On election night 2012, the Fox News decision said Barack H. Obama would win Ohio and therefore the presidential election. The announcement flabbergasted republican operative Karl Rove who was sitting in as a guest analyst--not to mention GOP candidate Mitt Romney who was in the middle of rehearsing his victory speech.
Rove's astonishment and disbelief moved him to claim the decision desk was wrong. It set him off babbling about thousands of uncounted votes in Hamilton County, a republican stronghold.. Romney's initial reaction to the news is unknown. However the news was so stunning to Fox management they sent one of their anchors into the bowels of the studio in order to interview the head of the decision team. He just smiled and said the team was confident in their decision. Late that night when the Fox prediction came true, Mitt Romney graciously accepted his defeat, then moved to Utah where he would later become a U.S. senator.
Eight years later things were , let's say, different. On election night 2020 Fox once again made an early surprise call. This one telling the world Joe Biden would carry Arizona. With the full support of Fox the White House was then occupied by a fully functioning psychopath named Donald Trump.
Trump and his supporters howled like gut shot wolves. Shouts of treason filled the air and more darkly Trump began alleging fraud in not only Arizona, but everywhere else he lost. Some of the blame for the upset loss fell onto Fox News, not because they hadn't supported Donald Trump during the campaign, but because they had simply broadcast what their decision desk said was going to happen.
Hey, sometimes the truth hurts. Especially when you tell it to cult fanatics.
Of course Trump's backup plan in case he did lose had always been to claim the election was stolen. By the end of the week, when it finally became crystal clear Joe Biden would be the next president the plot was well underway.
Fox, already stinging from the mob's criticism and seeing some of its viewers defect to places like OAN and Newmax,, made a business decision to go along with the big lie. The truth, which had always been expendable on the network, had become a downright liability..
Unfortunately in order to undercut the truly wild eyed loons on the smaller networks Fox had to put people on the air who were, you know, bat shit crazy They included the unhinged Mike Lindell, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. All of them, with endorsements from Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, savaged the makes of Dominion voting machines.
Dominion bit back.
Defamation suits began to fly and so did subpoenas. Now it has been revealed in texts and emails everyone at Fox, right up to ol' Rupe Murdoch himself knew the big lie was, well, a big lie. Fox News wasn't airing the bizarre accusations, and theories because they thought they might be true, or even newsworthy. As proven by the internal communications they knew their guests were lying. They aired, unchallenged, those lies just to grab a few more ratings points.
They were so desperate to continue the lies at one point Carlson sent a message to Hannity begging for a fact checker to be fired because she had tweeted the truth. The company stock is falling, he wrote, this is no joke.
The tweet was deleted, it is unclear if the fact checker retained her job. Meanwhile the unholy triad of Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham continue to lie about the 2020 election results, even after their texts admitting their disbelief in them became public.
When my wife watches some ultra right wing politico go off their nut she invariably asks the question, "Do you think he, or she, actually believes what they are saying?"
Obviously we now have the answer she has sought for so long. At least when it comes to Fox News, no, they do not.
Welcome to journalism in the 21st century.
2-18-23
For quite some time now, much of the media wants to be the news, not report the news.
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