The recent lawsuit brought by the Dominion voting machine company against Fox News has taken an interesting turn. If you haven't heard, the voting machine company is suing the news network because it believes that the news broadcasters and commentators on the network echoed Donald Trump's assertions that Dominion's voting machines were rigged against him in the 2020 election. Those assertions were echoed without any proof, even when Fox News knew there was no evidence for them. Not surprisingly, the network has responded to the lawsuit by claiming that they have freedom of the press and we'll see how it turns out.
The really crazy thing here is that the company's lawsuit against Fox has turned up some internal communications between people at Fox working both behind and in front of the cameras who knew full well that many of the claims made by the guest speakers on their shows concerning the election were simply not true. Not only did they know that were untrue, they sometimes expressed that in stark terms: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Messaged on air personality Tucker Carlson to fellow on air personality Laura Ingram. She responded by saying that Powell was a "complete nut.” Powell was the lawyer who pushed some of the more aggressive (and crazy!) conspiracies about the 2020 election, and who was given multiple chances to appear on the network and rant away unchallenged. Another on air personality, Sean Hannity, called Powell a "fucking lunatic". Meanwhile, Fox News president Jay Wallace described the craziness of on air personality Lou Dobbs by saying "The North Koreans put on a more nuanced show."
What this reveals is what those of us who do not reside in the right wing news bubble have known all along: while they may be sincere in their conservative beliefs, many people at Fox do not believe many of their own stories. They fully understand that their network is more about making money than news reporting or even pushing a political agenda. Putting it bluntly, coming up with ways to make their mostly old, white, male audience angry so that they won't change the channel is their bottom line. If that means putting on people on their shows that they themselves characterize as "fucking lunatics", then that's what they will do.
This cynical, money driven philosophy by the biggest news network in the country shows what a lie the false equivalency people draw between Fox News and MSNBC is. You can disagree with Rachel Maddow all you want, but the idea that she would have people on her show that she knows are liars and allow them to spew nonsense without questioning them, is absurd. These communications show that Fox News (and let's face, most of the right wing media) lie openly to profit from telling their viewers what they want to hear without ever challenging them in any way.
The specific reason behind Fox's turn to conspiracies after the 2020 election illustrates that point: it was Fox News that first called the state of Arizona for Biden in the 2020 election, which was a big step towards Biden's eventual victory. When Fox viewers, egged on by Trump, were mad about this "betrayal" (even though the call was correct), they started turning towards the new, even more right wing network, Newsmax. When Fox saw this happening, they quickly turned towards stolen election theories in their "reporting", inviting on Powell and other conspiracy theorists. So, it was just all about greed, or as Hannity messaged about the possibility of another conservative network rising during the fallout from the Arizona call, “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”
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