Fox News is now on trial for defamation, not for its years-long assault on American democracy and civil discourse.
Still, if Dominion Voting Systems succeeds in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox, it will be a victory for all Americans who care about this country, even the millions whose anxieties about demographic change in the U.S. have been milked for profit by the multinational media conglomerate.
The trial's outcome can't repair the damage that Fox News has inflicted on our society, such as the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories that have motivated white supremacist mass shootings and a failed coup. It can't heal the rupture between conservatives and liberals that company executives have turned into a chasm. But it's an opportunity to hold Rupert Murdoch and his allies accountable for some of its industrial-scale deception that fuels the hate many Americans have for one another and makes it hard to defend our common interests.
Text messages and emails uncovered in the lawsuit show the media giant presented its millions of viewers with lies about the 2020 presidential election being stolen. Those lies undermined faith in our democracy and led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Last week, the judge in the case, Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court, ruled that Dominion can't bring up the Jan. 6 insurrection during the trial because it would be prejudicial to the jury. The case, he said, isn't about whether Fox influenced the insurrection. But the bigger picture is that Dominion wasn't alone in being injured by Fox's lies.
Accountability from the company needs to go beyond any damages it may be forced to pay Dominion. It will need to come from other media organizations, cable companies, politicians and ordinary people refusing to collaborate with or consume its content.
"Treat Fox the way you'd treat Infowars," Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a media watchdog nonprofit, told me. "It's disreputable. It's not a news outlet. It's a far-right outlet."
Carusone's nonprofit is behind the campaign #UnFoxMyCableBox, which urges people to pressure their cable provider to drop Fox News and stop forcing subscribers to subsidize Fox's dirty business.
"The problem with Fox is not that they're biased," Carusone added. "[It's] that they're deceitful. They're not just spinning things. They actually lie. Intentionally, purposefully, regularly."
The judge in the case already determined that Fox's programs spread false statements about Dominion's voting machines being rigged to steal the 2020 election. But Dominion must convince the jury that Fox spread those falsehoods with "actual malice" — i.e., with knowledge of or reckless disregard for their falsity. That's a high bar, but even some conservative commentators say the evidence doesn't look great for Fox.
Dominion sent more than 3,600 emails to Fox News reporters, producers and others detailing how statements about its voting machines — such as that they were used in Venezuela to rig elections for Hugo Chávez or that they flipped Trump votes for Biden — were verifiably false.
Private communications show Fox hosts knew their sources were not reliable. "Sidney Powell is lying by the way," Tucker Carlson wrote to Laura Ingraham a few days after the election. "Sidney is a complete nut," Ingraham replied. "No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy."
Nevertheless, Fox continued to give those two sources a platform to spew nonsense about Dominion. Other Fox executives knew their teams were spreading falsehoods. For example, emails show an executive producer flagging to other executives that host Jeanine Pirro's planned monologue on Dominion was "rife w[ith] conspiracy theories and bs." Fact checkers who identified falsehoods in her script were ignored.
Attempts to tell the truth were considered outrageous and bad for profit. After Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that there was no evidence of voter fraud by Dominion, Carlson texted Ingraham and Sean Hannity: "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke."
That these records expose Fox News as a cynical, political operation shouldn't be surprising. Its founder, Roger Ailes, wrote a plan in 1970 envisioning a media company serving the GOP, resting on the idea that the public is unthinking and "lazy." Disdain for ordinary people is in Fox's DNA.
While Fox isn't the only right-wing media company fueling extremism, it has played a central and leading role because of its size and resources. "When you think about right-wing media, it's an echo chamber, and Fox News is like a conductor of that echo," Carusone observed.
It's ironic that one term Fox News hosts like to use against liberals is "anti-American." What could be more anti-American than a company that cons millions of people into denigrating their democratic institutions?
Whose interest does this propaganda serve? Certainly not Fox's viewers or the fellow Americans they're led to despise. As someone who has been a frequent object of derision on Fox News, including by Carlson, I can report that none of their scapegoating seems to improve the lives or well-being of its consumers, who fill my inbox with enraged, tortured, racist emails each time the network mentions me.
Fox executives might expect me to vilify those people and participate in their vicious cycle of dehumanization. But the real enemies are the billionaires infecting these people with delusions. The trial will determine the damages to Dominion, but the truth is, few people have been more damaged by Fox's content than its fans. Who will make Fox pay for that broader harm?
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