OPINION:
The sad, beleaguered competitors of Fox News desperately pray that the billion-dollar lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems will do what they have never been able to do: Topple the TV-news ratings king. And they are happy to sacrifice the First Amendment in order to do that.
The British press — which has been losing to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire even longer than the American press has — is especially hungry.
“Is Dominion’s $1.6bn defamation lawsuit a death blow for Murdoch and Fox News?” screams one eager headline in The Guardian.
Another headline last month in that same left-wing newspaper announced: “Dominion lawsuit is just the start as Fox faces losing friends — and viewers.”
Loses viewers? Apparently, the mainstream media is so blinded by hatred for Fox News that they are not interested in facts. Or refuses to report them.
Fox News routinely dominates half the cable news audience in America, leaving the other half to be divided among all its “competitors” like MSNBC and CNN — combined. Even more alarming for them, Fox News beats all competitors by double-digit margins among independent viewers and continues to attract more and more self-identified Democrats.
According to detailed Nielsen ratings from last December, Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” and “The Five” were the second- and third-most watched cable news shows among Democratic viewers in the most highly coveted advertising demographic.
Perhaps most alarming for competitors, a YouGov poll published last month showed Fox News was the “most trusted source” of news in television for the previous 52-week period. Fox was deemed “most trusted” by double-digit margins over ABC News, CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and state media PBS.
Apparently, the massive campaign to smear Fox News as some crazed, right-wing disinformation machine is not working. Which is why Fox News’ competitors are desperately praying that Dominion will prevail in its lawsuit against Fox.
In the trial, which begins this week in Wilmington, Delaware, Dominion charges that Fox News defamed the company by reporting on claims made by the sitting president of the United States and his lawyers about the reliability of the company’s voting machines during the 2020 election.
That’s right. Dominion wants Fox News to pay them $1.6 billion for reporting on claims made publicly by a sitting president. About an election.
Reporting on such public claims made by a president about the veracity of an election is not some far-distant, unintended, downstream consequence of the First Amendment. It is precisely what the First Amendment was designed to protect.
Free speech by a free press reporting on an election is the whole point.
For months, the failing competitors of Fox News — including once-serious newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post — have breathlessly heralded stories about text messages among Fox News producers and top hosts in which they debated the veracity of the public claims being made by the president and his legal team.
These are nothing more than the internal newsroom deliberations among journalists working in the chaotic weeks after a highly explosive election.
But the most damning indictment of the whole case against Fox News comes from a filing made by Dominion’s own lawyers asking the court to exclude the First Amendment from the trial.
“For months, Fox has beat the drum of the First Amendment in this Court and in its public relations efforts, mischaracterizing Dominion’s attempt to hold Fox accountable for lying to its viewers as and effort ‘to trample on free speech and freedom of the press,’” the lawyers wrote.
The First Amendment does not protect, they argued, “defamatory statements” made publicly by a sitting president’s legal team and reported by a news organization.
“For that reason, at trial, Fox should not be permitted to use inflammatory and legally erroneous First Amendment concepts in order to mislead the jury and urge jury nullification,” Dominion lawyers hilariously wrote. “Dominion therefore respectfully requests Fox be precluded from improperly invoking the First Amendment” at the trial.
And yet, despite that, the so-called mainstream media lustily applauds Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News even as the case would gut the very constitutional protections they have enjoyed in America for over 200 years.
This lawsuit and the coverage surrounding it does not prove that Fox News is bad or dishonest. It proves the whole reason Fox News exists in the first place.
• Charles Hurt is opinion editor for The Washington Times and a Fox News contributor.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.