“Here’s the truth. Lots of Republican politicians love spending and wasting taxpayer money almost as much as Democrats. The last two Republican presidents added more than $10 trillion to the national debt. Think about that. A third of our debt happened under just two Republicans.”
That’s what presidential hopeful, Republican Nikki Haley, said during her March 4 speech at a Club for Growth donor event in Florida. The only surprising thing about it was that it was the truth. Because normally Haley has a hard time telling the truth. Her lies about foreign aid are well documented in Glenn Kessler’s article in the March 1 Washington Post.
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But she has a long way to go before the number of her lies exceed those of former President Donald Trump. A March 6 article in the Independent reads, “Donald Trump made at least 23 false statements during his CPAC speech over the weekend, a fact check has found.”
Who’s surprised? A quick internet search shows Politifact, which fact-checks members of both political parties, lists pages filled with the lies he’s told over the years. According to the Washington Post, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims while he was president.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is right up there with Trump when it comes to the number of lies he’s told. The evidence shows that 17% of his claims have been mostly false, 42% were false, and 32% were “pants on fire.” Politifact details the lies, with solid evidence of why they’re lies, yet “the base” believes every one of them. That tells us just as much about Fox News viewers as it does about Carlson, Fox News and the other Trump enablers who lie almost every time they open their mouths.
On Feb. 27, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News Corp. It revealed that the right-wing news channel’s CEO, Rupert Murdoch, admitted in a deposition that some of his top hosts were pushing election lies to his audience even though they knew they were lies. He admitted a lot more than that, too, and the details can be found in a March 3 CNN article called “The 10 biggest revelations from Dominion’s explosive Fox News legal filing.”
Although Murdoch encouraged Fox News hosts to lie, he didn’t tell the truth until he was under oath. Looks like he doesn’t want to be arrested or take all the blame for what hosts of his network said and continue to say.
Fox hosts also leave out anything they don’t want their viewers to know. That’s called lying by omission and is just as deceptive as outright lying. Put simply, it’s when someone leaves out important information in order to hide the truth from others. Fox News does that on a regular basis.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., gave Fox News host Carlson access to more than 40,000 hours of the Capitol security footage from Jan. 6, 2021. Then Carlson, who used the footage to downplay the violence and defend the mob, claimed he checked with the Capitol Police before airing it.
However, on Tuesday, March 6, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger disputed what Carlson said about footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Manger said the host “cherry-picked” from the footage to present “offensive” and “misleading” conclusions about the attack.
The Feb. 19 issue of The Atlantic exposed more Fox lies, “There was the irresponsible hyping of anti-vaccine propaganda even as it imposed a vaccine mandate on its employees. There were the text messages from Fox hosts released by the January 6 committee showing that they saw Trump as responsible for inspiring the mob that sacked the Capitol, even as they defended him on air and downplayed the significance of the event.”
There’s no disputing the facts: Fox News relies on lies to keep its viewers. The Atlantic article states, “Fox News executives and personalities understand that their own network loses traction with its audience when it fails to tell the lies that the audience wishes to hear.”
That’s verified by the facts, text messages and other damning information uncovered by the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News Corp. During his testimony, Murdoch admitted that Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and former host Lou Dobbs promoted falsehoods about the 2020 presidential contest being stolen.
Murdoch also claimed it was “wrong” for Carlson to host conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell after the election. When Murdoch was asked why he allowed Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, to continue appearing on Fox News, Murdoch indicated it was a business decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green?” a Dominion lawyer asked. Murdoch agreed it was “green” — in other words, money motivated.
That tells us all we need to know about Fox “News.”
