Kathryn J. McGarr is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of "City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington."
Documents from a defamation lawsuit by Dominion, a manufacturer of voting machines, have laid bare that Fox News executives and hosts knew that claims of fraud and a stolen 2020 election were false but that they allowed allies of Donald Trump to push these claims on their airwaves anyway. The revelations have been shocking to many observers. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a moment like this, where a major news network has been exposed as deliberately deluding its viewers or readers,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told a Washington Post columnist. “This is a seminal moment in the history of mass media. And we need to treat it that way.”
While the exposure of the gap between what Fox personnel thought behind the scenes and what aired on their network has shown the network to be mercenary and uninterested in journalistic integrity, the situation of a news organization’s private memos betraying a certain amount of hypocrisy is less unusual than many like Murphy think. Fox executives and hosts were stuck grappling with a question that has plagued the media for a century or more: How should outlets cover false claims from political officials and their allies? After all, as...
stage at the Ninth Circuit, where pharmaceutical companies say a momentous new ruling "illustrates perfectly" the constitutional concerns of U. S. Supreme Court justices regarding FCA enforcement. ...