Other than former President Donald Trump himself, there may be no voice in America more culpable for spreading the dangerous myth of a stolen Nov. 3 election than Fox News. The cable network has duped millions of its viewers into accepting Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories and lies that fueled the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Now Fox faces a $2.7 billion defamation suit by a voting-machine manufacturer that the network’s hosts and guests claimed — ludicrously — was “flipping” votes against Trump. Perhaps a crippling legal judgment is what it will finally take to get Fox to stop poisoning democracy.
Fox News presenters didn’t just spin the facts, they outright misrepresented them. In the weeks after the Nov. 3 election, hosts like Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, and their guests, relentlessly promoted Trump’s debunked claims of mass voter fraud, often presenting this disproven falsehood as if it was established fact.
Among the most egregious lies was a conspiracy theory repeatedly spewed by Trump lawyers (and frequent Fox guests) Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. They created a fiction out of thin air that a company called Smartmatic, which operates electronic voting systems, was founded by cronies of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez “in order to fix elections,” and that Smartmatic machines flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden to help Biden win the election.
A few small problems: Smartmatic has nothing to do with Chávez. There’s zero evidence its machines have ever altered a vote, nor that such a scheme is even plausible. Also, Smartmatic’s only work in the election was for one California county, with no involvement in the states Trump’s team tried to dispute. In other words, the explosive vote-flipping allegations Giuliani and Powell repeatedly made on Fox — with credulous reception by Fox’s hosts — were 100% bunk.
Fox has acknowledged as much by airing a disclaimer that features an election expert who says, in essence, that everything Fox had been promoting about the supposed vote-flipping was false. That attempt to ward off litigation has failed — and deservedly so. Smartmatic’s suit, running almost 300 pages, names Dobbs, Bartiromo, Pirro, Giuliani, Powell and Fox itself as defendants. It identifies about 100 “false statements and implications” about Smartmatic made on Fox, and claims the damage to the company’s reputation could cost it some $500 million in lost future profits.
Fox hasn’t explained its subsequent decision to cancel Dobbs’ highly rated show. Perhaps the network is finally starting to understand that employing these kinds of professional liars creates more liability than profit. The network shamelessly treats facts as a hindrance when shaping its contorted message, with no concern for the damage it does to democracy. Hitting Fox’s bottom line is likely the only way to get it to start acting responsibly.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
