FOX NEWSIFICATION OF NIKKI HALEY
Here’s what I think is one of the most intriguing questions in American politics today: How would Nikki Haley talk about the country and its challenges if Fox News didn’t exist?
Here’s why: We’ve learned a lot in recent days about both Fox and Haley, the former South Carolina governor who has just started running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Let’s start with Fox News. We all sort of knew the truth about Fox, but now there can be no doubt: Fox News is to journalism what the Mafia is to capitalism — same basic genre, but a morally corrupt perversion of the real thing.
Before, during and after the 2020 election, it was not crazy to assume that Fox’s main prime-time hosts — Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham — actually believed some of the pro-Trump, election fraud conspiracy theories and theorists that they were putting on the air. But now we have learned from a batch of recently disclosed text messages and emails that they didn’t believe any of it.
The internal messages reveal that the three prime-time hosts, as well as others at Fox, privately made fun of, and were at times appalled by, the election fraud claims of Donald Trump advisers such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. But they mostly kept their skepticism hidden from viewers. Why? They feared they would lose viewers and ad revenue to even crazier networks — Newsmax and OAN.
The Fox News text messages, emails and testimony that expose all of this to public view are from depositions and discovery contained in a recently released legal filing in Delaware state court by Dominion Voting Systems. It is part of the company’s lawsuit against Fox News for broadcasting what it allegedly knew were false claims that Dominion machines helped to rig the 2020 election.
Now enter Nikki Haley, who also last week announced her presidential bid.
I’ve never met Haley, but from afar it seemed that she had a reasonably good story to tell — a successful South Carolina governor from 2011 to 2017, Trump’s first U.N. ambassador and the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her mother, Raj, studied law at the University of New Delhi, and after immigrating to South Carolina, earned a master’s degree in education and became a local public school teacher. Her father, Ajit, earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia and then taught as a biology professor at Voorhees College for 29 years.
The whole family is a walking advertisement for how America has been enriched by immigration.
And as governor, Haley’s best known — and most courageous — political act came in the aftermath of a white gunman killing nine Black parishioners during a June 2015 prayer session at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. After it was discovered the gunman had posed for numerous photos with Confederate symbols and was linked to a racist manifesto, Haley called for legislation that led to the removal of the Confederate flag that had flown on the state Capitol grounds since 1962.
“We are not going to allow this symbol to divide us any longer,” Haley declared.
Good on her. Now fast-forward to Haley announcing her run for the presidency. Imagine all the ways she could have differentiated herself from Trump and Ron DeSantis.
She could have said: “Friends, in the last two years, Congress passed bills to upgrade our infrastructure, our capacity to make advanced microchips and advanced clean energy systems. The first two were passed with bipartisan majorities. This legislation constitutes a launching pad that could enable America to dominate the 21st century. And I know how to get the most out of those launching pads.
“During my time as governor, Greenville, South Carolina, became one of the nation’s most important hubs of wind energy innovation. As South Carolina’s Upstate Business Journal recently wrote, ‘According to a new study from the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, inventors in Greenville were responsible for 172 wind energy patents over the past five years, more than any other metro area in the country.’ You bet! That’s because we made Greenville home to General Electric’s Power & Water energy engineering team.”
Haley could have added, “I also know a lot about building infrastructure for high-tech manufacturing, because during my time as governor I helped to make South Carolina one of the nation’s most active hubs of advanced manufacturing — from advanced aircraft to cars to tires.”
She could boast that she had the spine to pull the country together to do big, hard things.
Sure, that kind of speech would have challenged the Republican base, but I bet it would have energized many others — particularly independents and moderate Republicans looking for alternatives to Trump.
But Haley said none of it.
The evening of her speech, she appeared on — wait for it now — Hannity’s show on Fox, where she complained that the GOP needs a message to “bring in” a variety of people and it must do a better job at messaging — but offered no actual message. She chose instead to do a bad imitation of Ron DeSantis.
Why? Because like Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson and the Murdochs, Haley was more interested in following the Fox base than shaping it, let alone leading it to a better place.
As I said, imagine what Nikki Haley might have sounded like if Fox News didn’t exist.