Dominion Destroys Tucker and Fox News
Dominion Destroys Tucker and Fox News
Recently, it was announced that Fox was parting ways with its most popular host, Tucker Carlson.
Let’s say there was a guest -- we’ll call him Dr. Hugo Strange from the Gotham Institute of Technology (G.I.T.) -- who asked to come on the AACONS podcast to accuse Apple of using iPhones to spy on Americans for Russia.
Neither Marie nor I have any information corroborating Dr. Strange’s accusation. We never say otherwise. In fact, we text each other saying that we believe Dr. Strange is either wrong or lying because we don’t see nor will he provide evidence to support his case.
However, others have made similar observations about tech companies, their ability to spy, and their relationship with Russia. And, Dr. Strange is no crackpot. He’s a professor at G.I.T. after all. Besides, his accusation is sensational and he’s famous. Having Dr. Strange on our show would be very good for us.
But, should we be liable to a devastating lawsuit from Apple if the doctor is never able to substantiate his claim? I’m not a lawyer but I would think not.
A counterargument may come from Judge Eric M. Davis, who presided over Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network.
As reported by The NY Times:
“Davis prohibited Fox from arguing that the network was merely reporting on allegations made by Donald Trump and his lawyers, which Fox contended were newsworthy whether or not they were true.”
Disallowing political shows from reporting newsworthy but unverified allegations from important guests is a new and unsustainable standard. Imagine Sunday talk shows without having guests on to spout tales about CornPop, Chinese wet markets, or a planted Russian laptop, out of fear of being sued. One would either need to hire Diogenes to book guests or one might as well preempt these shows with reruns of Columbo.
One of the roles of a journalist is to ask expository questions of credible guests who make credible claims. The guests Fox interviewed about Dominion were credible. Sidney Powell Powell is a former federal prosecutor with a history of trying important court cases; Rudy Giuliani is also an important lawyer who was mayor of New York. Their claims that the Dominion voting machines were vulnerable to hacking were credible as well. On January 10, 2020, NBC posted:
The three largest voting manufacturing companies — Election Systems &Software, Dominion Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic — have acknowledged they all put modems in some of their tabulators and scanners. The reason? So that unofficial election results can more quickly be relayed to the public. Those modems connect to cell phone networks, which, in turn, are connected to the internet.
The largest manufacturer of voting machines, ES&S, told NBC News their systems are protected by firewalls and are not on the “public internet.” But both Skoglund and Andrew Appel, a Princeton computer science professor and expert on elections, said such firewalls can and have been breached.
In fact, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a paper about the “vulnerabilities” of the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X in June of 2022, so credible questions about the vulnerability of the Dominion systems still exist.
Powell’s and Guiliani’s claims were quickly challenged by the Fox hosts. Tucker Carlson raised suspicion about Powell as early as November of 2020, only weeks after the election, and days after Powell and company began making their claims publicly, on his show and in print:
[Powell] never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of polite requests. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they also told us Powell had never given them any evidence to prove anything she claimed at the press conference.
Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous, and she's right, but she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.
Given how quickly Tucker denounced Sidney Powell’s claims against Dominion, one wonders what harm Fox could have inflicted upon them to warrant a $1.6 billion dollar lawsuit.
As attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz stated:
“Dominion did not lose three-quarters of a billion dollars from Fox’s alleged defamation. It’s unlikely they actually lost very much at all; indeed they probably gained considerable credibility and additional business. This was especially so since the judge made findings favorable to Dominion’s professionalism.”
It was on February 15, 2022, barely over a year ago, that the New York Times reported that Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against it for falsely linking her to a mass shooting(!!!) was rejected by a jury after the judge said he intended to dismiss the case. The paper reported that, “The jury’s verdict, and the judge’s decision, served as a validation of the longstanding legal precedent that considers an occasional mistake by the media a necessary cost of discourse in a free society.“
Today we see media outlets celebrating the Dominion lawsuit despite it being an assault on that “longstanding legal precedent” and an undermining of the protection afforded the media by the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan Supreme Court decision.
This would not be the case if the defendant was not “a right-wing media outlet” and such a dominating competitor in the news business.
But more than this is that Fox, by platforming Powell and Guiliani, had touched upon the growing list of third rails in modern political discourse. One cannot call transwomen “men,” one cannot defend Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, most of all, one cannot challenge the legitimacy of Biden’s victory over Trump, however specious that victory was, without retaliation.
Fox has learned this the hard way, so much so that they agreed to pay $787 million dollars to settle a lawsuit a very winnable lawsuit.
Recently, it was announced that the network was parting ways with its most popular host, Tucker Carlson. Although the exact reason for this split has not been announced as of this writing, one can reasonably suspect that Tucker’s lingering skepticism over 2020 is a major reason for the split.
If this is correct, if the network will be cowed by the same forces most of its audience disdains, then it is the end of Fox.
—DK