The Internal Decapitation of Fox News

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The Internal Decapitation of Fox News
Documents from Dominion Voting Systems’s lawsuit against Fox show the network’s awareness of the flimsiness of its stolen-election narrative.

By Chris Lehmann


(The Nation) "I have been internally decapitated, and, yet, I live…. The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it.” Thus speaks the oracle at the center of the great conspiracy theory that nearly toppled the American republic. The writer was an unnamed correspondent of Sidney Powell, the most visible—and most unhinged—promoter of the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen by Joe Biden. A vast tranche of damning discovery and testimony surfaced late last week as part of the $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox in March 2021. The company’s petition for summary judgment furnishes the basis for this dumbfounding saga; you can read the 200-page document here.

The head-challenged wind-talker reached out to Powell at a pivotal moment in the crank lawyer’s effort to delegitimize the 2020 balloting. Shortly after the election, Powell had gamely floated a theory during an interview with Fox News host Lou Dobbs that a secret CIA program called “Hammer and Scorecard” had been flipping ballots in Biden’s direction, but the attempt to foment scandal fell flat. Powell fielded the e-mail from this, uh, jumpy and suggestible source the day after her Dobbs appearance, and found one of the claims in it explosive: that Dominion Voting Systems had harnessed a recondite algorithm to manipulate vote counts in favor of the Democratic presidential ticket. (The correspondent threw in a couple of other claims as a bonus—that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been taken out during a human-hunting expedition near the Bohemian Grove plutocratic retreat in Northern California, and that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the latter of whom had at that point been dead three years, met regularly in order to discredit Donald Trump, but these hot tips would have to take a back seat in the election crisis.)

....(snip)....

s it happened, the network had officially called the election for Biden in the two-day interval between Powell’s ill-fated romance with Hammer and Scorecard and the debut of Operation Get Dominion on Bartiromo’s Sunday morning broadcast. That blow, combined with the network’s accurate early call of Arizona for Biden on election night, had enraged the conservative base that furnished the cable leviathan’s $14 billion revenue model. Fox viewers were demanding content telling them Trump had been cheated out of another term, and were streaming over to right-wing cable rival Newmax to lap it up. So Fox executives and on-air talent stampeded to follow Bartiromo’s lead, and took up the bogus Dominion narrative with all deliberate speed. Network CEO Suzanne Scott lamented to one of her underlings that former DC managing editor Bill Sammon failed to grasp “the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ”—an “astonishing” oversight given that Sammon was obliged as “a top executive” to “protect the brand.”

Thus summoned, the brand rallied to the delirious fantasies promoted by Sidney Powell as evidence of a stupendous political crime, and an existential affront to all the right-believing Real Americans marshaled behind the lucrative on-air tantrums thrown by Bartiromo, Dobbs, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and the rest of the network’s lineup. The Dominion petition documents the sheer panic that seized a network forced to adopt a new mode of defamatory demagogy on the fly. When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a Trump tweet that repeated wild fabrications about Dominion while referencing Dobbs and Hannity segments devoted to them, the sanctums of Fox power shook with outrage. Carlson texted Hannity, “Please get her fired… seriously. What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” ...............(more)

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/fox-news-dominion/