Fox News and Trump's Big Lie

Thought for the day

Back in the 1990s, when I served as the marketing director of the Long Beach Press-Telegram, a Knight-Ridder newspaper, I often heard newsroom executives say, "We aren't in the entertainment business.  Our mission is to report the news, not slant a story to make some readers feel good."  

If only Rupert Murdoch and several of his Fox News anchors, like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, shared that same journalistic code of ethics.  Thanks to the process of discovery in the $1.6 billion dollar Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit, we now know these three privately trashed Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election results but publicly repeated many of his claims on air night after night after night. So much so, you would think they were on Trump's personal payroll.  Let's hope they never were. 

So, when is a factless news story a big, Big Lie?  You'll have to ask your priest, rabbi or therapist.  Better yet, let's hear directly from Murdoch himself.  What orders did he give his Fox News executives about Trump and what did they, in turn, tell Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham to say or do? 

Unlike Hollywood movies based on true stories, the fact that key people at Fox deliberately lied to tens of millions of viewers before, during and after Joe Biden was elected president makes me wonder if their "news" slogan shouldn't be "Tonight's Fox Broadcast:  It's Based on Not-So-True Stories."

-DF