Mark Lennihan/AP Photo
A headline about President Donald Trump is displayed outside Fox News studios in New York on November 28, 2018.
After this piece was written, copyedited, about to be posted online, and just after it was emailed to subscribers, Fox agreed to a settlement with Dominion this afternoon, rather than endure more revelations of its misconduct during trial, and the possibility that any fair-minded jury might award Dominion not only with the $1.7 billion it had requested but even more in punitive damages. In the fourth paragraph of the original piece, below, I had suggested that my suggestions could still pertain in the event of a settlement. Let me just add here that I think deporting Rupert Murdoch is still a swell idea and very much in America’s national interest. The original piece follows.
As I write this afternoon, the opening arguments in the trial of Dominion v. Fox News are set to begin tomorrow. And whatever the trial’s outcome, I think we—progressives, empiricists, fans of informed electorates and democratic values, men and women of goodwill—should involve ourselves in the process.
Because this trial doesn’t merely pit one wronged Canadian voting machine company against Fox News. Anyone concerned about the degradation of our democracy and civic life wrought by Fox’s two decades of Big Lie, neo-Goebbelsesque propaganda has a stake in its outcome. Merely following the trial, however avidly, will fail to grasp the opportunity that the coming revelations (there have been plenty already) of Fox’s democracy-destabilizing duplicity present to us all.
To wit: The vast majority of Fox News viewers access its daily distortions and hourly horrors through their cable TV providers. The coming weeks provide the optimal opportunity for cable TV subscribers to pressure those cable companies to drop Fox News from their offerings. And while emails, phone calls, Facebook and Twitter posts, and what have you from individuals should deluge the cable conglomerates, they would also be far more effective if they were part of an organized campaign put together by some empirically minded institution or institutions. If the cable companies respond that they won’t go in for the kind of content moderation that responsible social media platforms have engaged in, I suppose one fallback demand would be that Fox at least take the word “News” out of its title as a condition for continuing on cable. (“Fox’s Fascist Fantasies” might be an acceptable substitute.)
Even if the two sides in the suit agree on a settlement before the trial begins (which, I suppose, is a possibility that keeps delaying the opening statements), I think that the pretrial revelations and whatever outrages Fox admits to as a condition of a settlement will still provide ample grounds for waging such a campaign.
A modest parallel campaign we could all engage in would be to demand that the government deport both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Pretrial revelations have already made clear that both were aware of the falsity of the claims made on their tightly controlled network that Donald Trump had actually won the 2020 election but for the alleged chicanery of Dominion and deceased Third World dictators. Those revelations have also made clear that their fears that Fox might lose its audience if it actually reported that Joe Biden had won that election fair and square prompted them to let the network continue to elide that fact and to indulge in preposterous claims to the contrary.
Lachlan Murdoch, the top dog at Fox News, is an Australian citizen who’s here on some kind of green-card arrangement. Australian native Rupert, who is the pit bull atop Lachlan, wrangled an American citizenship in the mid-1980s as he was first attempting to buy some U.S. television stations. At the time, the law required that a noncitizen of the United States could own no more than 20 percent of a TV station.
America has deported resident aliens and immigrant citizens for far less than the damage that the Murdochs have brought down upon the United States. Indeed, it’s hard to think of any other immigrant to this country who’s done even remotely as much as Rupert to tear his adopted nation apart. (Among the native-born, you almost have to go back to Jefferson Davis to find someone who sundered the union on so massive a scale.)
So in addition to pressuring the cable companies to dump Fox News, we should also consider strategically located demonstrations demanding at least Rupert’s deportation, in the process also affirming our support for democracy and factually based reporting, and providing wholesome outdoor fun for Americans of all ages.
