The Political Right’s Long War on the Truth

With new damning information coming out daily about the manner in which Fox News' top talking heads knew they were peddling lies to viewers about the 2020 election, it is worth examining the reality that the political right in America has been trading in lies for years and in many ways set the stage for a pathological, amoral liar like Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenfuhrer, to become the darling of far too many on the right and within the GOP.  The right's - and certainly Fox News' goal - was to create an alternate reality for followers that insulated them from objective reality and the truth.  One can only hope that the two libel suits against Fox News will have a devastating impact on the number one purveyor of lies in America and, with luck, have a chilling impact on other "news" outlets that disseminate known lies in order to keep viewers happy and loyal.  As for Fox viewers, as the documentation of Fox's deliberate lies continue to be revealed, it will likely be very hard for many to accept objective reality after years of deliberately choosing to consume lies and fabrications that supported and stoked their hatreds and prejudices. Candidly, I hope nothing good happens to Fox in the libel lawsuits and I wish its top hosts were being sued individually as well as the company.  A piecein the Washington Post looks at the current situation and how the right wing media got to where it now finds itself:

Not long after Fox News correctly called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden, a senior Fox Corp. executive privately lamented that the network’s brand was “under heavy fire from our customer base.” The executive suggested Fox viewers might “feel like they have been somehow betrayed.”

This fear — that viewers might see telling the truth about Donald Trump’s loss as betrayal — was widespread inside the network, according to newly released texts among Fox News figures. In the texts, they fumed that candor about 2020 was driving the audience away, prompting viewers to defect to competitors who offered a more comforting cocoon. On the air, some of those personalities kept doling out what they privately admitted were lies.

This is one of the most extraordinary scandals to ever buffet a major American network. But it also points to an even bigger story: The right wing media’s long war on the truth. For decades, conservative media outlets have expressly sought to build and capture an audience that would accept only their version of events, and would be cordoned off to place them beyond the reach of mainstream news sources entirely.

“Right wing media have been engaged in a 70-year project to ensure that their audiences only trust conservative news outlets,” Nicole Hemmer, who tells this story in “Messengers of the Right,” her excellent history of conservative media, told me. “They’ve worked to discredit other sources of more-objective information, so that their audiences are unwilling to trust outlets more rooted in reality.”

The success of this project is illustrated by the texts, which were released as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox News.  . . . the hosts saw the truth as a threat to their hold on their viewers.

This bid to capture millions in a bubble of falsehoods was also acknowledged by the news side, when a top news editor called the constant lying an “existential crisis” for Fox News ’s journalism. But as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters notes, the prime-time personalities had a clearer read than the news operation on the real source of Fox News’ success: its role as a “propaganda machine that accumulates money and power by lying to its viewers.”

Hemmer traces the genesis of this broader ideological project to the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the time, she tells me, leading figures on the right made a concerted decision to “create their own media outlets” in the form of periodicals such as Human Events, while spreading “the message that all non-conservative media are deeply biased.”

This intensified during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, who turned Vice President Spiro Agnew loose to make snarling speeches attacking the television networks, which were growing in power. . . . . The influence of right-wing media intensified in the late 1980s with the explosion of talk radio. This capture of conservative audiences was aided, Hemmer notes, by the success of Rush Limbaugh and others who made the message about biased mainstream news “entertaining and profitable.”

Enter Fox News, which was founded in the mid-1990s and attained its commanding heights in the right-wing information ecosystem in the early 2000s. Behind Fox News’s “We report, you decide” slogan, Hemmer says, lurked its real message: “You should trust us, and not other outlets.”

That message worked, and the scandal is, in a way, the result of right-wing media’s grip on its audience. In late 2021, polling data showed that consumers of Fox News and other conservative media were overwhelmingly more likely to believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. This came after those sources relentlessly bombarded their viewers with that message.

But now the audience’s captivity to an alternate version of events is blowing back on Fox News. Over the years Fox News’s audience has rebelled over other things, Hemmer recounts, such as Hannity’s championing of immigration reform, which incited a backlash from his viewers.

Nothing, however, has compared to the current scandal. “It’s a pretty clarifying moment,” Hemmer told me. The network’s own personalities, she concluded, have now admitted that “we have to tell our audience not what happened, but what they want to hear, or we’re going to lose them.”

I hope Fox loses big time in the libel suits.