Fox News Celebrities Lie When Their Lips Move

If they were Pinocchio they would tumble from their chairs falling on their elongated noses

Politicians and Fox News hosts are alike. You know both are lying when their lips move.

Discovery in the pending defamation suit against Fox by Dominion Voting Systems speaks volumes. It unveils the following narrative.

Shortly after the November 2020 presidential election, Fox viewers were fleeing to Newsmax and One America News to gratify their fact-free hallucinations of a deep state conspiracy to steal victory from Republican candidate Donald Trump. Whatever its contrary professions, Fox News is in business to make money, not to communicate truths. If the two conflict, money wins in a landslide. Analogously, Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Fox News celebrities spread Stop the Steal concoctions with “actual malice” to end a hemorrhaging of viewer defections to its ideological rivals. Among other things, the United States Supreme Court in St. Amant v. Thompson (1968) declared that actual malice necessary for actionable defamation consistent with the First Amendment can be inferred “where there are obvious reasons to doubt” the basis of the falsehood.

Fox had overwhelming objective evidence to doubt Mr. Trump’s Stop the Steal delusion. It had been discredited in 61 lawsuits, many before Trump appointed judges. It had been dismissed as indistinguishable from believing in a flat earth by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, and Chris Krebs, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. No reputable attorneys or law professors, including Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz who defended Trump at his first impeachment trail, endorsed his Stop the Steal delirium.

In private, Fox News hosts voiced disbelief in what they or their guests were saying on air. Tucker Carlson told his producer Alex Pfeiffer on November 7-8, 2020, “The software shit [of counting Trump votes for Biden] is absurd.” On November 16, 2020, Carlson added, “Sidney Powell, [Stop the Steal megaphone about voting machine fraud], is lying.” Senior Vice President at Fox Corporation, Rah Shah, told Pfeiffer on November 22, 2020, “so many people openly denying the obvious that Powell is clearly full of it.” Pfeiffer responded, “She is [expletive} nut case.” Carlson tells Fox host Laura Ingraham, “[Powell] is a nut, as you said at the outset. Ingraham replied, “No serious lawyer could believe what [people at the White House] were saying.” One of Ms. Powell’s sources was a woman who had fantasized, “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost.” Yet Fox News kept inviting Ms. Powell, Pinocchio on steroids, back over and over again to disseminate her tsunami of lies.

A federal judge in Michigan, Linda Parker, sanctioned Ms. Powell for filing a sub-frivolous lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 presidential election, explaining, “This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process. It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”

Fox will likely to pay $1 billion or more in damages to Dominion Voting Systems, less than one year’s profits, not enough to deter repetition. Indeed, Fox is likely to respond to its defamation liability by falsely accusing judges of bias or bribery by George Soros to keep or expand its demented viewer base. Fox News hosts are like British Ambassadors: honest men and women put on air to lie for their company’s profits.

But are liberal media outlets like MSNBC or CNN any different? Is the only difference Fox was caught with its hand in the cookie jar and others have not—at least not yet?