Newsletter: Fox News survives. Will we?

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, April 22, 2023. Let’s look back at the week in Opinion.

By now we should accept that no grand revelation, no moment of major comeuppance would set our political system back on the right democratic track. The Mueller report fizzled. (Oh, sure, the behavior by the Trump campaign and administration that it revealed was damning, but that’s known only to people who do things like read 448-page government documents.) The journalism exposing Trump’s misuse of his self-dealing charitable foundation didn’t keep him out of the White House. Putting down the Jan. 6 insurrection didn’t banish the former president from public life for good, much less knock him off as the leading candidate for his party’s nomination in 2024.

And now, Fox News, the organization arguably most responsible for spreading the “big lie” about the 2020 election and filling Americans with fear and paranoia, emerges only a little poorer from a defamation lawsuit that once promised a reckoning with its reckless disregard for the truth. Yes, plaintiff Dominion Voting Systems gets $787.5 million, every penny of it deserved, but the public gets no apology or even acknowledgment from Fox News of its journalistic malpractice (which probably wouldn’t have mattered much anyway). The network’s post-settlement remark that the outcome reflects Fox’s “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards” evinces no understanding of the magnitude of its misbehavior.

Op-ed columnist Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney who has followed the defamation suit closely, offers a similar assessment:

“It was Fox’s mammoth checkbook, not any civic victory, that allowed it to make Dominion an offer it couldn’t refuse, satisfying the plaintiff’s interest regardless of the public’s. That’s an unavoidable consequence of an adversarial system based on the calculations of private parties.

“The case did incidentally serve the public’s interest by exposing Fox and its personalities through discovery, but not nearly to the extent that it could have through a revealing and damaging trial. Much of the country was looking to Dominion to vindicate basic offenses against the body politic by Trump and his enablers. Now we have to look elsewhere.”

It’s not just Dominion — there are other victims of Fox News’ lies. Columnist Jean Guerrero says its viewers are among those victims: “Whose interest does this propaganda serve? Certainly not Fox’s viewers or the fellow Americans they’re led to despise. As someone who has been a frequent object of derision on Fox News, including by [Tucker] Carlson, I can report that none of their scapegoating seems to improve the lives or well-being of its consumers, who fill my inbox with enraged, tortured, racist emails each time the network mentions me. Fox executives might expect me to vilify those people and participate in their vicious cycle of dehumanization. But the real enemies are the billionaires infecting these people with delusions.” L.A. Times

Journalists deserve robust 1st Amendment protection, but Fox News abused that protection. Columnist Nicholas Goldberg says he’s disappointed that Dominion’s lawsuit never went to trial, because he wanted to see Fox’s conduct after the 2020 election hashed out in court. How Goldberg summarizes that conduct is deeply unflattering to Fox: “Its hosts on a number of occasions repeated the allegations about Dominion as if they were fact. They took sides with [Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell]. Lou Dobbs asserted that Dominion’s voting machines ‘were designed to be inaccurate.’ He thanked Giuliani for ‘pursuing what is the truth.’ Maria Bartiromo said on the air, falsely, that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) ‘has an interest in this company.’ Bartiromo also repeated fraud claims about Dominion ‘even though she had been specifically notified that independent fact-checkers, government officials and election security experts debunked those lies,’ according to Dominion’s brief.” L.A. Times

Why are we stuck with a Supreme Court justice who doesn’t follow the law? Enjoying free lavish vacations with a billionaire donor may be unethical for a Supreme Court justice, but it isn’t against the law. What is illegal is failing to report the largess, and Justice Clarence Thomas violated the law. With our broken political system, there is no real way to hold an unchastened and unethical justice with a lifetime appointment accountable, writes columnist Jackie Calmes. L.A. Times

RIP Richard Riordan, the L.A. mayor who “could see around corners.” Riordan, who took over in 1993 as mayor of a city in crisis, left Los Angeles far better than he found it. During his eight years in office, crime plummeted and much of the city was rebuilt after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Former Times reporter and editorial page editor Jim Newton recalls the charmingly offbeat behavior of the former mayor, who died Wednesday at age 93: “Once, at a meeting at The Times, he started fuming and stood up to storm out. Trouble was, he’d taken off his shoes. Foiled, in his stocking feet, he sat back down and the meeting moved on.” L.A. Times

Dianne Feinstein’s continued absence from the Senate jeopardizes progress on her life’s work. The 89-year-old California Democrat’s recovery from shingles has taken longer than expected, continuing a Senate absence that has held up key judicial appointments. The Times’ editorial board says this leaves her with an extremely difficult decision about her future in the Senate: “This is probably not how Feinstein envisioned her final years in office. Ideally she would have the time and space to recover in peace and return to her life’s work, but these are not ideal times. With the balance of power so tenuous in Washington and the stakes so high at every election, there’s no leeway to keep missing critical votes. We wish Feinstein well in the coming days as she considers perhaps the most difficult decision of her long, storied career.” L.A. Times