley of paranoid delusion is that it presents some legal peril for the people charged with keeping the wheels greased. As soon as it was clear that Donald J. Trump had lost the 2020 election, and that he'd need the seeds of election-fraud conspiracies he'd planted months before to sprout during the transition period so that he could overturn the election and stay in power, it fell to the various inhabitants of the right-wing infotainment ecosystem to feed and stoke the conspiracies. This involved peddling all kinds of insane and inane slop about something something Hugo Chavez. It also involved making wildly false claims about voting-machine companies like Dominion Voting Systems.
This has led to a number of lawsuits from Dominion against outlets like Newsmax and OANN, as well as lawyerly types like Sydney Powell. And now the list includes The Fox News Channel, against whom Dominion has filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit. (This follows a similar suit against Fox News by Smartmatic, another voting-machine outfit.) In short, Dominion claims that "Fox, one of the most powerful media companies in the United States, gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little-known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain." Crucially, the suit lays out the case that Fox News knew the claims were verifiably false when it chose to broadcast them—a decision Dominion chalks up to desperation, as Fox saw its viewers fleeing to the aforementioned Newsmax and OANN, where they would be served the truly uncut election-fraud lunacy. It's a tough business.
For its part, Fox has issued a statement on the matter: "Fox News Media is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court."
But based on what we've seen recently, this may not be the defense strategy Fox ultimately goes with. The network's legal eagles won a defamation case against star host Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson last September by arguing that nobody could reasonably believe he is presenting facts on his show. This is not a joke. U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil found this highly persuasive, writing in her opinion that the "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.'" She added: "Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."
Talk about wishful thinking. But this is also the line adopted by Sidney Powell, who stood out as particularly nutty even on Trump's post-election legal team. (Powell was eventually cut loose for her particular kookiness, then was later seen meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, presumably because she was at that point one of a dwindling number of people still willing to tell him he could overturn the election.) In her own defense against a Dominion suit, Powell's counsel has argued that "reasonable" people would not accept her very, very long list of claims about the election as "fact."
This seems to be the wave of the future. You say insane things, then if things get hot, you claim nobody could reasonably have believed you. Unless they did. But they didn't. So you didn't mean it. This is the absurdism of authoritarian rhetoric, the same logic of Trump's "edgelord coup." We're joking, it's not real, but maybe it is, OK there are guys laying siege to the Capitol, ah, they failed, it wasn't ever a coup. Shame has collapsed as a social force, and the political press has slowly begun to adapt. Perhaps the courts will, too. This is, after all, very likely what the future looks like. A United States senator who came in second for the last contested Republican presidential nomination just posted a Blair Witch sequel from some bushes along the southern border in which, along with some radioactive levels of smarm, you'll find some wild-eyed claims about cartels and their flashlights. There are no limits, and so far, very few consequences.
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