Nikki Haley heads down the Foxhole

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. Having gotten the Fox audience totally aroused by — and addicted to — claims of election fraud, Fox News’ leaders were afraid to stop. 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. The cynicism they reveal is breathtaking.

The depth of it is best summed up in this account by The New York Times last week of an exchange dated Nov. 12, 2020: “In a text chain with Ingraham and Hannity, Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, factchecked a tweet from Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion. ‘Please get her fired,’ Carlson said. He added: ‘It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.’