With Fox News humbled into a $787.5m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over election lies this week, it might be expected that the conservative TV channel’s outspoken hosts would tone down the misinformation a bit, soften their rhetoric – basically, just chill out.
None of that has happened.
Instead Fox News has continued just where it left off, serving viewers a largely imagined, and utterly terrifying, version of the US: one where trans people are on the warpath, where people in New York City are never more than 6ft from either a rat or being murdered, and where the government is attempting to “send away” Fox News viewers to an undefined but ominous sounding “camp”.
Just a normal week, in other words, as America’s most-watched news channel mainly ignored the Dominion lawsuit – brought after Fox News repeatedly aired untrue accusations that the company’s voting machines had been manipulated to flip votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden – and got back to basics.
On Thursday night Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s most performatively upset host, was churning out the usual hits on his 8pm show, with Hunter Biden, “racial violence”, and “transgenderists” to the fore.
“Say what you will about elected Democrats but they know where the power is. They’re like truffle pigs for power,” was how Carlson began his show. He then made a pig noise, before accusing Joe Biden of attempting to subvert the course of justice regarding an investigation into his son.
“This is not a small story,” Carlson told his audience, seemingly implying that the mainstream media had ignored it: except the story – that a whistleblower had come forward accusing the Department of Justice of going easy on an investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances – had been broken by CBS News, and covered by ABC News, NBC News, the BBC, the Los Angeles Times and Associated Press.
“What we’ve learned here is exactly [what] you suspected all along: the Biden people are criminals,” Carlson said.
Given none of the “Biden people” have been convicted of any crimes, it was the kind of statement a network just sued for defamation might have wanted to avoid, but never mind, because soon Carlson was on to New York City, a favorite bugbear.
“New York City has got a lot dirtier,” Carlson announced to the audience after an ad break.
Dirtier than what? Than where? Than who? We’ll never know, but it’s something to do with Democrats, liberals and possibly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
We learned that there are rats in New York City – the place where Fox News is headquartered – and that the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, is a chump.
On Fox News the viewer is never more than two minutes away from being warned about trans people, and Thursday night was no different.
After inviting on Tulsi Gabbard – a former Democratic congresswoman turned paid rightwing media personality who has been such an ardent defender of Russia and Vladimir Putin that Russian state TV has literally used her appearances as pro-war propaganda – to have a go at trans people in the military, Carlson later declared that trans people are “blowing stuff up”.
“They detonated explosives at the University of Pittsburgh the other night, because somebody said something they didn’t like. That’s what the transgender movement’s up to this week,” Carlson said.
“There is an enormous amount of transgender violence going on,” Carlson continued – news which will come as a surprise to those who have seen crime against trans people rise in recent years.
The story, about activists in Pennsylvania protesting against an anti-trans speaker, was wildly overblown – the “explosives” the students “detonated” consisted of a firework and a smoke bomb, according to police – but you wouldn’t know it from watching Carlson.
“These people are low-IQ thug savages,” he announced.
In the days following the Dominion settlement, Fox News has remained largely silent on its own legal struggles. It reported the end of the lawsuit on its 6pm show on Tuesday, but the channel’s media correspondent, Howard Kurtz, had been rather coy about the details.
“The amount of the settlement has not been disclosed,” Kurtz told viewers – a strange thing to say, given the $787.5m settlement had been reported by almost every news outlet in the US.
“For Dominion, if it lost the case, it ends up with zero, and because of the first amendment concerns […] that would’ve been a roll of the dice for the company that argued that they had been defamed by Fox,” Kurtz added.
It raised the question as to why Fox News paid Dominion the better part of a billion dollars. The question was not answered.
Sean Hannity, the silver-haired, box-faced, Carlson follow-up act, hasn’t mentioned the massive settlement this week. His focus has been elsewhere.
“Coming up, Kamala Harris giggles her way through another public appearance,” read a chyron on his show on Thursday. The vice-president’s laugh has proved an enduring fascination for Hannity, who has repeatedly devoted air time to Harris’s chortling.
The Fox News host had kicked things off with the customary 15 minutes on Hunter Biden’s laptop, before bringing on Laura Ingraham, who hosts her Fox News show at 10pm.
Hannity has been experimenting with hosting a live studio audience recently, and they gave Ingraham a rapturous welcome – the cheers only dying down when she attempted to toss an American football into the crowd and instead hit a spotlight.
Amid a rambling speech which touched on Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and unnamed “destroyers of democracy”, Ingraham turned to Hannity’s audience – predominantly made up of white men with red faces – and gave a stark warning about Democrats’ aims.
“Every one of you sitting here tonight, if they could, I really believe they would shut you down: whether put you in a camp or send you away somewhere so you’re never heard from again,” Ingraham said.
Hannity nodded in agreement.
“These are the only normal people in the country,” he said, referring to the audience. There was a chorus of lusty cheers.
For the crowd, and the viewers at home, it was like a greatest hits show: because that’s what Fox News does.
Every night people are told that a revolving cast of Biden, Democrats, liberals, trans people, Black Lives Matter activists, criminals, China and Hunter Biden are out to get them.
Fox News, and its executives, know what its audience want. They don’t want apologies about allegedly defaming innocent companies. They want fire, and brimstone, and Kamala Harris’s laugh.
On the evidence so far, the Dominion lawsuit isn’t going to stop them getting it.
