Fox News canning Lou Dobbs last week probably should have happened long ago, given that the “business” side of Fox Business News had long since been coopted by incendiary pro-Trump, anti-immigrant and election fraud conspiracies. Dobbs average audience of 300,000 was low by Fox News standards, and reflected the hardest core of hard core far-right fanatics who bothered to find his show; in fact his show was more “popular” among other news outlets critiquing his latest demented claims. Major advertisers had already fled his show, which isn’t surprising since the majors also have tended to shun Fox News’ prime time line-up, but because that is where Fox News achieves its highest ratings, the Carlson/Ingraham/Hannity trio are in no danger of losing their jobs, tending to stick to their own evidence-free opinions rather than relying on those of the most extreme of crackpots.
In other words, Dobbs was “expendable”
in the face of Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox
News, Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.
Smartmatic describes what these entities are guilty of doing:
The Earth is round. Two
plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of
the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are
facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable. Defendants have always known
these facts. They knew Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 U.S. election.
They knew the election was not stolen. They knew the election was not rigged or
fixed. They knew these truths just as they knew the Earth is round and two plus
two equals four. Defendants did not want Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to win the
election. They wanted President Donald Trump and Vice President Michael Pence
to win re-election. Defendants were disappointed. But they also saw an
opportunity to capitalize on President Trump’s popularity by inventing a story.
Defendants decided to tell people that the election was stolen from President Trump
and Vice President Pence. Defendants had an obvious problem with their story.
They needed a villain. They needed someone to blame. They needed someone whom
they could get others to hate. A story of good versus evil, the type that would
incite an angry mob, only works if the storyteller provides the audience with
someone who personifies evil. Without any true villain, Defendants invented
one. Defendants decided to make Smartmatic the villain in their story.
Reading the nearly 300-page lawsuit, it is clear that Smartmatic does make its case that what these three individuals did went far beyond simply offering opinions—they presented their opinions as “facts” with the help of crackpot conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Peter Navarro and even Rudy Giuliani. Much was made of the alleged “connection” between Smartmatic and Venezuela, but the company made it clear that it provided voting machines to countries all over the world, and there was nothing “conspiratorial” about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez using its voting machines. In fact, Smartmatic stated that it has not allowed Venezuela to use its machines since 2017 upon discovering that “official” voting results released to the public were not the same as what was actually tabulated by the voting machines.
Smartmatic’s most powerful claim is the most obvious one: Dobbs, Bartiromo, Pirro and their “experts” were making a generalized charge that Smartmatic was largely responsible for Trunp losing the election through "vote switching," or at least after they lost interest in accusing Dominion of such after it released its $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit. Smartmatic was of course even more “suspect” because of its alleged ties to Venezuela’s dictators. Bartiromo even claimed that there was “evidence” that U.S. election votes were being tabulated in Venezuela: “A Venezuelan country counting ballots ??? What happened to other countries interfering with our elections ????” she tweeted.
What the trio repeatedly failed to inform their viewers was that Smartmatic was operating in only one location in the U.S.—in Los Angeles County, and nowhere else, and they knew it was impossible for the company to be doing what they were claiming. In Los Angeles County itself, the 71-27 margin for Joe Biden wasn’t exactly a nail-biter, and shouldn’t have been expected to be even close, so know one was accusing Smartmatic of "fraud" there. Yet over and over again, Dobbs, Bartiromo and Pirro allowed the likes of Powell to repeatedly make knowingly false claims and pass them off as “fact”—and even themselves asserting as much. Smartmatic is claiming that it lost a significant amount of business because of this, as well as its employees receiving death threats.
In “normal” times, these
people would have been off the air long ago. Remember that Dan Rather was “retired”
from being the anchor of CBS Evening News for a story about then president
George W. Bush being “AWOL” from duty in Vietnam while serving in the Texas Air National
Guard, allegedly because the documentary evidence provided was “inauthentic.” But
those documents were never proven to be forgeries, and the truth was very
likely that Bush received special treatment to skip town when his unit was
called to “action,” given the political influence of the family patriarch, Prescott Bush.
Meanwhile, Pirro seems
for now “safe” in her 9 PM Saturday slot, which is a cable news twilight zone
time slot. Bartiromo still has a job, and is still at it again. On Sunday she
hosted Wisconsin Republican senator and nutjob Ron Johnson, who claimed that
Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the Capitol Hill riots, although it is just
his “suspicion” and naturally he has no evidence to prove it; of course
Bartiromo herself continues to claim that Antifa was actually “responsible” for
the riot. Besides her Sunday show, Bartiromo is being tested for the 7 PM “opinion”
slot on weekdays. Why Fox News has done this is head-banger stuff, particularly
in the face of the Smartmatic lawsuit. Bartiromo should be next on the chopping
block, and it may only be a matter of time if she continues in this vein.
One suspects that Fox
News, which yesterday was reported to have fallen behind in the cable news ratings
behind CNN and MSNBC, doesn’t know which way to turn, with hard news viewers
switching to the other networks, since they were only getting demonstrably
false election fraud conspiracies from Fox News and other “facts” that were at
odds with the relative normalcy of the Biden administration compared to the
last months of the Trump administration. Perhaps Fox News thinks that it will
ascertain if indeed the reason that it lost viewership was due to its “call” of
the Arizona vote, which seems ridiculous. Will a known far-right Trumpist like
Bartiromo bring them back?
But with new strains of
the coronavirus presenting new dangers in the coming months, do people really
want to hear more pandemic denials and Ingraham claiming that masks “don’t work”—and having to stomach more and more insane conspiracies and rants about the left “destroying”
the country? Trumpists might eat it up, but with evidence piling up on how the
Trump administration undermined efforts to tackle to pandemic for political reasons,
Fox News’ bullshit is not what we need right now.
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