Dominion’s damning revelations underscore the 'full corruption of Fox News': former Reagan speechwriter

02 March 2023

For many years, Mona Charen — a veteran conservative columnist who was a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan during the 1980s — has complained about what she views as a liberal bias in the mainstream media. But in an article published by The Bulwark on March 2, the Never Trumper’s primary target is not CNN, the Washington Post or the New York Times. It is Fox News, which, she argues, has "embarrassed" itself by shamelessly promoting "lies" and "fiction."

Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News has turned into a major scandal for the right-wing cable news outlet, which, in late 2020 and early 2021, promoted attorney Sidney Powell's false claim that Dominion's equipment was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the presidential election from then-President Donald Trump. E-mails and text messages that Dominion has presented as evidence show Tucker Carlson and others at Fox News privately admitting that Powell's claim was total nonsense. Yet Fox News, according to Dominion, promoted Powell's debunked claim anyway.

"Like most conservatives, I initially welcomed Fox News to the airwaves," Charen, now 66, recalls. "A media world that included Jennifer Griffin at the Pentagon, Neal Cavuto on Wall Street, and Charles Krauthammer every evening on 'Special Report' was an overdue counterbalance. An enormous audience had been underserved, and Fox was able to exploit an opening. But then things went sideways. While we can't say the Fox News effect was entirely responsible — talk radio too played a role, as did social media — it started to become evident during the Obama years that the right's impatience with press bias had curdled into something more ominous."

Although Charen is conservative, she is a blistering critic of Trump and the MAGA movement. In fact, Charen was among the many Never Trumpers who supported Biden in 2020. And she argues that Trump's "war on the truth" has been fully embraced by Fox News.

"The revelations in the Dominion Voting Systems legal filings demonstrate the full corruption of Fox News," Charen laments. "The channel that debuted with the tagline 'fair and balanced' has become completely untethered to any standard of integrity. Its own bias bears no comparison to that of the 'mainstream media.' CNN, ABC, and USA Today have their flaws, but at least remain within the bounds of reality. Fox is not a news channel — it is the right's Pravda."

The former Nancy Reagan speechwriter continues, "Among the frank acknowledgments of what the channel had become were rebukes to reporters who attempted to tell the simple truth. When reporter Kristin Fisher noted on the air that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell's howler of a press conference on November 19, (2020) contained allegations that did not align with what Trump's lawyers were pleading in court and were not supported by evidence, she was rebuked by higher-ups at the network and told to do a better job of "respecting the audience.'"

Charen emphasizes that according to Dominion, what Carlson and his colleague Sean Hannity said about the 2020 election privately and what they said on the air were two different things.

"Respecting the audience in Fox speak meant telling the audience exactly what it wanted to hear and nothing that would ruffle its delicate feathers," Charen observes. "In private, Sean Hannity would confide that 'Rudy is acting like an insane person,' but in public — to Fox's vast audience — Rudy's ravings were laundered and legitimized. In private, Tucker Carlson fumed that a reporter telling the truth — that the election had not been stolen — was 'measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down'…. When Fox News and its competitors lie to viewers, they are endangering not their physical health, but their civic health and the good of the nation."

Read Mona Charen’s full article for The Bulwark at this link.

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