For years, Fox News managed to effectively straddle the barrier between the bizarro world of Donald Trump’s politics and a more reality-focused existence. The network’s coverage and its hosts were sympathetic to Trump’s worldview and also dependent on his supporters, so it was careful to present as a mainstream news outlet without unnecessarily rocking the boat.
After Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, that became untenable. The network called Arizona for Joe Biden, which it shouldn’t have at the time, infuriating Trump-supporting viewers. Then it called the election for Biden, which it should have — but this further infuriated a viewership that was hearing elsewhere that Trump had actually won and that the results were tainted by fraud. Trump said this, incessantly, but so did networks such as One America News and Newsmax. With other sources offering their Trump-loving base the falsehoods they craved, Fox News could no longer straddle that wall.
This was obvious from the outside, but internal documents, released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, proves the point. Fox News executives and prime-time hosts were freaked out that there was so much appetite for obviously false claims and, the documents suggest, they erred on the side of feeding that appetite. The alternative was that their viewership would continue to defect and they would fall into the unpopular liminal space in which so many anti-Trump Republicans had taken up...
Foley partner Lisa Noller, Chair of the Firm’s Litigation Department, will be speaking at the American Bar Association’s Qui Tam & Civil False Claims and Healthcare Fraud Institute in Washingt...