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Item one: Funny, I don’t see liberal media outlets paying huge settlements

I’m shocked that, as far as I’ve seen this week, no one has connected these obvious dots. But consider.

 

Last October, jurors in Connecticut ordered Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion to the families of the children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The next month, a judge added another nearly $500 million in various fees. It was described at the time as the largest known defamation award at trial in the history of the United States.

 

This week, as we know, Fox News settled with Dominion Voting systems for $787.5 billion. This has been described as the largest known defamation settlement in the history of the United States.

 

Do we see a pattern here, folks? Fox News is the largest right-wing propaganda network in the country. Alex Jones’s Infowars, which includes a website and loads of streamed videos, is not nearly as large as Fox. But it is a “media organization,” or at least gets to act like one under the agreed-upon rules, and it too reaches a hefty audience (around 16 million visitors a month to the website, according to one site I looked at). Indeed Jones, after the 2021 death of Rush Limbaugh but before the defamation award, might have made a plausible claim to being the single most influential voice on the far right (although maybe Tucker Carlson overtook him somewhere in that time frame).

 

However you rank them, the plain truth is that Fox News and Alex Jones are vastly influential right-wing “media” voices. And now one has been assigned to pay history’s largest defamation award and the other to pay history’s largest defamation settlement.

 

This is not a coincidence. This is how they roll. Lying is what these people do. Why? A few reasons. Money, mostly, as the Fox-Dominion depositions showed (“It is not red or blue, it’s green,” Rupert Murdoch said). Also, to shock and upset conventional liberal opinion (which is tied to money, of course, because the more shocking they are, the higher the ratings, and the greater the profit).

 

And finally, for ideological reasons. There isn’t much of an ideological angle in a comment like this one, which Jones made about a grieving parent the night after the shooting: “You know, after you lose your daughter, they put you on some antidepressants or something, but I thought those take a month to kick in. I mean, it’s like a look of absolute satisfaction, like he’s about to accept an Oscar.” But remember that Jones also said this: “Why did Hitler blow up the Reichstag—to get control! Why do governments stage these things—to get our guns! Why can’t people get that through their head?” That’s a clear ideological defense of his lies.

 

The record would seem to indicate that Fox executives and anchors had no ideological motivation, because said record suggests that they knew Donald Trump was lying about the 2020 election. But their choice to go along with the Big Lie was partly an ideological choice too, and for this reason: They understood the stakes of going along with the lie. They knew very well that if Trump got his way, and states tried to put in substitute slates of electors or Mike Pence refused to certify the electoral votes on January 6, 2021, that would have been the end of more than 240 consecutive years of democratic rule in the U.S. The end! And they went along. It was driven by ratings in the first instance—which is hardly an excuse, by the way—but it was also revealing of the ideology of the place, where democracy takes a distant second to power.

 

They lie. They lie all the time about practically everything. It’s a strategy. Turn reality on its head. Invert every question. Cherry-pick evidence. Here’s a comparatively benign, wonky example. There’s a recent book out called The Myth of Inequality, co-written by former Senator Phil Gramm, which argues that inequality has shrunk, not increased, over recent decades. One chief claim in the book is that the way we measure inequality doesn’t count transfers of “wealth” to poor people like Medicare and Medicaid. Well … it’s true to some extent that these are resources that are transferred to poorer Americans—but mainly if they get sick! TNR’s Tim Noah demolished this argument last fall, writing: “By Gramm’s logic, the sicker you get, the richer you become.” Gramm and his co-authors also wrote—for real—that Ebenezer Scrooge is misunderstood.

 

That, as I said, is a more quotidian example of the way they lie, but its very quotidian-ness makes my point: They lie about virtually everything, because reality is at odds with their worldview. Sometimes those lies are merely insidious, with horrible consequences for policymaking and society (that inequality is shrinking; that charter schools do better than public schools). But other times, the lies are vicious and unspeakable, with potentially tragic consequences for society. And they don’t care.

 

Meanwhile … where are the massive defamation lawsuits against MSNBC, HuffPost, and the like? Funny thing. They don’t exist. It’s not that these outlets, and other mainstream and liberal ones, have never been sued. Everybody makes errors, sometimes fairly bad ones. But we—both the avowedly liberal media and the mainstream media—don’t lie as a strategy. And the right is reduced to trying to catch the mainstream media in lies by … in essence, lying—i.e., sending people like James O’Keefe out to try to dupe people and get them to admit certain things and heavily edit the resulting conversations.

 

They’ve been lying for years. Reality was bound to catch up. But they still are able to use the cover of the First Amendment to lie—to help destroy, paradoxically, the very democracy that the First Amendment was written to sustain. There is much more to be done to rein them in. Go, Smartmatic.

 

Item two: Ron DeSantis is drunk with power

 

Did you ever see Woody Allen’s Bananas? It’s from back when he was only trying to be funny, not profound, and as such was probably more profound than he was when he started trying to be profound. It was also before we knew all that awful stuff about him. I guess because I saw them in real time, I can still laugh at them.

 

Anyway. It’s about a leftist guerilla who takes over a South American government in a coup. Before seizing power, he vows land reform and the redistribution of wealth to the peasants. But once he takes power, he descends to the main plaza to announce various new measures, all of which are insane (the only one I remember is that citizens would now be required to wear their underwear outside their pants).

 

I thought of this scene while watching Ron DeSantis go about his business this week. Threatening to build prisons near Disney World. Boy, I wish I were a Democratic TV ad maker. I know just the ad I’d cut if he became the Republican nominee. It might involve DeSantis as Jafar, or, in what would be a very nice touch, an in-drag DeSantis as Maleficent, and it would make him look ridiculous to all but the 30 percent of America that backs his anti-woke crusade.

 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the conventional wisdom go so rapidly from “This guy looks formidable as hell” to “This guy ain’t got it.” In fact, it’s changed so rapidly and so thoroughly that I don’t entirely trust it. There are plenty of second and third acts in American life, and there’s lots of time for DeSantis to reinvent himself again and mount a comeback. On the other hand, there’s a strong conventional argument for him to let Trump run this time and lose, and DeSantis runs in 2028, in a year when, history indicates, voters are likely to hand power to the other party.

 

He has proven one valuable thing to us, though. The politics of anti-wokism has limits. You may have noticed on Thursday, the House voted on strict party lines to pass a bill prohibiting transgender high school athletes from participating in sports. Every Democrat voted against. Josh Gottheimer. Jared Golden, who represents a pretty red district in Maine and lives in terror of being linked to AOC in a 30-second attack ad. Gottheimer and Golden must know that this vote isn’t really going to hurt them. That’s big progress on an issue that would have sent a lot of Democrats scurrying a few years ago.

 

These assaults on transgender people are real and appalling, and we have to keep paying attention. But it’s great to see the Democrats united on the question, and we partially have DeSantis to thank for forcing the issue.

This week’s quiz: I’m sorry, so sorry.… On this week in which we were denied the big apology we all ached to hear, a quiz on famous apologies, in history and in popular culture.

 

And finally, of course, who famously didn’t apologize this week? Hint: They vowed a “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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