Think that settlement was a big win for Dominion Voting Systems? Think the settlement – or the firing Tucker Carlson – will make Fox change in any way? Think again. Here is a game plan for finishing the job that Dominion only started.
Nobody’s saying much about why Tucker Carlson got fired. But one thing is clear: it sure wasn’t about concern for his, um, journalistic standards.
Now that would be news.
Nah. Some think Carlson angered Fox top brass with his texts about how stupid and incompetent the management was. Others speculate it is because of what will come out in Fox Producer Abby Grossberg’s lawsuit charging that Carlson’s show was a hostile work environment.
But nowhere do we see Fox stepping forward and saying that lying to its viewers is the reason Tucker Carlson had to go.
In some ways, the handling of the Carlson firing reinforces a crucial point: nothing – not the Dominion lawsuit, not the settlement, not Carlson – is going to change Fox’s modus operandi.
And that is a problem for all of us.
You see, the lawsuit was all about the defamation of a company… Dominion Voting Systems.
But nothing is being done about the defamation of the American system of free and fair elections. Donald Trump and Fox News conspired to make a full quarter of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Who is going to fix that? And how do we do it? Today, a modest proposal…
The idea that Fox had been humiliated and would change its stripes certainly seemed to be the progressive pundit fantasy when word exploded on April 17 about the last-second settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. The liberal media bubble veritably climaxed with an eruption of schadenfreude the likes of which have not been witnessed since the Red Sox came back from down three to beat the Yankees in the ALCS in 2004.
Lawrence O’Donnell opened his 10:00 segment on MSNBC’s “The Last Word” by labeling Rupert Murdoch “stupid” at least once a minute until the first commercial break. The essence of O’Donnell’s argument was that if Fox was going to settle, the infinitely more logical time to do so would have been before document discovery began… that is, prior to the dizzying parade of texts and emails that revealed Fox News executives and Prime Time personalities to be morally bankrupt charlatans who lied on the air in order to stoke their ratings and profits.
Other left-leaning pundits salivated not only at the enormity of the settlement, but simply that the financial details of such agreements were not required to be held secret -- as is almost always the case in such negotiations. Many opinion writers rejoiced in the official statement that Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” Clearly, taken in sum, this appeared to be a colossal triumph for Dominion.
Well, not so fast.
Dominion won a big cash settlement, to be sure. And yes: Dominion is a business, and they have no obligation to think about anything beyond their shareholders, their customers, their bottom line, and their own goals in filing the suit. They can walk away from this deal with a big smile.
But there’s a strong argument that Fox News also got exactly, precisely what it needed out of the settlement.
Nowhere in this settlement was Fox News ever required to have its Prime Time line-up of liars stare into the cameras and announce to their loyal audience that they had routinely deceived them.
Nowhere in this settlement did Fox News face the risk of having those big Prime Time personalities and top management testify under oath, admitting to having said all the ugly deceits that were revealed in texts.
In no way did this settlement risk the long term viability of Fox News. Fox viewers, who never venture out of their insular media bubble, may never, ever, once hear that Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, or Laura Ingraham lied to them for money. Fox viewers will never know a thing… and that gives Fox a true “get out of jail free,” enabling them to continue to print money off the back of ignorant, easily manipulated viewers for far into the future.
The defamation trial itself was going to be six weeks of daily gruesome humiliation for Fox News executives and on-air personalities. Now… poof! That worrying threat is gone.
Heck, even the amount of the settlement -- as huge as it sounds – is not that heavy a lift for Fox News. They make that kind of money every six months.
Now what we hear out of the left-leaning media is how the settlement with Dominion sets Fox up for another calamity with Smartmatic, the next election technology company to sue Fox for defamation. Maybe. But the far more likely interpretation is that there is now a playbook that both companies can follow to a far more rapid, private settlement.
No, the conclusion has to be that Fox will navigate this potentially mortal blow with a few skid marks and a couple of irate Board members.
And as of today, a full 25% of Americans still believe that the election of 2020 was rigged, fraudulent, stolen.
Dominion Voting Systems came away from this lawsuit with buckets of cash… but what about the rest of us?
It is time that we realize that the real losers in this corporate war are the American people.
The American people are the losers because a bunch of politicians and a major television network decided to lie in order to stoke the outrage of their viewers to spur higher ratings and more profit. In so doing, those politicians and that network destroyed the reputation of American elections for a full quarter of our voting population.
Fox News viewers – who tend to be those who now doubt the integrity of our elections – will never know that the attack on our elections was a coordinated, malevolent, orchestrated lie.
And the majority of Americans – that is, people who do believe in the integrity of our elections -- must deal with the fact that a quarter of the population will not accept the results if their candidate loses.
There is, however, an answer that addresses all these issues. And it’s not that hard to implement.
Dominion Voting Systems should take $100,000,000 of its settlement money and make a gigantic advertising buy on NFL Football this fall.
It should use this advertising campaign to tell Americans that when Fox News pushed a phony story about election fraud, it was lying. And it should use the ad campaign to tell Americans that its elections are free, fair, and should be respected as binding.
