Fox Gets Real; DeSantis goes?

 

During the 2020 election campaign, many in the MAGA camp, such as Attorney Sidney Powell and others, made wild claims about the electronic voting machines supplied to several states by Dominion Voting Systems. If my memory serves, they claimed these machines were controlled by some systems in Italy or by operators trained by Cesar Chavez in Venezuela (he has been dead for several years, now). I think the CIA or FBI even went to Italy at the insistence of the White House to check this out. Some hearings held by the January 6^th committee discussed these claims and others about dead voters voting and ballots being hidden or switched by remote controls, members of the Department of Justice reported to the sitting president in 2020, that they checked out rumor after rumor, ad no ballots were hidden, converted, stolen or otherwise changed.

In the end, many of these claims were investigated multiple times and found as erroneous, misrepresentations, or just plain lies. Do you recall the tale told by Rudy Giuliani about the mother-daughter ballot counters in Fulton Count GA? He said they were hiding votes and passing a thumb drive around that contained election data. No such evidence was found on reviewing the tapes, but that did not stop him and the former president from using the names of these two women in speeches and causing both to be harassed so much that they were told by the FBI to move for their safety. Nor did it stop Fox and other conservative outlets from repeating these lies.

Long after the election and even after the events of January 6^th, many election facts were not presented to the viewers on either FOX news or their broadcast evening shows. The network continued to use the “Stop the Steal” movement language and suggest that the election was stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary. The Murdoch plan was also to not carry gavel-to-gavel coverage of the January 6^th committee, although it carried some, as I understand it.

Recently, Dominion released transcripts of emails gathered for their lawsuit against the Fox network for its election coverage among Fox management and on-air talents and others. Here they can be heard saying that they did not believe that the news they reported about the election being stolen was true. The reports quoted them as saying the claims made by Sidney Powell and her associates were crazy as was she, yet they booked her on the air and took live broadcast phone calls from DJT where he bellowed out his grievances. Dominion Systems machines were called out in these broadcasts while the hosts did not question or contradict their guests. Off the air, these same hosts spoke to each other about how they could not wait for DJT to be gone, so they did not have to deal with him. Tucker Carlson, an evening host, spoke of his passionate hatred for the former president.

Yet day after day, evening after evening, they touted their support for the Republicans and the claims of a stolen election. When their network called the state of Arizona for President Biden, their audiences hit it with a flurry of calls to rescind that call. Soon after, other networks called more states for Biden and the writing was on the wall; the president would not win re-election. When Fox reported that, they lost viewers and the MAGA crowd migrated to networks such as AON and Newsmax. So, according to their own emails, they had to keep up the false claims if they were to retain their audience. According to testimony by the 91-year-old conglomerate owner, Murdoch, the issue to him wasn’t skewing red or blue, it was a matter of losing green–their income stream, although he admitted doing things such as giving Jared Kushner, whom he called a friend, an advance look at political ads planned by the Biden campaign.

Pundits are divided about the possibility of Dominion winning the lawsuit for defamation. The bar for news organizations is high and must show willful or malicious intent to defame. When the management admonished reporters for giving accurate information that was contrary to the channel line and continued to showcase claims by guests whom they considered unstable and untruthful, I think they exceeded that bar, but I am not on the potential jury and have never been a MAGA fan, so I might see the issue differently. But, since they also said that keeping the stolen election issue alive kept viewers tuned in, that showed that they had a monetary measure to meet and, if defaming Dominion got them the right numbers, they didn’t seem to care. For that matter, I have never watched the Fox channel unless the football games were on, so I am not at all impartial.

Another matter that has always bothered me is just what news conservative media reports. They did not adequately cover the insurrection as a news event, nor was it shown fully in real-time. So, while I was watching and becoming horrified at the invasion of the Capitol, their management kept Fox viewers unaware. The same happened with the January 6^th hearings, which had minimal coverage. But never mind, Tucker Carlson has thousands of hours of official police insurrection tapes, courtesy of Speaker McCarthy, to manipulate so that he can now show pictures of a tourist romp in the park with Donald and spew his propaganda over America. Hopefully, most will not believe him. No thanks to Kevin McCarthy for his perfidy.

That brings the question, if much of America no longer routinely watches the evening network news, and only listens to partisan cable channels, is the media reinforcing the red/blue divisions? Will each faction stay in its corner and not interact? We don’t have Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley, two of the most trusted TV newsmen of the 1960s and 70s any more. So who does the public trust? Some say it is the network’s nightly news; others rely on PBS as an unbiased source. The media should feel responsible for news one can believe in, and challenge lies or, as the Washington Post says on its masthead, Democracy Dies in Darkness. Shine a light on it! And if some members of the media are not content with slanting the news to their perceived audience, but will lie outright, withhold news, or distort the truth, then when do they stop being media and become comic actors or propagandists?

Now, we have waiting in the wings a “White Christian Nationalist Fascist” “wanna-be” in Ron DeSantis. Not content to only go after limiting free speech on college campuses and lower schools, restricting voting to his class of preferred people, banning books, and beating up on gays and trans kids; no, now he is going after the press. He is proposing new laws to weaken the very bar I just mentioned above, that of proving malicious intent. He wants to restrict press freedom and stifle any negative press against him or his policies. As Vox reported last week:  “DeSantis’s proposals should alarm anyone in media, and, indeed, anyone who believes that the government or other powerful public actors should not be allowed to target individuals who criticize them.”

(The author, Ian Millhiser, described DeSantis as an Orbanesque Governor, convening a panel to find a case to challenge and weaken Sullivan-or the right of press freedom at the Supreme Court.) He quotes the 1964 decision: “Sullivan, in other words, rested on the proposition that free speech cannot exist unless society tolerates some factually erroneous statements, even if these statements sometimes paint an innocent person in an unfavorable light. The alternative is to hang a sword of Damocles over the head of every journalist, every political activist, and really anyone who speaks out on controversial matters, which can fall the moment they make an innocent mistake. As the Court concluded, “whatever is added to the field of libel is taken from the field of free debate.”

Millhiser notes further that DJT attempted also to weaken press freedom; in many ways, the two of them, DeSantis and DJT, are despots in waiting. The MAGA crowd couldn’t get it together and operated mostly on emotional appeals about witch hunts. DeSantis will not go that route, he wants to create a new precedent and be able to close out any criticism by denying access. Both leaders vilified a free press and banned press coverage at various times. In the DJT White House, often the press briefing was a joke or the press secretary did not respond to questions. But, he warns, issues once thought untouchable or absurd are no longer. “The first is simply that opposition to free speech rights for the press is fast becoming the official position of the Republican Party. Both of the presumed frontrunners for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 — Trump and DeSantis — support getting rid of New York Times v. Sullivan. As do other leading figures within the GOP.”  As any veteran of the Obamacare wars will tell you, legal arguments that are widely viewed as ridiculous today can easily gain purchase if they are embraced by legal and political elites.”

Millhiser concludes by warning that DeSantis and his ideas are positioned for a presidential campaign in which DeSantis promises to make America like Florida and he says:

“A DeSantis-led GOP is potentially an existential threat to the right to free speech.”

As has been said before, forewarned is forearmed; will America listen?

Along with this news, this week is another threat of storms to California, which is reeling with storm after storm and inches of rain and many feet of snow. Well, maybe the drought is over, but floods and mudslides remain concerns. I send caring thoughts to all affected. Climate change is here, folks.

‘Til next week-Peace!