Unless you're a MAGA sort of Republican who only watches Fox News, you should be aware that legal filings submitted by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox have made it crystal clear that Fox News doesn't care about reporting the truth.
All it cares about is keeping its viewers happy by telling them only what they want to believe, not what they should know.
So bizarrely, Fox News hasn't been reporting on the lawsuit that is one of the biggest news stories in the country right now.
Because court documents show that both executives and on-air personalities at Fox News knew that the 2020 election wasn't stolen from Trump, but they were afraid to tell their viewers this truth out of a fear that they'd turn off Fox and go to even crazier right-wing media like OAN.
Thus Fox News spread lies about Dominion machines switching votes from Trump to Biden, and gave lots of airtime to other conspiracy theories concerning Trump's Big Lie that he actually won the presidential election.
Watching coverage of the Fox News scandal today, I was struck by a mention on MSNBC that for lots of Fox News viewers, probably a majority, Fox is the only place they go to learn about what's happening.
By contrast, liberals like me have many options. I watch CNN and MSNBC. I read the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other news sources that I find on Google News and elsewhere.
This makes the failure of Fox News to accurately report news more serious than it would be if avid conservatives could turn to other sources of information about current events in the United States and the rest of the world.
Sometimes I wonder how my mother, a hard core Republican, would look upon the sorry state of conservatism in our country. She was an intellectual. My mother loved to learn. She devoured books and magazines, along with listening to right-wing radio commentators like Paul Harvey.
I'm pretty sure she would be aghast at how so many modern-day Republicans care so little about truth. My mother could be an annoying person to talk politics with, because she had such strong conservative opinions.
But she always tried to be factual.
That's why even though as a divorced woman without much money during my childhood, my mother subscribed to all of the major news magazines in the 1950s and 60s. Time, Life, Look, Saturday Review, National Geographic, National Review (a conservative publication with smart, well written stories).
There's simply no basis for saying that in 2023 Fox News and MSNBC, say, are equally biased toward one side of the political spectrum. Fox News lies. MSNBC either tells the truth or admits when it got something wrong.
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