Can Fox News Handle the Truth? As Long as It Pleases the Viewers
NewsMax, a news channel oriented farther to the right than Fox, was also on the mind of fellow show host Sean Hannity. In an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, he lamented the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about rising competition from newer further-right outlets.
Jack Nicholson’s showstopping line from “A Few Good Men” — ”You can’t handle the truth!” — echoes in the court filing in which the anchors expressed deep skepticism of Sidney Powell, one of the attorneys spreading the false fraud allegations, even as they continued to air her views. Ingraham described her as a “complete nut.” Hannity said in a deposition that the “whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.”
So why continue to serve it up to your audience, one might ask? Former Fox executive Bill Sammon seemed to offer the most on-point answer: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” he observed in a statement that probably should be posted prominently in every journalism classroom in the country.
Instead, some Fox folks tried to have it both ways. At one point, Carlson and Hannity demanded that Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she fact-checked one of Trump’s tweets spreading the false election fraud claims about Dominion. She wasn’t fired but the offending tweet was deleted.
In another email, a different Fox executive feared what he called “conspiratorial reporting” at Newsmax, a criticism that also sounded like a thinly-veiled expression of envy.
“We’ve really cornered Fox from the right,” Chris Ruddy, NewsMax founder and friend of Trump, told the AP after the election.
Small wonder, then, that at least one Fox executive said the “conspiratorial” approach “might be exactly what the disgruntled FNC viewer is looking for.” That executive later warned, “Do not ever give viewers a reason to turn us off. Every topic and guest must perform.”
P.T. Barnum could hardly have said it better. It is understandable that the popular news channel would try to please the conservative audience they have built so successfully, but not at the expense of reality.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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