The Tiger Is Loose

Further thoughts on Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

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Trump supporter Melissa Regan, of Pike County, Ohio, attends a Stop the Steal rally in support of President Trump on December 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis/Getty Images.)

I read this David French tweet on Friday and was instantly mad at myself for not having made the same point in that afternoon’s newsletter.

There’s nothing new about right-wing outlets stooping to the sort of unethical behavior they deride in their enemies. For all their anxiety about media gatekeeping, you’re more likely to find news that’s inconvenient for the left in the New York Times than news that’s inconvenient for the right on a conservative website. People who earn a living complaining about collusion between Democrats and liberal journalists had no issue with Trump treating one Fox News host as his “shadow chief of staff” and patching in another via speaker phone to weigh in during Oval Office meetings. The Venn diagram of populist outlets that screech endlessly about media corruption and populist outlets being sued for defamation for lying about the 2020 election is basically a circle.

If you doubt that most of the right’s media critics are offended not by ethical lapses per se but by the fact that the lapses of the mainstream press favor the left, ask yourself how many spoke up over the last few days upon learning that the most influential conservative news organization in America covered up the truth about a presidential election.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    It’s always bottom up. Most things are. Of course it begins with the fact that humans don’t like to believe they lost. People are always claiming that the umpire did something unfair and they shouldn’t have lost the baseball game. The nature of modern digital media is to pander to that impulse. The 2000 election was the canary in the coal mine but it just kept getting worse and worse. 2016 half of Democrats don’t believe Trump won a free and fair election. Now 2020 and Republicans.

    There is a weird kind of honesty in this bottom up phenomenon. A lot of people aren’t faking it. They actually believe it. Leftist media doesn’t come to conclusions that benefit left-leaning, educated readers because they’re cynical. They actually believe it. Both sides have this bottom-up phenomenon going on, it’s just dumber on the right because the right has always been less sophisticated.

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      Picov Andropov

      You know, at some point you would think that the people spreading this crap would know that it’s some kind of lie (ex Tucker Carlson and “Stop the Steal”). They may become self-deluded over time like putin in Ukraine but wouldn’t you think they‘d know at some point they were lying?

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        Ben Connelly

        No the marks believe it. They want to believe it. Conspiracies come from the desire of humans to believe them nor from the desire of peddlers to push them.

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  2. Dfstarr

    How did we reach this point where tens of millions of people are so ignorant and unhinged as to be in thrall to such lunacy? And to point out the facts that there's no evidence of large-scale election fraud makes one (obviously) part of this massive conspiracy.

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      Ben Connelly

      Conspiracies are endemic in human nature I suppose. They’ve always been with us. I’m sure the numbers on whether the CIA killed JFK would have been surprising and dismaying in the 60s. It isn’t an American thing, or a right-wing thing, it’s a human thing. As Nick noted, it’s bottom up (a point which, incidentally, disproves almost every conspiracy which involves a top-down nefarious cabal). People want to believe something and other people have an incentive (financial, social, political, etc.) to humor them.

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  3. Brett

    Fox did not support the election stolen narrative. That was the whole point of the texts in the lawsuit - execs and talent mad the network was too anti-Trump on air. Dominion cites almost no fox statements supporting the big lie. Trump was livid at Fox urged supporters to watch Newsmax. Why would he do that if Fox was promoting his lies?

    Baier, Wallace, Stirewalt, McCallum, even Tucker (Nov 19 monologue) all rejected the big lie on air (and privately too it seems). Dominion's case is based largely on Dobbs interviewing Powell, some stupid comments from Judge Jeanine.

    The whole article is based on this mistaken premise as are most of the comments below.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Wj

      > Trump was livid at Fox urged supporters to watch Newsmax. Why would he do that if Fox was promoting his lies?

      This is flips the situation on it's head.

      Trump urged supporters to go to Newsmax when Fox's election decision desk called AZ for Biden, and they listened.

      Fox panicked as ratings plummeted, fired the head of their decision desk team in an attempt to appease Trump, and made a deliberate decision to get behind the election conspiracies even though they knew they were BS. And it worked, more or less.

      (Fun fact: The guy Fox fired as a sacrificial offering to Dear Leader was Chris Stirewalt. Stirewalt now serves as core contributor at a small but venerable little outlet called... The Dispatch)

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      1. Brett

        Okay, quote something Fox did to promote the big lie then. Dominion didn't even try. It argues interviewing Powell was the problem not statements made by on air Fox talent. There's one directionally proTrump quote from Dobbs but it's factually accurate, was covered in the court cases Trump lost, Rudy et al made no effort to subpoena the records Dobbs was talking about as maybe showing fraud (showing Trump's bad faith).

