All the news that gives us fits
Since 1897, the masthead of The New York Times has carried the motto, “All the news that's fit to print.” The Times' motto implies someone has to determine what's “fit” for the paper. Ultimately, it's a judgment call, with all the biases that implies.
With folks getting their news today from John Oliver, TikTok and troll sites, it's almost quaint to talk about publishers, editors and advertisers shaping the news. Every media platform has its own system for determining the fitness or unfitness of a particular story, some giving wide latitude to outsidethe-box ideas, while traditional media still vet sources, dot i's and cross t's before running a story. Even with the best of intentions, mistakes get made. But what about when a news organization's intentions are not the best?
The discovery phase in the Dominion Voting Systems v. News Corp and Fox News lawsuit has produced bombshells: Fox News didn't simply blunder when reporting the “stolen election” allegations in 2020. Fox stars Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity actually texted and emailed back and forth their belief the allegations were “insane,” “crazy,” “a joke” and “bull s___.”
Not my words, their words. These internal communications, including testimony under oath from Fox founder and CEO Rupert Murdoch, prove beyond debate that the “Fair and Balanced” network didn't make a mistake. They made a decision to report allegations of voter fraud they considered to be false as facts.
News Corp has excellent lawyers. They are putting up an aggressive defense and I have no idea how this suit will ultimately play out. Still, what we have learned thus far is hugely important regardless of who we vote for or where we get our news. The truth matters in a civil society. The “news” is the fact pool from which we arrive at judgments in law and life. When a news organization knowingly lies, it taints the pool, subverting the democratic process.
The internal communications between Carlson, Ingraham, Hannity and others show not confusion and mistakes, but rather a conscious decision to give a platform to conspiracy theorists like Mike Lindell of My Pillow fame (a major Fox News sponsor) as well as crackpot lawyers Sidney Powell, John Eastman and the man formerly known as “America's Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, who all of the Fox hosts believed to be either crazy or lying.
When the late, great Paddy Chayefsky wrote his Academy Award-winning screenplay “Network,” he intended it to be a satire of the television industry. It turned out to be a business model for talk radio and cable news channels.
Today the line between news and entertainment is nonexistent. When it serves Sean Hannity's purpose, he's a “journalist,” entitled to all the legal indemnification the First
Amendment provides. Then, when he's called to account for spreading misinformation, he's an “entertainer” and nobody should take what he says seriously. News shows were once considered public service broadcasts and not rated by Nielsen. Absolved of the commercial pressures of the entertainment programs, news departments could air stories that might be important but not sexy. By the 1970s that line was erased. News shows were now rated like “The Price is Right” or “Gilligan's Island.” Paddy Chayefsky instantly recognized what that meant. “The news” was now just another show and had to pull and hold an audience to make money.
In the pre-Reagan administration days of the Fairness Doctrine, broadcast license holders were obliged to give equal time on issues. This was vague and made programmers reluctant to cover controversial topics. In the postFairness Doctrine media world, there is more news coverage than ever, with many more points of view represented. Yet the door was also opened for overtly partisan networks who fear offending their audiences with news they might not like.
The Dominion case should be a wake-up call to everyone in the news game.
The new Republican House of Representatives will soon haul in network, newspaper and social media executives to explain how and why they sat on — or consciously tried to discredit — the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop story first reported in the New York Post.
Where this story goes from here remains to be seen, but it should have been vetted prior to the 2020 election and would have been had it been Donald Trump Jr.'s laptop. The truth is equally distorted by acts of omission.
Everyone makes mistakes. Believe it or not, even I, your rock-solid, trustworthy, honest broker of truths sometimes blows it. But there is a big difference between an honest mistake and deliberately peddling lies for profit.