What’s the perfect punishment for Fox News?
What’s the perfect punishment for Fox News?
How to undo the Fox propaganda feedback loop
Friends,
The trial of Fox News is expected to begin tomorrow. If Dominion Voting Systems wins, I have a suggestion for what the court should demand of Fox News, in addition to paying damages for the harm to Dominion.
The judge has already ruled that on-air statements by Fox News hosts, asserting that Dominion’s voting machines played a role in causing Donald Trump to lose the 2020 election, were false. The task for the jury is to decide whether Fox made those false statements with actual malice.
If Dominion wins, it will be because Fox’s own internal emails, text messages, and depositions revealed that its hosts (and owner, Rupert Murdoch) knew that the allegations of election fraud by Trump and his allies were baseless but kept airing them anyway, in part because they feared that another right-wing network, Newsmax, would otherwise steal their audience. When Fox News reporters shot down the allegations publicly, the network’s big personalities complained internally that telling their viewers the truth was hurting the network’s brand.
To this day, Fox News viewers still don’t know the truth — neither about Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, nor about Fox News’s role in promoting Trump’s big lie. This is the real damage of the Fox News propaganda feedback loop: After inflaming right-wing conspiracy theories, Fox has a financial incentive to continue to push them in order to retain its inflamed audience, which further inflames them.
The case raises a fundamental question: Will there be a penalty for profiting from the spread of dangerous disinformation?
Think of the poison Fox has knowingly been pumping into America as analogous to the poison cigarette manufacturers pumped into Americans’ lungs. Part of the remedy for the cigarette poison has been warning disclosures on every pack. Why not an analogous remedy for Fox News’s poison?
If Dominion wins, the court should order Fox News hosts — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and all other hosts similarly implicated — to tell their viewers every half hour, at least until the end of 2024:
“When we told you the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, we lied. Trump lied, too. He continues to lie. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Biden won fair and square.”
As on cigarette packs that must vary their warnings, the court should require alternative disclosures, perhaps every other week:
“We apologize for lying to you about the 2020 election. There was no fraud. Biden won. We lied because we were afraid of losing ad revenue if we told the truth. Shame on us.”
And every third week:
“The 2020 election wasn’t stolen from Trump. Trump made that up, and we repeated his lie because we’re greedy and unscrupulous. And that’s the truth.”
What do you think? Should Fox News be required to issue any other disclosure messages?
***
Reminder: Please join me Friday for the third class in my Wealth and Poverty course, right here on this page. We’ll be taking a deep dive into the jobs of today and the likely jobs of the future. If you missed the first two classes, no problem. You can pick up with the third, or retrieve class one here, and class two here.
They should lose their FCC license and be taken off the air.
Criminal charges should be brought to all the host who lied.
But at the minimum; They must state on air, every show that they lied, a minimum of 6 months or ideally until December next year.
The very first and foremost action is the court should order the FCC to reverse the actions of Ronald Reagan that allowed Fox Broadcasting the power to broadcast false information and opinion as news with no accountability. Secondly at the moment when Rupert Murdock was granted such empowerment it was still illegal for aliens to broadcast news and information in the United States. Therefore at the same time Reagan granted Murdock US Citizenship and became a naturalized US citizen. There are laws allowing the court to revoke US citizenship to naturalized citizens under certain conditions and actions against the best interest of the American public. Therefore the second action the court could take is the revoke Rupert Murdock's US citizenship and deport him back to Australia as Persona Non Grata. Thirdly the broadcasting license should be revoked or at the very least suspended until guarantees or in place that Fox New follow a strict non political agenda of true reporting under the penalty of permanent revocation of Broadcasting license.
Fourth; every "talking head" - broadcasting host must announce several times daily for several weeks their confession and apology for lying and spreading false information to the detriment of the American People and why they did so with a promise that they will never again act irresponsibly.
In addition Fox Corporation must pay that billion dollar fine make public apology to the American people and the entire board of directors be fired from any and all connection and interaction with the company.