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        1. Avatar photo
          Wj

          > Okay, quote something Fox did to promote the big lie then. It argues interviewing Powell was the problem not statements made by on air Fox talent.

          IANAL, but I'm not sure the bar that needs to be met (in this suit against the *network*), is proof of the hosts themselves explicitly stating lies about Dominion on air.

          The hosts, producers and execs have editorial control over their programs. They used that control to present folks like Rudy, Powell, et al as credible sources and treated their allegations as serious, over and over, despite knowing that it was all untrue. That IS the bad thing they did.

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          Ms. SSM

          Fire Stirewalt. That’s one thing.

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        3. Goatprairie

          The opinioneers could have done more to inform their audience of Trump’s big lie. They more or less let the lie go on.
          Why? Simple, they didn’t want to lose their cult viewers which comprised a large share of their audience.

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          1. Brett

            That's a nice sound bite but it isn't true. Fox more or less refuted the lies. Nothing on MSNBC convinced me Trump lied. What convinced me it was all bogus was listening to Powell and Rudy make their case on Fox.

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    OJFL

    Having given up on cable news since 2015, when the trend Mr. Catoggio highlights was clear, this does not surprise me. The embrace of Mr. Trump by Fox, and by extension Fox Business, ruined my experience. A network that proclaimed to represent conservatism and published in its early days a documentary named "The Right, all along", embraced a big government loudmouth. A network that proclaimed to believe in natural rights embraced brutality. The other channels are not any better. CNN is but a shadow of its old self. So no cable news for us anymore.

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  5. Edgmoran

    I restrict my FOX viewing to the 6 o'clock news program. Bret Baier has the far right wing seal of disapproval for calling the Arizona race for Biden. Poor guy. He was only reporting the news.

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    1. Goatprairie

      If one in incident proves the insanity of the cult it was their outrage over FOX (correctly) calling AZ for Biden…after the polls closed.
      No matter how often you lay the facts before these idiots, they all think that because FOX called it for Biden, Trump lost AZ when he would have won if FOX hadn’t called it for Biden. Even though it didn’t make any difference.

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  6. Tom Johnson

    Great article, made me glad to be a recent subscriber.

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  7. Grantcooter

    This political phenomenon is interesting in how self-destructive it is. I honestly think the majority of the country generally leans more conservative, as life is pretty good at the moment. In the post-Barack environment, Republicans had a chance to win big for a while - some things that Democrats were going for (and did) sounded pretty expensive and generally complicated to deal with.

    Instead, all the nascent brewing of conspiracies and hyperbole broke free and culminated in the rise of Trump. I 100% guarantee this will turn off a big majority of millennial voters, a generation characterized by cynicism, and un-welcoming to mendacious political posers.

    So where Republicans could have started a decade of winning, they instead launched a generation of losing. There might be some wins for them in the near future as the conservative baby boomer demographic remains, but in like 5 to 10 years, things will start turning blue for a good long while.

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    1. MrMalredo

      Conservatives had captured power in all but the most bluest statehouse during the Obama era, engaging in numerous conservative policy reforms at the state level and building up a new generation of conservative talent focused on right-sizing government. The Democratic Party was riding on Obama's personal popularity, in mid terms where Obama himself wasn't on the ballot, the Democrats were shellacked. And in 2016, Obama was termed out and it was going to finally be Hillary's turn for the Dems. The Dems were putting their hopes on a politician that was universally despised, had barely any passionate fanbase, and had no political skills beyond riding her husband's coat-tails. Someone so disliked that she almost lost to gadfly geriatric who is the human equivalent of a Phish concert. And the GOP had an embarrassment of riches, fresh new conservative senators and get-it-done governors.

      And then the party had to have it's emotional cathartis instead of winning by going with Donald Trump.

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      1. Goatprairie

        Yes, excellent summation. Republicans screwed the pooch by going with Trump in 2016. One step forward, ten steps back.

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    2. AJLiberty

      I agree that post-Obama, the GOP had a good opportunity to put forward an optimistic agenda and grow the GOP tent. Instead, whatever was gained in white blue-collar males with Trump's populism, was lost in suburban women and people turned off by his character defects. The only positive working for the GOP is that Biden is not exactly charismatic or inspiring, and though Democrats have their typical collection of legislative initiatives, they're blunted by transgender and woke positions that leave many voters shaking their heads.

      It's unclear if the GOP moves on from Trump and starts messaging beyond its base, whether they can regain their electoral mojo. If nothing else, another big loss in 2024 will compel change. The mafia-Don approach will have to be exchanged for something else. But the base has to decide it wants to be a majority rather than an angry minority. That's not always clear to me.

