Not a Sane Reality

Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines.

I don't have time to write what should be written about the Fox News lies concerning the 2020 election, which were recently verified in the Dominion voting machines depositions. I hope you have been reading or hearing what news coverage there has been of them.

All the biggest names on air and behind the scenes at Fox are involved, and they did it to maintain their audience share and the company's stock price, so basically for money. 

Here are a few quotes from a Los Angeles Times story that was reprinted in the Star Tribune:

Fox maintains the company's stance that its reporting on Trump's claims — albeit false — were still newsworthy and protected under the First Amendment.

Yeah sure, because constantly repeating only one side of a false story is a valid way to cover a newsworthy story. And even if that were true, adding the voting machine fabrications on top of the basic Big Lie added defamation of the company to Fox's misdeeds, and defamation is not protected by the First Amendment. 

Fox also plans to claim Dominion is motivated by money (hah!), with "opportunistic private equity owners" while Fox's case has at its core "freedom of the press and freedom of speech..." Rupert Murdoch, of course, has no motivation related to money.

The deposition clearly shows that on November 9, 2020, two days after Biden was declared the winner of the election by all the other networks and people with brains, there was a surge of viewership at the right-wing cable network Newsmax, which "caused a full-scale panic inside of Fox News." That day, "Fox News executives made a decision...it had to act to stop its sliding ratings, which were directly correlated to anger over the Arizona election call." "The Arizona call" was the accurate call that Fox News's elections desk had made on election night that Arizona had voted for Biden.

As Ahmed Baba said on Twitter this morning, 

In a sane reality, a scandal like this would grind any network to a halt. Fox News execs and anchors—including Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham—privately condemned Trump’s election lies even as they pushed them and cracked down on fact-checking.

Oh yeah, that part about fact checking. One of their own fact-checkers was publicly spanked in real time for contradicting the Fox talking heads on Twitter. She retracted her Tweet the next day and soon no longer worked for the network.