Fox News and the Lies, Lies, Lies It Told

The threat of disinformation to American democracy

The right-wing news media spread Trump’s lies year after year—and now shoulders a large share of the responsibility for the Capitol siege and the continued threat of political extremist violence that faces us now.

Little lies, big lies, it didn’t matter. The conservative media ecosystem ate them up and spit them out. Modulated to prop up Trump’s narcissistic grandiosity, to tap into white grievance, and to appeal to conservative sensibilities, the lies—predictably challenged by Democrats and principled Republicans who embrace facts, reason, honest debate, and a consensus notion of truth—generated political drama that made for great copy and television and thus big profits.

Fox News is the center of this conservative media world.

In 2014, two years before Trump was elected president, the Pew Research Center released the report “Political Polarization & New Media Habits” showing that Fox News was the main source of news for 47% of conservatives.

By 2020, Pew Research revealed that 65% of conservatives trusted Fox News more than any other outlet.

Fox News, eager to keep its top spot in cable news ratings, was happy to have the president call into its shows and tell lie after lie with little to no correction. Fox News welcomed Trump’s revolving door of press secretaries and advisers and allies, too, and fed their lies directly into the credulous hearts and minds of its viewers. Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, with their algorithms built to monetize and incentivize the infectious spread of big lies (the bigger, the better!) amplified the lies.

Some lies were small, silly lies, like the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd.

Some were medium-sized, consequential lies, like Trump’s repeated claim that a national health care plan was imminent.

And many lies were big, consequential lies, like Trump’s claims that the coronavirus would soon disappear and that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Slowly, the lies accumulated until a large group of conservatives lived in an alternate reality spun largely from the threads of disinformation.

Pew Research has just released new polling information about the Capitol riot. Roughly 34% of voters believe Trump won the election. And most of these “believe he bears no responsibility for the Capitol riot.”

Trump’s lies, repeated on Fox News and amplified on social media, have produced mass delusion and fueled mass extremist violence, the greater part of it white supremacist in nature.

I am not alone in this conclusion.

Brian Stelter, chief media correspondent for CNN, said that Fox News and Facebook “hosted and repeated President Donald Trump's lies that led to the siege.” The Washington Post’s conservative columnist Max Boot believes we need to hold Fox News accountable. As he points out, Media Matters for America found that in the two weeks after the decision desk at Fox News called the election for Biden, the news shows “cast doubt on the results nearly 800 times.” In an exceptional story, Ben Smith, the media columnist for the New York Times, lays the blame directly at the feet of Fox News:

“There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths [Trump’s lies about election fraud]. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.” Ben Smith, New York Times, Jan. 17, 2021

And now, in a Financial Times interview, James Murdoch has called out his father Rupert Murdoch and older broth Lachlan Murdoch, who run Fox News: “Those outlets that propagate lies to their audience have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces that will be with us for years,” he said, speaking of the lies that led to the Capitol riot. He didn’t name his family or Fox News, but we all know who and what he was talking about.

What can be done about Fox News? How can it be prevented from polluting the public sphere and destroying democracy?

Stay tuned. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your ideas.

Best, Kathy