At the 11th hour, a $787 million settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems averted a landmark trial alleging defamation at the hands of Fox News against Dominion. Regardless, the damage to Fox had already been done. Redacted documents widely shared to the American public demonstrated that while perpetuating claims of election fraud in the 2020 election to millions of viewers, behind the scenes, Fox widely ridiculed and denounced these claims. Shortly following — and possible related to — this dilemma was the firing of Fox News figurehead Tucker Carlson, whose controversial primetime show was consistently one of the highest rated shows on television.
For seven years, Carlson was the face of Fox News, even amid repeated allegations of racism and his perpetuation of a hostile work environment. This case and Carlson’s subsequent firing reveal what has become the driving force of legacy media: audience validation. This propels news outlets to tell the audience what they want to hear, at any cost. Fox, a corporation which states it is committed to “building a culture of trust, integrity, and ethical behavior” has been caught red-handed engaging in exactly this type of unethical behavior. While on the surface, this lawsuit has hurt Fox financially and led to Carlson’s exit, it also represents a crucial turn of events for the future of news media.
In the era of “fake news,” false, defamatory, misleading and hyperbolic statements travel faster and farther than real news. As an ever-expanding web of media sources compete for our undivided attention, televised news sources are under increasing pressure to retain their audience through increasingly desperate means. The Dominion case divulged a pivotal effect of this sort of competitive environment. While Carlson vehemently opposed Trump in private, his obligations to his conservative viewership meant that to escape irrelevancy, his stances had to shift along with the stances of his viewers. This two-faced approach seems to have become a staple across the organization, with multiple producers, anchors and executives making similarly incriminating remarks surrounding the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Throughout his seven-year campaign, Carlson’s primetime proclamations were often directly geared towards making inflammatory statements with the express purpose of stirring up controversy, which led to soaring viewership. Over time, his dominance over cable news meant that Fox increasingly relied on such assertions to generate revenue. In the years of Trump’s presidency, this meant harnessing otherwise taboo white nationalism by attacking minority groups and citing alt-right conspiracy theories. Long before the claims of election fraud, a high-level dispute arose when Brian Jones, then Fox’s highest-ranked Black executive, disputed Carlson’s coverage of Black people killing white landowners in South Africa, insisting that almost everything he said was untrue. Fox did nothing to stop Carlson, and later that evening President Trump tweeted that he enlisted Mike Pompeo, former U.S. Secretary of State, to investigate this mostly fraudulent story. This communication sparked outrage and resulted in a statement from the foreign minister of South Africa condemning the reports.
Nevertheless, Fox executives continued to stand behind Carlson, even amid dissenting voices resigning from Fox. By June 2020, Carlson had lost multiple advertisers from 2018, yet still brought in an immense amount of revenue. The remarks by Carlson, which sparked the defamation lawsuit against Fox, were not a novel event, but rather the final link in a long chain of his misinformation and outright lies. In spite of this, his sheer popularity and the revenue he granted Fox gave executives no incentive to end his dangerous streak across the primetime airwaves.
Ironically, it was a string of highly offensive private text messages directed at these same Fox executives that allegedly was the final straw. Even with Carlson’s departure and a hopeful return to more fact-based programming, the culture at Fox News, headed by Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan, remains mostly unchanged. While significant airtime was devoted to Carlson’s firing on other networks, it has remained business as usual at Fox, who have since replaced him with a rotating roster of anchors until a lasting replacement is found. This represents a pattern at Fox: Past anchors such as Bill O’Reilly were abruptly discarded once their presence became too inconvenient.
Quintessentially, the for-profit news media system in the United States drives networks to appeal to the established beliefs of their audience to maximize viewership and retention, especially as many media sources diverge to a digital audience and growing subscription services. This constant pursuit of retention and engagement is guided by analytics on which stories are most popular with readers. In turn, this pushes networks to publish more stories on similar issues, driving exacerbation of media bias and partisanship. While other mainstream, left-leaning media networks such as CNN or MSNBC have escaped the legal scrutiny Fox News was subjected to in the Dominion case, political polarization among cable news has only increased over the last decade. Considering this trend, it’s possible that CNN, MSNBC and related networks also engage in similar practices to stay relevant.
This cycle of bias is a double-edged sword. Not only does it affect media sources, but it also disproportionately affects viewers who become less receptive to ideas that challenge their established views. This phenomenon culminates in a population of people who are not only less media literate but also increasingly unaware of their own predispositions, as everything that aligns with their beliefs becomes an unequivocal fact. Viewers didn’t watch Fox News for Tucker Carlson or any other personality — millions tuned in because they knew he’d validate their own misaligned inclinations. This reality can be easily recognized within the recent rise of Newsmax, Fox News’ rival for the conservative media throne, which enjoyed substantial increases in ratings following Carlson’s departure.
Simultaneously, trust in the media has reached historic lows, especially among young people. Information they see on social media is almost equally trusted as information received from national news sources. Regardless of age group, levels of trust across the political divide have also decreased substantially, driven by a sharp decline among Republicans. Increased distrust in mainstream media has led to increasing numbers of people getting their news from alternative sources such as Breitbart or Infowars, which have carved out significant sectors of the right-wing ecosystem. These factors have led to a population which is increasingly vulnerable to misinformation and “fake news.” This is especially harrowing when swaths of people become increasingly attached to the ideas of ideological demagogues such as Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones.
This rapid spread of “fake news” as a result of distrust in reputable sources cannot be solely attributed to Republicans or Democrats. On both sides of the political aisle, individuals with high conscientiousness were least likely to spread misinformation. But, Republicans with low conscientiousness were two and a half times more likely to share misinformation, higher than all other groups combined. In another study, the spread of conspiracy theories was equally likely between conservatives and liberals. This refutes the common misconception that the fault lies exclusively with radical conservatives — in reality it lies with those who are poor critical thinkers, regardless of political affiliation.
The Dominion lawsuit and Carlson’s firing represent an extreme case in this cycle, yet must serve as a reminder that above all else, the truth must be one step above pursuing profits. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is a cautionary tale of what happens when this business model is driven to the extreme, and other mainstream media outlets must respond by assessing the biases present in their own coverage. We have already seen the results of overly-partisan reporting over the last decade. In its wake, media outlets have an opportunity to deliver just the facts, not their facts. Alternatively, outlets will continue to perpetuate the proclivities of their audience, and we will face an even more polarized and divided nation.
Maximilian Schenke is an Opinion Columnist who is passionate about international politics and how they affect us locally, but often writes about national politics as well. He loves receiving criticism or otherwise at maxsch@umich.edu.