Fox News or Fox Noise — The Pretense

Michael Castengera
2 min readApr 1, 2023

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In the latest round of the Dominion company lawsuit against Fox Noise, Fox claims that “the foundational right to a free press is at stake.” And that’s true. But the question is — does The First Amendment protect an organization that knowingly spread lies?

In the latest revelations from the lawsuit, messages sent by the company CEO Suzanne Scott show she was more concerned with ratings and revenue than the real truth, more concerned with fans’ fury than facts. When her anchors questioned Trump’s lies about the election being stolen, she repeatedly warned that it was “bad for business.”

In fairness, it should be noted that her anger with her anchors stating facts was fueled by the audiences’ anger at being given facts. That speaks to the “quality” of the Fox audience. They didn’t want facts, and another revelation from the Dominion lawsuit, neither did Fox.

Some of the redacted parts of the Dominion lawsuit have been released, and it shows that the company’s own in-house fact checking organization reported that the claims of election fraud were bogus. In classic style, the group named the “brainroom” shows the statement by Trump making the false allegation and then follows it up with THE FACTS.

And the facts were: “there was no evidence of widespread fraud… (and) officials from both political parties have stated publicly the election went well.” And the line in the fact check that Dominion lawyers especially liked was that there “no major problems” with the company’s system.

While the Dominion lawsuit is getting a lot of attention, a second lawsuit by the company Smartmatic may be even more of a concern for the Fox lawyers. For starters it is suing for $2.7 Billion in damages compared to Dominion’s $1.6 Billion. It cites several false statements made by Fox hosts, including the strange, and untrue, allegation that Smartmatic was “founded in Venezuela at the behest of corrupt dictators.”

To prove defamation, Smartmatic has to prove that Fox acted with “actual malice.” The judge in this case ruled that the company has provided enough evidence “to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice.”

In its response to The Guardian newspaper, lawyers for Fox state “Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected…” Again, like the first statement cited at the beginning of this article, that also is true. But you don’t protect it by lying about it.

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Michael Castengera
Michael Castengera

Written by Michael Castengera

Newspaper reporter turned TV reporter turned media manager turned consultant turned teacher

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