The trial pitting Fox News against Dominion Voting Systems, which is seeking $1.6 billion in damages for defamation, begins Monday. At the center of the legal squabble are thousands of documents and recordings proving that Fox personalities knew that what they were saying on air - that the Dominion voting machines were rigged to help Biden win the 2020 election - was completely false. Fox lawyers will play the "freedom of speech" card, but they will seriously squirm as they try to defend their odious client.
Why did Fox do it? Ratings. The minute the network rightly called the election for Biden in Arizona, diehard Trump supporters fled the channel and went to the more conservative Newsmax which signed on to the Big Lie. The beancounters at Fox freaked out and demanded that their talking heads stem the bleeding by going back and telling the viewers what they wanted to hear rather than the truth, making Dominion one of the scapegoats along the way.
Simply put, Fox chose profits over the truth.
Herein lies the greatest threat to our democracy - the inability of good, smart, people who think the last presidential election was stolen because they keep their TV tuned only to Fox. Sadly I know some of them personally.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help getting the feeling of schadenfreude, knowing that Fox is about to get its clock cleaned. Let’s hope that it might finally be able to tell time after Rupert Murdoch writes that big fat check.
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