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      1. Billy Zammit

        As part of the base, I'll make it clear for you: we absolutely do not care at all about winning a majority. Literally no amount of election defeats will convince us to go back to the days of Bush, McCain, Romney and Ryan.

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        1. GenZConservative

          "I should get what I want or I'll take my ball and go home."

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        2. Goatprairie

          I’ll make it clear for you…..people like you screwed the GOP for possibly a decade or more. Why don’t you and the rest of the right-wing ignorati get lost?

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        3. Raincheck

          Wow. “No amount of liberal Democratic rule will make us go back to the days of intelligent, thoughtful leaders.”

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      2. MrMalredo

        I hope another big loss would change things, but I remain skeptical. Trump and Trumpism keeps losing, yet each time afterwards, the Trumpists blame their loss on fraud or sabotage by the establishment and continue their takeover of GOP institutions.

        Here in Michigan, we had a community college instructor/bar trivia host who made up a voter fraud story in 2020 (Or was too dumb to know what was going on) and she rode that to being the GOP nominee for Secretary of State. Then she lost in a landslide (Michigan is a fairly purple state and a very light blue at worst) and after her 14 point loss, she became chairwoman of the Michigan GOP. The party got smoked in Michigan at a level not seen since 2008 when Obama was first on the ballot and then they just doubled-down on everything that led to them losing.

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        1. Goatprairie

          The right-wing ignorati i.e. the cultists have taken over many states. The extent of Trump’s corruption of the party is huge.

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    3. Bobby D

      There’s definitely a certain irony to the fact that the GOP had prolonged the fading relevance of the Democrats by going out of its way to offer voters a worse alternative.

      I’m still looking for a cogent answer as to what benefit anyone expected to gain by platforming craziness. When the nuts in Congress orchestrated the 2011 debt-ceiling showdown, they were giving President Obama a 4- or 5-point bump. And it’s unclear what they got in return.

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  8. Edgmoran

    I gave up on Tucker about a year ago when I caught him in a deliberate misstatement. He was doing his usual anti Fauci bit. No problem with that if that's the way he sees that situation. He plays a short bit of an answer that Fauci was giving to some on screen reporter. He then paraphrases what Fauci had just said and attacks. Problem: Fauci had not said what Tucker said he said. Through the magic of modern day electronics, I dialed back three times and listened to Fauci's words. Nope, he didn't say what you just said he said, Tucker....to make your point. How often does he do this, I thought. Goodbye, Tucker

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    1. Mary Stine

      I had the same response, but years earlier when Bill O'Reilly was still there. His show did a scathing take down of an African American woman speaking at a school board meeting. The problem with that was the video had been clipped before and after the segment shown, totally altering the real intent of her speech. She protested and other stations showed her entire speech, but Fox just doubled down and lied, especially O' Reilly. I'd had enough of his bombast and ego by that time, so it was the end of my regular viewing of Fox.

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    Earl King

    Grift. It’s the grift. It about money. It is always about money. Why would you hold right media more accountable than left wing media. Both serve their audience.

    You’ve found an audience, if you started losing it what would you do? People are weak.

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  10. Twvacek

    Having only read the commentary and not the motion itself, I have to say I am most assuredly not scandalized by Fox’s behavior. I understand journalists take themselves seriously, but when did anyone start believing that Fox (or MSNBC, CNN, Twitter, or Facebook) is not entertainment? For all of Twitter’s and FB’s travails in censorship, I find the root cause to be abandonment of their core mission. Overt moral hectoring is now interwoven in entertainment with the tenacity of Big Brother. Kudos to Fox for recognizing its mission. I pay money to The Dispatch for entertainment as well, though I get less value from feeling morally and intellectually superior than other subscribers, I suspect.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Pat Riot

      Yep, politics is just entertainment. What happens in Washington will never affect you. Lawmakers only affect other people's lives, not yours. So what if millions of Republicans are lied to by what purports to be one of our major US news sources, and they attack the US Capitol and shit on the floor there and kill some people. No skin off your nose. Etc.

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      Wj

      > I understand journalists take themselves seriously, but when did anyone start believing that Fox is not entertainment?

      Credibility and entertainment value are distinct and can come in any combination:

      * Credible and entertaining
      * Not credible and entertaining
      * Credible and not entertaining
      * Not credible and not entertaining

      The Dispatch might entertain you, but they are also credible. Fox News might entertain you, but you they are not credible (and even lie maliciously).

      I think even those Fox News viewers who understand the infotainment aspect of cable news, also think they are still getting credible information, when they are actually getting the opposite. Their audience isn't in on the scam.

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