The defamation case between Fox News and a small election services firm, which is set to go to trial this week, is the most significant moment yet in which those who spread former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen must answer for behaviour that is still poisoning American democracy.
Dominion Voting Systems claims that the conservative network spread the ex-president’s conspiracy theories, including those involving its voting equipment, in order to avoid losing its viewers and improve its bottom line.
The trial was supposed to begin Monday, but the judge said Sunday evening that it would be postponed until Tuesday. The reason for this was not immediately apparent. The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch, claimed, citing persons familiar with the situation, that Fox had made a late effort to settle the disagreement out of court.
The drama set to unfold in a Delaware courtroom represents an extraordinary moment in modern American history because it has the potential to demonstrate how truth has become tainted as a political currency and showcase a right-wing business model based on crafting an alternate reality. Yet it is unclear whether Trump, the principal architect of the toxic conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged, would suffer a big personal or political price.
The notion that Trump’s assertions, which were reiterated by his advisors and allies on Fox, as well as some of the channel’s characters, had any merit will not even reach first base in the trial. During pre-trial proceedings, presiding Superior Court Judge Eric Davis concluded that jurors did not even need to evaluate one critical issue: whether Fox’s assertions regarding Dominion were truthful.
“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that it is CRYSTAL CLEAR that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Davis wrote in a judgement last month that severely limited the network’s options for defending itself.
The epic case is now centred on Dominion’s attempt to establish the legal standard for defamation by demonstrating that Fox must have known (or strongly suspected) it was lying about the problems at hand at the time and acted with “actual malice.”
Trump has yet to pay a price for his electoral fraud deceptions.
Though he vehemently denies breaking any laws, the former president appears to be facing indictment in investigations into his attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory by a district attorney in Georgia and by special counsel Jack Smith into his conduct leading up to the US Capitol insurgency. And, when Democrats controlled the House last year, the many layers of Trump’s democracy-damaging behaviour were catalogued in interviews and public evidence gathered by a House select committee.
However, the lie of a rigged election remains the foundation of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Millions of Trump supporters believe he was unjustly removed from office on the false basis that he won in 2020.
It’s also unclear whether conservative media viewers will hear much about the trial and receive enough information to change their thoughts about 2020.
Trump’s conviction that the election was tainted by fraud is causing some senior Republicans nightmares as they strive to recover from Trump’s loss in 2020 and deal with their disappointment at the lack of a “red wave” in the midterm elections last year, despite capturing the House.
According to Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp on AWN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, the ex-president is pushing his party to gaze in the rearview mirror while impeding its efforts to look forward.
One key issue in court will almost certainly be attempting to demonstrate that Fox believed that communicating difficult truths to the audience was bad for business – a consideration that drove right-wing media in 2020 and still holds true today. The Republican Party’s refusal to anger its base voters two years later is evidence of this. While many top party leaders have indicated a desire to move on from Trump, the only part of the GOP with clout in Washington – the House Republican majority – has made repeated efforts to shield Trump from accountability for the 2020 election and to distort what actually occurred on January 6, 2021.
A moment of reckoning
But, despite Trump’s attempts, the legal procedure against Fox, like the constitutional process that ensured a transfer of power between Trump and Biden, if marred by violence, demonstrates that the country’s tools of accountability remain intact.
Fox News and its parent business, Fox Corporation, deny any allegations of impropriety. They’ve contended that their conspiracy-theory-laden broadcasts following the 2020 election were protected by the First Amendment, and that a loss in the case would be a devastating blow to press freedoms.
However, the run-up to the trial has been a series of embarrassments and reversals for both the network and the broader assumption that Trump’s bogus assertions are true.
In pre-trial hearings last week, the court, for example, noted that there were well-established and accepted limits on First Amendment rights.
“To stand there and say, ‘What Fox did was protected by the First Amendment,’ that’s only half of the story.” “If you can’t show actual malice, it’s protected by the First Amendment,” he stated.
Texts and emails between Fox personalities and managers, as well as depositions disclosed by Dominion, reveal that several at the station privately doubted Trump’s assertions but reinforced them despite growing fears that exposing the truth would drive viewers away.
Murdoch, for example, emailed Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, warning her that rival conservative network Newsmax should be “watched.” In a separate message, Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson told colleague Laura Ingraham, “Our viewers are good people, and they believe [the election fraud claims].”
Dominion has been accused by Fox of cherry-picking damning remarks and communications ahead of the trial. However, research suggests that Fox’s propensity to cater to its viewers’ ideas, even if they are false, is closely related to Trump’s own attitude and mirrors the Republican Party’s aversion to antagonising the ex-president’s fans.
Trump made it apparent from the start of his presidency that he intended to establish an alternate version of reality that his supporters could accept and that would help him violate the rules and conventions of the presidency. Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, yelled angrily in January 2017 that his boss had drawn the largest inaugural audience in history, which appeared weird and preposterous at the time. However, in retrospect, they were the first indication of a daily attempt to undermine truth for Trump’s political benefit, which finally developed into lies about a stolen election that persuaded many of the ex-president’s fans. The culmination of all of this was a mob attack on Congress by his supporters on January 6, 2021, during the certification of Biden’s election.
The notion that the Fox defamation trial would actually play a part in eliminating lies about the 2020 election appears far-fetched, given the potency of his falsehoods, which has survived numerous clashes with the truth. Despite the fact that several courts in multiple states dismissed Trump’s petitions alleging election fraud following the 2020 election, the notion that the election was stolen eroded faith in American democracy among his supporters. In a July 2022 AWN/SSRS poll, only 29% of Republicans believed that US elections truly represented the will of the people.
This may come as no surprise. Because, while in office, Trump made no secret of his strategy, telling the world openly how he functioned.
“Be patient with us. “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” he said in a 2018 speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars supporters in Kansas City. “What you’re seeing and reading is not what’s happening.”
Trump is still at it after five years.
“In 2016, we won.” “We won by a lot more in 2020, but it was rigged,” Trump claimed at the end of March during his first major campaign rally in Waco, Texas.
Some Republicans are eager to move on.
The fact that Trump continues to spread such lies – and that many in the Republican Party are unwilling to challenge him – irritates some party leaders who saw Trump’s handpicked candidates, who touted his election lies as the price of his endorsement, flame out in swing states in last year’s midterm elections.
Georgia’s Kemp, for example, has warned that repeatedly bringing up 2020 will lead to another political disaster for his party.
“I think any candidate, to be able to win, is to talk about what we’re for, focus on the future, not look in the rearview mirror,” Kemp told AWN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.
“If you look in the rearview mirror for too long while driving, you’re going to look up and run into someone, and that’s not going to be good.”
However, the fact that Trump remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024, according to many polls, and is still massively popular with conservative grassroots conservatives implies that it will take far more than a courtroom show to restore the truth about 2020.
And the GOP will most likely be looking in the rearview mirror for a long time.