Why run ads on the NFL? Well, Fox would never let Dominion run ads on Fox – but NFL football is the next best way to reach viewers of Fox News.
Everyone watches the NFL. In 2022, the eight top-rated television shows were NFL football games. Of the top 100 television programs in 2022, a mind-frying 82 were NFL football telecasts.
Yes, everyone… including tons of Fox News viewers. Sure, MSNBC viewers too. And CNN. Nearly 100,000,000 Americans watch the Super Bowl.
We may have political media bubbles, but there is no bubble when it comes to NFL football. We all tune in.
Pony up $100,000,000 for an advertising buy on the NFL, and you will be as ubiquitous as Bud Light, Verizon, and Chevy Silverado.
That’s the idea, Dominion: make an ad buy that is absolutely guaranteed to reach a huge segment of Fox News viewers, and then hire an ad agency to create TV commercials that are simply a compendium of every text, every email, and every quote that a Fox employee ever said about Dominion Voting Systems, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump… and Fox viewers themselves.
The commercials don’t have to be fancy. Heck, all you need is to have the actual quotes in scrolling type over photos of Powell, Giuliani, Fox executives, and Fox on-air personalities as the voice-over announcer reads…
Proposed Dominion Commercial #1:
Primary Voice Over:
“On November 18, 2020, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham at Fox News exchanged texts about Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who appeared frequently on Fox News to claim that there was rampant fraud in the 2020 Presidential election. Carlson wrote:”
A second, different male voice-over reads the actual Carlson quote:
"Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It's insane.”
A female voice-over reads the actual Ingraham quote:
"Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy."
Primary Voice Over:
“We at Dominion Voting Systems are running television commercials to show that Fox News knowingly lied to its viewers to try to create doubt about our voting machines – and about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
It’s time that all Americans learn that Fox News knowingly lies to its viewers.
And it’s time that Fox viewers finally know what the rest of America already knows… elections in America are free, fair, and honest.”
Proposed Dominion Commercial #2:
Primary Voice Over:
“On January 21, 2021, Rupert Murdoch wrote an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, in which he expressed regret for the claims that Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham made on Fox News alleging that the election was rigged.”
A second, different voice-over reads the actual Murdoch email:
“Maybe Sean and Laura went too far. All well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump… but did he have to tell his viewers?”
Primary Voice Over:
“We at Dominion Voting Systems are running television commercials to show that Fox News knowingly lied to its viewers to try to create doubt about our voting machines – and about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
It’s time that all Americans learn that Fox News knowingly lies to its viewers.
And it’s time that Fox viewers finally know what the rest of America already knows… elections in America are free, fair, and honest.”
Proposed Dominion Commercial #3:
Primary Voice Over:
“In November and December, 2020, lawyer Sidney Powell appeared frequently on Fox News to claim that there was rampant fraud in the 2020 Presidential election. Fox executives and broadcaster personalities knew that Powell was lying, but they continued to feature her lies prominently in their coverage.
On November 23, Fox Senior Vice President Raj Shah wrote to his superiors and admitted that Powell had no proof for the allegations of election fraud, even as they continued to feature her on their programming.
A second, different voice-over reads the actual Raj Shah quote.
“We encouraged several sources within the administration to tell reporters that Powell offered no evidence for her claims and didn’t speak for the president.”
Primary Voice Over:
“We at Dominion Voting Systems are running television commercials to show that Fox News knowingly lied to its viewers to try to create doubt about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
It’s time that all Americans learn that Fox News knowingly lies to its viewers.
And it’s time that Fox viewers finally know what the rest of America already knows… elections in America are free, fair, and honest.”
Go ahead, Dominion Voting Systems, make a dozen commercials like this and run them on the NFL, the Country Music Awards, and local programming in every Red State in the Union.
Go ahead and finish the job that your defamation suit started.
Don’t want to spend a hundred million? Ok, how about you kick in fifty mill and ask Michael Bloomberg to match your ad budget dollar for dollar. Then hit up Tom Steyer. MSNBC and CNN. Ask the Democratic National Committee.
The fact of the matter is that roughly a quarter of the population of the United States still believes the election was rigged. Some percentage of those people still believe Dominion Voting Machines are rigged.
They still believe it because Fox News told them those machines were rigged, and now Fox News has no obligation to tell its viewers they were lying.
That is now your job, Dominion Voting Systems. It is your obligation to your employees, your stockholders, your customers, and, yes, to your country.
Yes, maybe you should stop and consider that you owe that much to do a country that built the legal system and paid for the courts and wrote the laws that enabled you to cash a check for $787,500,000.
You’d be telling the people of this country that their elections are sound, that Donald Trump lost the election of 2020, and that anybody who tells you anything different is a liar.
You know… a liar like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Rupert Murdoch, and Suzanne Scott.
And every single person that continues to work at that sleazy, trashy, septic tank of a television network, Fox News.
That, Dominion, is how to really nail Fox News.
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