Dominion's damning discovery

Evidence obtained in Its case against Fox News casts Tucker Carlson in a terrible light

Donald Trump is a man of many character flaws, dishonesty being prominent among them. However, I have more respect for Trump than for commentators who realize how flawed he is but won’t say it in their commentary.

I understand why many GOP politicians hold their fire when it comes to Trump. Commentary isn’t their job and it’s the nature of their job not to be impolitic.

But commentary is precisely the job of commentators. If they won’t say what they genuinely think about such vital matters as the character and actions of a candidate for president, or indeed a president, they are doing their audience a major disservice. And if they defend the character or actions of such a man even though they don’t believe in that defense, they are whores.

The case Dominion Voting Systems has brought against Fox News rests, I think, on a somewhat different set of facts. As I understand it, Dominion’s complaint is that Fox News hosted people like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani who presented false claims against Dominion that top Fox executives and some hosts firmly believed to be false.

This is a more complicated situation than the one I described at the beginning of this post. Networks shouldn’t be barred or deterred from presenting views their leaders and hosts disbelieve. After all, the leaders and hosts might be wrong. In any event, such a rule would disserve open public discourse.

On the other hand, before a news network presents people who make slanderous allegations, it seems like there should be some threshold of plausibility to the allegations. And if network executives and/or hosts have a very high level of disbelief, they probably shouldn’t air the slander.

Absent a settlement, these competing considerations will be thrashed out in the Dominion litigation.

Meanwhile, though, discovery in the case suggests that Fox News engaged in some of what I described above as whoring. This evidence doesn’t relate directly to Dominion, and therefore may be of limited or no relevance to the case. But it is relevant to how we should view some employees of Fox News.

Here is what Tucker Carlson said about Trump in private content discovered in the Dominion case:

We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately. . . .

That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.

Carlson thus admits that he had been “pretending” the Trump administration was other than a “disaster” and that there’s an ”upside” to the man. Carlson’s private assessment of Trump’s presidency is, by the way, harsher than mine.

Be that as it may, Carlson has admitted that he serially fed his audience views about Trump and the Trump administration that he didn’t believe. Given this admission, I don’t see why anyone should ever again believe anything Carlson says.