Of all of the astonishing, but not surprising, quotes from Fox News stars and executives made public in recent legal filings, it’s one from Fox senior vice president Raj Shah that best captures the network’s central flaw.
Compared with other revelations about the willingness of the network’s employees to give airtime to unfounded claims about the 2020 election — and, specifically, voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing for defamation — it would be easy to consider the Shah quote as unremarkable. Here are on-air stars disparaging the credibility of people they would later interview! But those are symptoms, not the disease.
A few days after the 2020 election, Shah reached out to Fox News’s communications lead, Irena Briganti. Polling from the firm YouGov showed that Fox News was viewed increasingly negatively by its viewers. He had a recommendation: “Bold, clear and decisive action is needed for us to begin to regain the trust that we’re losing with our core audience.”
Why was Fox News losing its audience’s trust? Certainly not because it was focused on misleading them about the election results. The network called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden far too early, but got lucky when the call paid off. It followed other networks in declaring Biden the president-elect on Nov. 7. It did not immediately engage in the sort of dishonest speculation about fraud or rigging that further-right networks like One America News and Newsmax immediately engaged in.
And that was the problem. Fox News earns the trust of its audience not by conveying the truth but by bolstering the right’s agreed-upon falsehoods. Within the universe that is conservative media, there was a “truth” about the election results that quickly became consensus: Donald Trump won; the election was stolen; the Democrats and Biden are crooks. It was this “truth” from which Fox was deviating — and thus eroding the trust its viewers had given it.
It wasn’t just Shah — a veteran of Trump’s White House communications team, a reminder of how migration works within that right-wing universe — who framed the problem that way, according to Dominion’s filings in its suit.
A few days before, Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott discussed the network’s eroding support with Fox chief executive Rupert Murdoch. She talked about the need to “keep the audience who loves and trusts us,” according to the filing, and “to make sure they know we aren[’]t abandoning them and [are] still champions for them.”
In a text message to Fox executive chairman Lachlan Murdoch, Scott made a similar point.
“Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief,” she wrote. “It’s a question of trust[.] [T]he AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”
Fox News host Tucker Carlson worried that executives like Scott didn’t get the problem. In a message to his producer obtained by Dominion, he worried that executives might not “understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience.”
Again, the thing that eroded that trust was that the network — briefly, at least — failed to embrace the right-wing consensus about the suspiciousness of the election results. Other outlets, like Newsmax, were telling their shared audience what they wanted to hear and thereby bolstering their credentials as a reliable news outlet within that universe. Fox News was hewing more closely to reality, and thereby weakening its credentials.
It’s right there in Scott’s text: The network needed to let viewers know they were heard and respected — meaning that their false beliefs were respected, not contravened. We saw something similar a few months later when Fox News declined to air the live prime-time hearings held by the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot. Host Laura Ingraham scoffed at the idea the network should carry the first hearing.
“We actually do something called, you know, cater to our audience,” she said, which is, of course, correct.
From a business perspective, this approach had worked well for Fox News. In March of last year, YouGov conducted polling for the Economist in which it measured the level of trust Americans had in news outlets and news presenters. The channel that Americans overall trusted the most for news was PBS. The network trusted the most by Republicans? Fox News, by a wide margin. Nipping at their heels, though, were Newsmax and One America, the upstarts whose business models were heavily centered on being more deeply immersed in the alternate right-wing reality.
Notice how Republicans view news presenters relative to Americans overall. It isn’t just that they are more likely to trust Fox hosts than hosts from CNN; it’s that they trust explicit opinion hosts like Carlson and Ingraham more than Fox News’s non-opinion anchors like Bret Baier. Republicans put the most trust at that point in Carlson, someone who has repeatedly offered misinformation to his viewers and who even attorneys for Fox have attested should not be considered a source of accurate information.
But Carlson is trusted because he reflects and amplifies that alternate-reality universe. He drives it. In the contest between actual reality and the inaccurate right-wing worldview, Carlson shows little pause in embracing the latter. Did executives even understand how much credibility the network had lost, he fretted, by insisting on telling its viewers the objective truth about the election?
Imagine how jarring that must have been to viewers who had spent five years hearing about how Trump was correct or, at least, that Trump’s critics were wrong. There were no Americans more loyal to Trump than Fox News viewers, and now the network is trying to say that Trump lost? That the election was stolen? How could you trust anything Fox said if it wasn’t going to say the one thing that everyone on the right had agreed to say?
So Fox started saying it more. And Dominion sued.
