Donald Who?: Fox, the Dominion Case, and the Perils of Pivoting from Trump

[Nevilledog]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/donald-who-fox-the-dominion-case-and-the-perils-of-pivoting-from-trump

No paywall
https://archive.is/8Lkvj

It was a slow news week in Washington, at least if you watched Fox News. On Tuesday night, apropos of nothing in particular, two of the network’s marquee prime-time hosts, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, retreated to their safe space, devoting long opening segments to bashing President Biden. Hannity banged on about Biden’s friendship, decades ago, with the long-dead Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, who had been a racist Klan member as a young man before renouncing the group. Carlson opted for a more straightforward hit, arguing that Biden’s age makes him unfit for office. For Fox, these monologues are what you talk about when you don’t have anything else to talk about, like when a comedian runs out of material and starts making jokes about the weather.

Biden is so old, Carlson insisted, that he is literally “losing his ability to speak.” He’s so old, Carlson added, that not even “Botox and hair plugs and face-lifts” can fix it. In fact, his age is such a problem, Carlson concluded, that it’s a sign of America succumbing to “the trans agenda and climate theology.” Huh? According to Fox’s most watched prime-time host, the U.S. is violating the laws of nature by having such an ancient President, and once a country starts violating the laws of nature, well, then anything can happen.

The rest of the week, the two hosts continued to expose the dangerous perfidy of America’s élites. On Wednesday night, Hannity offered a long rant about Hillary Clinton and her e-mails and the “abject failure” of the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray. Carlson delivered riffs on the “Democratic donors” who created the opioid crisis, on all the money that is going to citizens of Ukraine instead of to citizens of Ohio, on Chicago’s “historically disastrous” Democratic mayor, and on the Wall Street Journal’s report that the Department of Energy now thinks, with low confidence, that covid-19 may in fact have originated in a Chinese lab. This last item, according to Carlson, was both major news and complete vindication—for him. Anyone who did not believe in this theory, Carlson said, was “complicit in the greatest crime in history.”

Just as notable was what the Fox hosts did not mention. Donald Trump, for years the hero of their nightly shows and even now the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination, was barely acknowledged. Nor was the week’s biggest news concerning Fox itself: the revelations in two extraordinary recent legal filings by Dominion Voting Systems about the cynical lengths to which Carlson, Hannity, and others at Fox went to promote Trump’s false claims that he had won the 2020 election—despite knowing that he had lost. They did so, according to evidence obtained by Dominion during discovery in its $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox, because Fox’s Trump-loving viewers refused to abandon their defeated President, preferring to go along with his “rigged election” delusions rather than admit his defeat.

*snip*