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What if you had to have a civil political debate with someone who had zero obligation to the truth? It would be frustrating, right? If your debate opponent isn’t held to account for either past statements or acceptable facts, then there is really no debate. There is no way to win, and certainly no way to find common ground.
That is the situation we are currently in with Fox News.
Over the weekend FoxNews.com published a story from Brooke Singman, the headline of which claimed the Hillary Clinton campaign “infiltrated” Trump Tower servers, which was presented as de facto evidence in support of former President Donald Trump’s claim that he had been spied on.
But The New York Times reporter Charlie Savage writes: “The entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.”
He also adds this rather pithy explanation of how this story perfectly exemplifies misinformation:
Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.
Singman’s report focused on additional details included in the Durham filing, and in particular about former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann,who was indicted last year for making a false statement to the FBI. The report’s initial headline misled by suggesting the Durham filing said the Clinton campaign “infiltrated” Trump’s servers when that word was nowhere to be found in the filing document. The “infiltrated” quote came courtesy of Kash Patel, a former Trump administration staffer and political ally ofDevin Nunes.
The misleading narrative didn’t end with a story on FoxNews.com. The hosts of the Fox News prime time lineup took the claims at face value, and in at least one instance, ramped them up to wild bullsh*t levels.
As Mediaite’s Michael Luciano wrote last night, “Jesse Wattersfalsely claimed thatHillary Clintonpaid hackers to plant fake evidence in an effort to showDonald Trump colluded with the Russian government. ”
The Fox News host blatantly mischaracterized the filing to state as fact that Clinton had attempted to frame Trump by planting evidence. Watters said:
Durham’s documents show that Hillary Clinton hired people who hacked into Trump’s home and office computers before and during his presidency, and planted evidence that he colluded with Russia.
Yeah. You heard that right. Hillary broke into a presidential candidate’s computer server and a sitting president’s computer server, spying on them. There, her hackers planted evidence, fabricated evidence connecting Trump to Russia, then fed that doctored material to the feds and the media.
None of this is true. Meanwhile, Fox News media reporter Howard Kurtz blasted the competition for turning a blind eye to the story. Fox & Friends opened Tuesday’s show amplifying the same idea (though with slightly less aggressive language) then mocked the media for ignoring it.
Turns out, there was a very good reason for the media to ignore this story. As much as Fox News hosts and anchors are willing to give it airtime, it’s not much of a bombshell. That might be why hosts on Fox News have had to exaggerate its findings — because there’s just not much there.
Coverage of this Durham filing is just another example of willful dishonesty that one can easily pull from the last week.
Also on Monday night, Tucker Carlson resurrected the Seth Rich conspiracy, though he didn’t name him. The theory claims that the 27-year-old stole DNC emails during the 2016 presidential election campaign, provided those emails to Wikileaks, and was shot and killed as result.
Fox News pushed that conspiracy theory repeatedly back in 2017, but ended up having to retract its reporting. The Rich family sued, and Fox reportedly settled for millions of dollars.
Need another example? Trumps’ alleged removal of top-secret documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, which led the National Archives to call in the Department of Justice to investigate the legality of concealing documents.
The laissez-faire treatment of this story by Fox News, and by conservative media in general, was revealing. There are exceptions: Bret Baier asked his Special Report panel on Thursday night if it showed inconsistency from Republicans, considering the Hillary Clinton email server kerfuffle and “lock her up” chants that were central to the Trump campaign in 2016.
It’s great that Baier asked that question. But that line of inquiry was so unique that Mediaite felt it was newsworthy enough to write it up. Yes, we covered that very lowest bar of journalistic integrity because it was newsworthy when Fox News met it.
The other example of embarrassing double standards? The hagiography by Fox News of Canadian Truckers breaking the law to protest vaccine mandates. This was perfectly illustrated by both CNN’s Brian Stelter and the Daily Show, each of whom noted the ways in which Fox News has treated similar blockade-centric news and foreign caravan stories from neighboring countries in a very different manner than the Canadian trucker story.
What is different from Canadian truckers and BLM protestors and groups of undocumented immigrants coming to the United States from Central America? I will let you, dear reader, put your thinking cap on and figure that out yourself.
Golf players have a saying for anyone caught cheating while playing. Golf has a long memory…you run afoul of the rules once, your reputation is forever besmirched. Journalistic integrity should, and often does, have the same standards, though it’s curious how this sort of misreporting often gets a pass. If this were to occur on CNN and the reporting was about Trump, you can be SURE that Fox News would not have forgotten that. But I digress…
Fox News is dominating ratings, but to extend the golf metaphor, they are kicking the ball out of bad lies, cutting strokes, and perhaps even throwing balls out of sand traps right onto the green, as Michael Jordan famously did, according to a Sports Illustrated report. Except this isn’t gamesmanship or even poor sportsmanship. It’s cheating, pure and simple, and a big and unfair advantage.
The truth is that it very often seems like Fox News primary objective is to make it so that the truth doesn’t matter. And the fact that conservative media, in particular Fox News, not only gets away with this sort of clear duplicity but that they embrace it? That’s the story.
You can’t have an effective debate with liars because, well… they lie.
Do you want to know why our country is so divided along partisan political lines? You can start by looking at which side of that divide is held to any standard of truth — and which one willfully flouts it.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
