Interesting dilemma a journalist faces when telling the truth could cost him his job. To do? Reward honesty or bank account? The immortal reputation or the fleeting fame?
I am not referring to journalists in tyrannical countries. If you make a living in a Russian, Chinese or Iranian environment, the price of telling things as they are is not losing your salary, it is losing your freedom or your life. The alternative to lying is martyrdom.
The journalist's dilemma in free countries is less dramatic. It is not a matter of life or death, it is a choice between integrity or cynicism, as the news channel with the highest audience in the United States, Fox News, has just shown us.
Over the past seven years, Fox News has been to Donald Trump what all Russian television channels are to Vladimir Putin today. One had always suspected that Fox reporters and anchors were more or less sane people, aware, deep down, that their beloved leader inhabited an alternate reality. The news is that the suspicion has been confirmed. Because the United States remains a country where the law works, the hypocrisy of Fox News has been laid bare.
Basically, it has been shown that the main figures of Fox, not excluding its owner, Rupert Murdoch, knew from the first moment that the result of the 2020 presidential election had been legitimate. But this did not prevent them, once in front of the cameras, from following Trump's slogan and insisting that there was fraud. In private they called the accusations nonsense; in public they encouraged them with indignant conviction.
Fox's great tactical error was repeating the Trumpist slander that Dominion, the company that makes the vote counting machines, was complicit in the alleged fraud. Dominion responded by claiming $1.6 billion in defamation and, while the trial has yet to start, a flood of information about the internal processes of the Murdoch family company has already come to light.
Dominion's lawyers have gained access to private communications between Fox News star hosts, producers and executives expressing a collective disdain for Trump's conspiracy theories, describing them, among other things, as "mind-bogglingly bonkers," "absolute bullshit" and “totally unrelated to reality”. “The North Koreans present the news in a more nuanced way than we do,” a senior Fox News executive commented one night.
The presenter Tucker Carlson, more famous in the United States than Brad Pitt and a hundred times more influential, knew from the beginning that the apologists of electoral fraud were lying. But when he interviewed them live he seemed to take them seriously. "I hate this shit," he confessed in a message. But he did not stop spreading it.
Carlson –a Kremlin idol, by the way– entered into the dynamics that George Orwell called “doublethink”. He mocked Trump's lies in conversations with his peers, but denounced the brave few among them who for a while spoke their minds on television. Carlson fell to the infamy of calling for the firing of a reporter who had the audacity to say on air what he knew to be true, that the allegations against Dominion were baseless. “This crazy lady is hurting the company,” Carlson wrote in a message. “Our stock value is falling. This is not a joke."
Here's the thing, as Rupert Murdoch himself acknowledged in an affidavit he was forced to give last month. The magnate admitted that he never bought the joke about the voter fraud allegations, but explained that "Trump had a lot of supporters and probably a lot of them are Fox viewers, so it would have been stupid" to tell the truth. The few instances of such "stupidity," such as the reporter whose head Carlson asked for, had a negative impact on Fox News ratings. A month after the 2020 elections, a leak was detected to smaller news channels but more fanatical about their Trumpist vocation. Carlson and company responded by closing ranks – precisely – to the North Korean one.
Sean Hannity, another well-known Fox News host, also did not stop expressing to his peers his disgust with Trump once he began to question the election result. But, after the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Hannity was forceful in his response to those who accused Trump of having incited it. “This is nothing more than another excuse to smear Trump and all his supporters,” Hannity told viewers.
"Navigating" the waters between truth and "insanity" turned out to be "very difficult" for Fox, Murdoch acknowledged. A member of the company's board of directors, former Republican congressman Paul Ryan, called for a forceful denouncement of "the farce" that Trump carried out. He ignored her. Murdoch, opted for "madness", with a consequent rebound in audience and the value of his company on Wall Street.
As for the damage that Murdoch himself understood that Trump and Fox had caused to the credibility of American democracy, his attitude was "what are we going to do?" Pasta comes first.
This story will serve, I fear, to confirm the prejudices of those who believe that journalists are sold to money or power. Not so fast. The Fox News scandal is not typical. In four decades in the media I have never come across anything worse. That said, I am aware of sins of omission, of media that do not count or give little weight to information that would endanger the loyalty of their audience. But this is precisely the issue. The public. Some of us will have more responsibility than others, but here no one is acquitted. The news consumer, as Murdoch points out, is complicit in what the journalist says or writes. Let us be thankful, at least, that in democracies like the United States one can choose between media with different points of view. In Russia all the media without exception are as cynical, hypocritical and deceitful as Fox News. Each country has the press it deserves.
