Fox News’ Big Lie infected Idaho. Now there are 790 million reasons to discard it | Opinion
For years now, American politics has been clouded by the Big Lie, former President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
This lie was what led to the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6. It is also the reason most people in the Intermountain West said they were seriously concerned about further Jan. 6-style violence in the near future, when polled by the Frank Church Institute in 2021.
This week, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems — the makers of ballot machines that were at the center of conspiracy theories about how this vote-stealing was supposed to work — nearly $790 million to settle a defamation lawsuit alleging that it had intentionally lied to the American public.
It’s not hard to see why Fox offered such an astoundingly large settlement: It’s clear from text messages released in the discovery process that people at Fox News knew the Big Lie was a falsehood and decided to spread it anyway. Nearly $1 billion is a lot of money, but it’s worth it not to have to get on the stand and be questioned about those text and email messages.
And it’s also clear why. Fox was scared that telling the truth would alienate its audience.
Fox had been the first major news organization to call Arizona for Joe Biden (and, though this call was correct in the end, there’s quite a good argument that both Fox and the Associated Press were premature, as New York Times analyst Nate Cohn laid out.) The decision to call the race in Arizona enraged significant sections of Fox’s audience, which had top executives in distress.
“Getting creamed by CNN!” Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch wrote in an email to Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Fox. “Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it. Hard enough for me! They’ll return. (Not for Chris Wallace!)”
The Big Lie has been central to Idaho politics for some time. Two of the three main Republican nominees for secretary of state embraced it. Luckily, Phil McGrane won the race, but not by so much that it’s certain he would have defeated the election deniers if they hadn’t split the vote on the far right.
It’s also filtered down into legislative efforts, generally under the guise of eliminating some vague category of fraud that no one has ever seen take place.
Only one terrible election bill succeeded this year: banning the use of student IDs for voting purposes. A lawsuit seeks to have it declared unconstitutional.
Even worse proposals, supposedly aimed at tamping down fraud but effective only at tamping down legitimate voting, came close to being enacted.
There was House Bill 205, which would have eliminated absentee voting for people in most situations, leaving it open to active duty military, people with second homes, people on religious missions and a few other favored categories. Thankfully, the House rejected the bill — but 30 representatives supported it, including Speaker Mike Moyle.
House Bill 137 would have eliminated the ability to cast a provisional ballot with an affidavit guaranteeing their identity, in the event they forgot their ID at home. That bill was also supported by Moyle — and would have passed if only two representatives had switched their votes from no to yes.
Enough.
It’s never been more apparent than it is today that the Big Lie deserves its name. Let’s hope those who once espoused it will look at Fox News’ record-breaking settlement and finally get the message: There are 790 million reasons they should never have taken claims of widespread election fraud seriously in the first place.
Statesman editorials are the unsigned opinion of the Idaho Statesman’s editorial board. Board members are opinion editor Scott McIntosh, opinion writer Bryan Clark, editor Chadd Cripe and newsroom editors Dana Oland and Jim Keyser.
