Fox News Got a Bargain: Putin and Xi Did, Too

History matters, including sage words that help illuminate current events. Rupert Murdoch may have had Samuel Johnson’s famous line in mind last week when he agreed to fork over $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle its defamation suit against Fox News out of court. "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates the mind wonderfully," the 18^th Century English poet and essayist said. Who knows? For Murdoch, the prospect of testimony under oath in a Delaware court just might have had the same effect.

Instead, Fox ran a full page ad in the mainstream media on the day the company settled up. George Orwell would have smiled. Fox News, the headline proclaimed, "Trusted Now. More Than Ever." Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19^th Century New England philosopher, wasn’t in the news business, but he knew hypocrisy when he saw it. "The louder he talked of his honor," Emerson wrote of an encounter 150 years ago, "the faster we counted our spoons."

The post-settlement analysis has produced the usual group think among the experts. The legal commentariat is proclaiming new mile markers at the intersection of First Amendment freedoms and the media's license to market mendacity. Green eyeshade types are fussing over the near-billion-dollar hit on Fox's cash hoard. And attorneys and accountants alike are calling the award unprecedented. But is it? After raking it in as the Trump administration's ministry of truth, Fox’s $787.5 million spanking pales beside the payoff from its nonstop prevarication since Trump first threw his hat in the presidential ring.

From 2017-2022, the Fox network’s annual revenues added up to some $70 billion, leading the competition hands-down. As a share of that total over Fox’s six years of broadcasting as Trump’s favored prime time propagandist, the Dominion penalty represents a miniscule one percent. Or consider the five-year period of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and White House term. Even as a give-back from Fox News’ $8.1 billion in profits from 2016-2020, at 10 percent of its total profits the price for dissing Dominion is a modest hit.

But the relative size of the media giant’s penalty isn’t the only story. In avoiding any admission of guilt, the settlement’s anodyne apology all but Teflon coats Fox’s image in the eyes of its faithful audience as well as protects its business model: to prevaricate in order to keep its viewers happy and profits rolling in. The financial payment to Dominion notwithstanding, the real cost of Fox’s actions also won’t come out of its pockets. That damage -- to democracy and the country’s security -- only shows up on the nation’s books.

A Rand Corporation study released a few days before Fox and Dominion settled makes the point. Truth Decay and National Security is the latest product from the think tank’s multiyear effort to examine the eroding role of facts and analysis in public discourse. The Rand research examines Truth Decay’s effects on public opinion, politics and policymaking. Because Rand’s work casts a wide net, nothing could be a more relevant guide for exploring the damage done by Fox’s role via its knowing broadcast of lies.

The Rand study isn’t a treatise for foreign policy wonks. It puts national security in a wider context. "Truth Decay," the analysis asserts, "affects the United States on individual, institutional, societal and normative levels." Specifically, the Rand authors explore the interaction of foreign and defense affairs with "trends, such as polarized or partisan policymaking; the paralysis that partisanship can bring to the policymaking process; and the virulent spread of misinformation, pervasive conspiracy theories and extremism at both ends of the political spectrum."

National security policy faces "a growing volume of opinionating, blurred borders between opinion and fact, declining trust in expertise as well as disputes about facts themselves." The resulting problem isn’t just nastier or more nonsensical debates. "Polarization is the primary driver of Truth Decay," the Rand authors write. The consequences erode civil discourse and produce political paralysis, potentially impacting "America’s ability to use national power," including "national security resources and resilience to homeland security threats."

That the country’s adversaries, no less than Fox News producers, have been paying attention to the lies corrupting the current political climate and how to use them goes without saying. The effects of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Laura Ingram bannering their knowingly mendacious commentary on a stolen election, or for that matter, Ukrainian Nazis, Deep State operatives or January 6^th as an FBI plot to frame that day’s innocent Capitol Hill visitors hasn’t been lost on the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Russia and China are hard at work in exploiting mis- and disinformation of all sorts. Only last week, for example, the Justice Department announced the indictment of four U.S. citizens and three Russian nationals for conspiring to sow racial discord and for election meddling. For Moscow and Beijing, Fox’s willingness to push prevarications in prime time has been a big help. In 2019 the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a multivolume study of Russia’s clandestine political warfare during the 2016 election. They put its scope this way.

"Russia is waging an information warfare campaign … that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election. Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in … government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans …. Other adversaries, including China, North Korea and Iran, are following suit."

Rand, of course, isn’t the only one spotlighting the dangers that Fox News’ actions represent. Reflecting on the Fox-Dominion settlement, Britain’s Financial Times put the onus for the damage done squarely on the Murdoch empire’s crown jewel. "Fox News played a key role in perpetuating the most dangerous instance of fake news to date in a democracy … Fox pandered to its conservative viewership, but the alternative reality it created fed their tribalism and paranoia. When the Trump narrative parted ways with reality, viewers preferred hearing the lie. Fox continued to give them what they wanted."

Do the headlines recounting the settlement, including the voluminous evidence that Fox knowingly broadcast stolen election lies about Dominion Voting Systems, matter? Unfortunately when it comes to its viewers, opinion surveys suggest not. As the Dominion trial approached this month, Fox remained the most watched cable news network. Among Fox News viewers polled for Variety last month, 50 percent said revelations the network propagated lies had no effect on their belief that the 2020 election was stolen. As for any penalty, a Quinnipiac University poll in March found only 41 percent of Republicans believed the network should be held accountable.

To be sure, when it comes to Fox’s legal travails the Dominion case isn’t the end of the line. Smartmatic, another election services provider similarly smeared by Fox’s guests and hosts, is pursuing a $2.7 billion claim. A disgruntled investor is suing Murdoch and Fox Corporation board members for violating their fiduciary duties. And news reports suggest more stockholder firms appear grouchy enough to join the litigious queue.

Will Fox News change its business model or on-air acts, much less address the moral and ethical vacuum at their core? Don’t hold your breath. After all, just look at the ratings. And those numbers don’t even include viewers in Moscow and Beijing where Fox is a must-watch. Putin and Xi have their troll armies on the clock taking notes. No question they’ll be tuning in.

Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.

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