Newsmax and Fox News fear lawsuits now that the gig is up. It’s finally over. Having pummelled states, election officials, and voting system companies, this week, America’s top right-wing news outlets did a little Stalinesque revisionism on their long-running revisionist post-election narrative of widespread election fraud. The grandmaster, Fox News, aired clarifications on several shows over the weekend. This was an unusual move for the following reason. As an earlier defense in former Donald Trump mistress Karen McDougal’s defamation suit against one of its highest-rated host, Tucker Carlson, in September, Fox asserted that you can’t believe Carlson’s words because he is pure entertainment.
Fox told a federal judge that the “‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.'” In her opinion, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil’s accepted Fox’s arguments, stating, “Fox persuasively argues, that given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statement he makes.” In other words, you’re an idiot if you watch Tucker Carlson’s show and believe a word he says.
We can then interpret Fox’s decision to run clarifications this week as the lawyers waving a red flag of potential lawsuits from its coverage. In a somewhat surreal climb-down over the weekend, the usual Trump combatants at Fox News and Fox Business Channel – Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, and Lou Dobbs – used others to relay their revision of many weeks of post-election revisionism.
But even more extraordinary was Newsmax’sMea culpa. In the last few weeks, it has given disgraced former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn a platform to grift Donald Trump with Martial Law ideas. It has given over its airways to Sidney “Kracken” Powell to spread lies and disinformation about the election results and the voting companies. Her claim to fame is that Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp was in the pockets of the long-dead Hugo Chavez (of Venezuela fame) and Dominion Voting Systems. Powell, Trump’s once-disavowed-now-back-in-the saddle nutty campaign lawyer, has become notorious of late for filing laughable post-election typo-ridden lawsuits. How they came up with these wild stories is beyond comprehension.
On Monday, Newsmax aired a nearly two-minute video ticking through items it had “not reported as true” related to President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated election-fraud claims. It issued a lengthy statement to “clarify” false and baseless claims made on its platform about two vote-processing companies, Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, and the 2020 election. Anchor John Tabacco also ticked off a series of political figures and entities the network had wrongly maligned. He told the audience that, “Newsmax would like to clarify its news coverage and note that it has not reported as true, certain claims made about these companies.” Newsmax also posted the same statement on its website on Saturday, reiterating that it “no evidence” to back up the election-fraud claims it had spent weeks propagating.
The New York Times reported that Newsmax, Fox News, and One America News Network could face defamation lawsuits from voting-system companies, Smartmatic and Dominion. Smartmatic, a digital-security firm, has threatened to sue Newsmax, Fox News, and One America NewsNetwork over promoting false and defamatory claims that the company engaged in or covered up voter fraud. Dominion Voting Systems had also threatened to sue the Trump campaign and Sidney Powell.
Since losing the 2020 election, President Donald Trump and his allies, including Powell and Rudy Giuliani, have aggressively pushed baseless claims that the voting systems companies were part of a global cabal bent on stealing the race for the Democrats. Wild theories about nefarious players involved in voting machines and mail-in voting systems were regular features of Newsmax’s coverage in the weeks after the election. Powell and Giuliani pushed outlandish claims on Newsmax, including that the dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez had orchestrated the 2020 election conspiracy before his death in 2013, leaving it to others like the Clinton Foundation and the CIA to then carrying it out.
In NewsMax’s Mea culpa, anchor John Tabacco delineated that, “Dominion has stated the company has no ownership relationship with the Pelosi family, the Feinstein family, the Clinton family, Hugo Chavez, or the government of Venezuela. Smartmatic is a US company and not owned by the Venezuelan government, Hugo Chavez, or any foreign official or entity. Smartmatic states that it has no operations in Venezuela … It was never founded by Hugo Chavez, nor did it have a corrupt relationship with him or the Venezuelan government.”
Trump confidante and Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy said in a statement later Monday that the clarification segment would air across all of its shows. Now to the realization that hubristic actions do have consequences.
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