Two Years Later and Fox News Still Hasn’t Truly Come Clean About Trump’s Election Denialism
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
The feckless and craven instincts of Fox News executives and hosts was laid bare last Thursday when Dominion Voting Systems released a damning brief detailing internal discussions surrounding former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen election.
The specifics are by now well-told in political media circles, and you can catch up on the half-dozen biggest revelations in this piece by our own Aidan McLaughlin. Long story short? It seems that nearly everyone in power — from Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to prime-time opinion hosts and their producers — was mortally afraid to tell the truth about the 2020 election for fear of angering their viewers, who in turn seemed eager to only receive the information they wanted.
In the days that followed President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the general election, Fox News coverage had already begun to pivot away from Trump’s more unhinged claims — though they were rarely called out explicitly — a pivot that angered the then-president, who started to blast the network.
At the time, I noted that Fox News faced an existential crisis in a column titled “Fox News Identity Crisis: Indulge Trump’s Election Conspiracy or Reject It … and Watch Its Audience Flee?”
I then wrote:
Simultaneously, the network’s top-rated opinion hosts have continued to entertain the increasingly loony conspiracy theory that the election was stolen from Trump through widespread voter fraud. They have been careful in their words, but the near-constant amplification of baseless allegations of a rigged or stolen election has lent credibility to the InfoWars-esque conspiracy theories being touted by Trump. The same theories mocked behind closed doors are being laughed out of courtrooms.
The growing disconnect between the two sides of Fox News programming reveals its current identity crisis and raises a question about their immediate future. Do they want to be a news outlet where facts, as disappointing as they may be, are paramount? Or an information entertainment company that today solely acts as cheerleaders for outgoing President Donald Trump?
We now know the answer to that question, and it doesn’t reflect well on the network.
The Dominion brief revealed grave concern inside Fox News that the network was losing pro-Trump viewers to Newsmax, a start-up cable network that ironically was designed to outflank Fox from the center but pivoted hard right in the later months of 2020.
Murdoch messaged Scott about how best to play the uncomfortable hand, writing, “Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can. We don’t want to antagonize Trump further, but Giuliani taken with a large grain of salt. Everything at stake here..”
Tucker Carlson notoriously texted a group chat with fellow primetime houses Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham his disgust over Jacqui Heinrich’s correcting the lies that Trump had just put forth. “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight,” he wrote. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
And further private texts from top Fox News figures demonstrate they did privately concede that stolen election claims being made on Fox News air were trash. From McLaughlin’s write-up:
“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote to Ingraham on November 18.
Ingraham replied: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”
“Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Carlson lamented.
The next night, Carlson did call out Powell for not sending him any evidence to support her claims. It was a rare rebuke of the election conspiracy theory on Fox News prime time, and one that was hedged to death by Carlson’s argument that it was nonetheless reasonable for viewers to believe fraud was afoot.
It was not a good time at Fox. But as evidenced by the raft of private messages released by Dominion, the overarching concern at Fox News was ratings or losing an audience of viewers who couldn’t handle the truth. Or, as was the case with Tucker Carlson, the “stock price.”
The network’s confused handling of Trump’s ravings led to a significant loss of viewers. In fact, January 2021 saw Fox News land in an unheard-of last place in the cable news ratings. I detailed the many reasons why they fell off so far, which boiled down to bad programming decisions in the aftermath of the election.
Also? Sports fans often stop watching games when their team loses in a rout. It’s just not enjoyable. And the tribal nature of political media has made cable news more like a sport than ever before. So Fox News viewers, many of whom were Trump supporters, turned off cable news. Progressives have done the same on other networks following Republican victories. As happens every four years, half of America needed a break.
But revisiting the months that followed the general election and 2020 — right up to the attack on the Capitol on January 6 — it becomes shocking how few Fox News personalities were actively calling out Trump for his baseless and unproven claims the election was stolen. Most shocking is the fact that after two years of Biden as president, that dynamic is still at play today.
To this very day, Trump continues to claim to be a victim of some ill-defined conspiracy that has failed to establish itself as valid in court. At this point, his whining has reduced him to the stature of your village conspiracy theorist that the locals cross the street to avoid.
Except Trump isn’t just some random guy. He’s the presumptive Republican nominee for the 2024 general election. There is some debate about his actual power at the moment, but any discussion of who currently holds the most sway in the GOP starts with Trump.
So the most powerful person in the Republican Party is saying batshit crazy things. And the most watched cable news network in the country is desperately trying to ignore him — no doubt, as shown in the Dominion brief, out of fear of angering an audience apparently too sensitive to hear the truth: that Biden beat Trump in a free and fair election.
Now almost every talking head at Fox News or in their executive ranks would tell you, to a person, that they understand that Joe Biden was elected president. (There are a few disturbing exceptions).
What they will not do is tell their viewers the truth: that Trump continues to falsely claim the election was stolen from him.
There are a handful of examples of Fox News pundits speaking truth to Fox News power on this issue. My favorite came in late 2020 when Jonah Goldberg called Trump’s stolen election claims “bat guano” and flatly confronted world-class troll Mollie Hemingway on the fact that the 45th president was actually trying to steal the election himself with these false claims.
“They are alleging an insane, bat guano crazy conspiracy theory where Rudy Giuliani is actually saying that most ballots are actually counted out of the country,” Goldberg said. “They’re alleging that those internationally recognized cyber ninjas, the Venezuelans, have hijacked our democracy. And while I don’t think Donald Trump thinks he’s going to pull it off, he’s trying to keep his options open. One of the options he would like to keep open is to literally steal an election by claiming that the Democratic party has stolen an election. It’s a pervasive, unpatriotic lie.”
Goldberg was precisely correct on this and was rewarded for this bit of candor by being shown the door at Fox News.
But back to the issue at hand: Trump continues to lie about the 2020 election, and Fox News continues to pretend that isn’t happening, focusing instead on churning out anti-Biden coverage on a 24/7 basis because… well, that’s who they are now.
There is no question that Fox has become far more partisan over the last few years. And the evidence in the Dominion brief proves how openly the network sought to support Trump and the Republican Party in their election fight. The edict came from Rupert Murdoch and extended all the way through the network.
It’s a free country, and Fox News has every right to behave as it sees it. But what has become abundantly clear is that Fox News is not a news organization. It’s not even close to one. It’s a profoundly cynical revenue engine that describes itself as a “news network” but nothing more than a propaganda machine built on sowing distrust, anger, and division.
Sure, Fox News: Congrats on your ratings. But what harm are you doing to the nation? And what price, victory?
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
