The Wages Of Sin: $787.5 Million

The perils of journalism in an emotivist era

Good morning from the banks of the Danube. Just looked out the window, and ain’t seen no bodies floating downstream. Guess all is well in Austria. Onward!

The big US news this morning is the monster $787.5 million libel settlement Fox paid to Dominion voting systems, to prevent a trial on Dominion’s claims that the news channel broadcast claims that Dominion had engineered election fraud against Donald Trump, despite knowing those claims to be lies. The information that has already come out from depositions and discovery has been utterly damning to Fox. The judge in the case said that it is beyond doubt that Fox broadcast claims it knew were false, writing that “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.” The only question was whether its actions constituted “actual malice.”

The size of this settlement beggars description. We now know have a figure on the wages of the particular sin of lying for Trump. Rupert Murdoch judged it was worth it to give away about 20 percent of Fox’s entire worth to prevent himself and his network stars from being put on the stand to testify.

Because I’m glad we have Fox to offer some kind of balance to the lockstep liberalism of all the other networks, I wish I could say this was not a just result, but I really can’t. It is true that libel settlements don’t always mean that the defendant lied; it could mean that the defendant decided that it’s less expensive to pay the plaintiff off than to go to trial. Fox did not have to admit in the settlement that it knowingly lied; it simply no longer contested the charges. But the documents unearthed by the plaintiff’s attorneys made it very clear that top people at the channel knew they were broadcasting nonsense. There has to be a price for that, even if it’s paid by people on my own side. At least this cost will likely insure that Fox will have no part in construing a 2024 MAGA fantasy.

What’s interesting about this case is that internal documents showed that Fox talent and executives signed off on lying on air, not because they wanted to mislead viewers, but because they were afraid that if they told viewers the truth, viewers would abandon them for one of the upstart farther-right networks that was happy to serve Trump’s Big Lie. Think about what that means: Fox lied to its viewers not because it wanted to, but because it figured that they demanded it — and if they quit telling those sweet MAGA lies, the conservative viewership would bolt. Think about that: what kind of business feels it has to provide its customers with a fraudulent product to keep their loyalty? Think about what this says about the customers’ standards.

In Live Not By Lies, I write about Hannah Arendt’s warning that pre-totalitarian societies are ones in which masses of people have become indifferent to truth. They would rather believe things that please them rather than the truth.

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause:

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth.

In the book — and hey, in this daily newsletter — I write about how this characterizes much of the Left today. But the Fox-Dominion dispute shows how much of the Right is just as caught up in believing its own narrative over facts. Surely the aspect of this settlement that is most characteristic of our own corrupt age is that Fox lied to its viewers not to protect some powerful figure or interests, but to protect itself from the wrath of its viewers, who wanted to be lied to.