Coup in prime audience

During the two months that passed between the presidential elections that Joe Biden won, in November 2020, and the attempted assault on the Capitol on January 6, the Fox News television network contributed decisively to give an appearance of credibility and amplify the nonsense that the election had been rigged.

Through his primetime shows, President Donald Trump used his enormous predicament over a portion of the Republican electorate to undermine confidence in the democratic system.

Now, the evidence and statements unsealed in a lawsuit against the network have revealed to the public that the leadership of Fox News, and the anchors, did not believe the lies they told on screen.

One of the rumors spread was that voting machines from a company called Dominion switched votes from Trump to Biden in key battleground states.

The company claims that this damaged its image and its business and, in a lawsuit, claims 1.6 billion dollars in compensation.

The judge has compiled hundreds of pages of internal Fox News communications that reveal the hypocrisy that reigned on the network.

Star presenters who fueled the conspiracy privately claim that what Trump's lawyers say is a lie.

They know they are telling hoaxes but they fear losing their audience.

"It's not a question of red and blue," says the owner of the chain, Rupert Murdoch, referring to the colors of the parties;

“it is green”, the color of the dollar.

The lawsuit has an uncertain path.

The mixture of information and opinion is common in that industry, although Fox News takes it to the extreme.

Press freedom enjoys the highest constitutional protection in the US It is very difficult to prove malicious intent in repeating statements that were ultimately invented not by Fox but by Trump.

But Murdoch denies in his statement that the company endorsed the outgoing president's hoaxes and shifts the blame to individual comments by some presenters.

It is impossible to calculate what was the degree of responsibility of the chain in the extreme fanaticization of the two thousand Trumpists who stormed the Capitol.

The biggest conspiracy nonsense circulated through unconventional information channels.

But it is not difficult to intuit that, if the stars of the media magaverse had told the truth, the attempted coup led by Trump would have had a more difficult time.

Forced to choose between defrauding its audience or spreading a lie that corrodes democracy, Fox News chose the lie.

This is a decision that goes far beyond business pragmatism.

Legally guilty or not, the case already appears as a paradigm of ethical corruption that breaks the border between a means of communication and an instrument of agitation and propaganda.