Fox News' Pathological Lying Shows It's Time to Expand the FCC's Authority to Regulate Cable News
Could we be witnessing the eventual demise of the network the late Roger Ailes originally pitched to President Richard Nixon in the 1970s as "GOP TV"?
The most consequential to Fox so-called ānewsāā bottom line is the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems has lodged against it after the āfair and balancedā conservative network peddled the lie that the 2020 election was fraught with inaccuracies and fraud. Network executives and commentators knew they were lying, but continued to look into cameras each day and perpetuated it.
Yet this hasnāt stopped Fox in the least.
Even after the suitās filings revealed multiple network employees admitted they work for a republican propaganda machine, Fox does not appear at all willing to come clean.
Here we all, day 74 of 2023, and Fox so-called ānewsā has continued to promote over 50 lies about the presidential election and former president Trumpās attempted coup against Congress on January 6, 2021.Ā
Media watchdog Media Matters chronicled an exhaustive list of examples.
Here is Independent Womenās Forum senior fellow Gayle Trotter on Fox News MediaBuzz on January 1, featuring, whitewashing the failed coup attempt:
The criticism of the media in this circumstance is that thereās a double standard. So Trump is not allowed to grouse about the results of the 2020 election, but obviously Hillary Clinton, Stacy Abrams, if you want to look back really far, Al Gore, were able to complain about the results of their elections and Trump, you know, did not complain that Biden was elected with the help of the Russians, and that Biden is Putinās puppet.
Fox host Jeanine Pirro spouted:
What we saw as a result of Elon Musk exposing what was going on Twitter was that there wasĀ ā¦ suppression not only of free speech, but suppression in one direction so that there would be an election impacted in one particular way and not both ways.
āWhite replacement theoryā proponent Tucker Carlsonāāāto whom House Speaker Kevin McCarthy submitted privileged camera footage of the attempted coup that overran the Capitolāāāhas spewed the following:
The FBI is now a bigger force in American elections than any single group of voters.Ā
The DOJ has been allowed to prosecute and jail hundreds of nonviolent political protesters whose crime was having the wrong opinions.
The āsketchyā 2020 election has led to a tenuous legitimacy of American democracy.
Sean Hannity:
Twitter, Facebook, Google, other Big Tech companies were coordinating, collaborating with not only the DNC, the Biden campaign, but the upper echelon of your FBIāāāall united in one effort to defeat Donald J. trump and help elect Joe Biden.
Maria Bartiromo:
We knowĀ ā¦ that federal agencies had up to 1,000 people within the government that had their own lists about who theyāre telling Twitter to cancel and the posts to take down.
Piers Morgan:
[Twitter] canceled the [New York Post] story [on Hunter Biden, which is a] perfect example of cancel culture workingĀ ā¦ specifically to thwart democracy and perhaps to change the result of a U.S. election.
The entire mind-boggling list is here.Ā
Fox audiences donāt care theyāre being lied to as long as there is someone manipulating their outrage sensors giving them Democrats to hate.
There is no constitutional prohibition on lying, even if the offender proports to be a cable ānewsā organization. But while lying has been the networkās stock in trade for decades, the Dominion lawsuit could be the Jenga piece necessary to finally bring the whole sham tumbling down.
It could also be the catalyst for Congress to broaden the Federal Communications Commission (FCC )ās authority to sanction cable news outlets as it does network ones held to a higher standard.
Progressive commentator and talk show host Dean Obeidallah explained in a recent piece titled āHereās how we can stop Fox News from peddling more lies on airā:
Just so itās clear, proving news distortion is a high barāāāwhich it should be to ensure we have a free pressā¦ The key is the FCC will ONLY sanction a network if it can be shown they ādeliberately distortedā a news story.
Well, the evidence here couldnāt be more incontrovertible.
Emails and texts confirm Fox executives were so terrified their viewers would switch over to Newsmax, they made a conscious decision to ādeliberately distortā facts about the 2020 election.
Odeidallah adds:
If a network news outlet did this, they would be sanctioned by the FCC from fines to even threats of broadcast license suspensions. But with the cable news, while there are no broadcast licenses, the threat of massive fines should be used to ensure cable news outlets engage in the same robust fact checking that network news outlets do. (And many already do that.)
What Iām advocating would apply of course to all cable news outlets. Meaning that if it can be shown that CNN or MSNBC did exactly what Fox News did here, they, too, should suffer sanctions.
In a study last year titled āThe manifold effects of partisan media on viewersā beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers,ā authors David Broockman of Stanford University and Joshua Kalla of Yale paid viewers $15 an hour to watch less partisan news outlets for seven hours a week for 30 days.
What they found is within that period participants became more discerning, skeptical, and less likely to buy into the fake news to which they had grown accustomed watching hyper-partisan media like Fox and Newsmax.
Study author Joshua Kalla stated:
People who watch cable news tend to be very politically engaged and have strong opinions about politics, limiting the impact of the media. Similarly, they also tend to be strong partisans who might not trust any source not associated with their party.
He added:
A lot of people might expect this audience to completely resist what CNN had to say, but we see people learning what CNN was reporting and changing their attitudes, too. It is therefore surprising that watching CNN had any impact at all in this experiment.
This study is not the first documenting right-wing hate media, particularly Foxās, corrosive effect, however.
In 2010, a WorldPublicOpinion.org study out of the University of Maryland concluded that Fox News viewers were more inclined to be malinformed on numerous domestic issues than other news consumers.
According to that study:
Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely), most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points), the economy is getting worse (26 points), most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points), the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points), their own income taxes have gone up (14 points), the auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points), when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points) and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points).
Could we be witnessing the eventual demise of the network the late Roger Ailes originally pitched to President Richard Nixon in the 1970s as āGOP TVā?