Fox vs. Dominion voting machines

Continued from Page 18

With that as already well-known background, many of us are hoping — expecting— that the scales have been tipped in favor of Dominion and that Fox will have to bear a huge fnancial burden. Some commentators with a left-leaning bias have even suggested the possibility that the $1.6 billion in damages for libel could be augmented by punitive damages for the willfully false attack on Dominion’s integrity as a key supplier of voting machines to localities across the entire country. It remains to be seen, of course, how the trial goes and how successful the defense attorneys may be in refuting the plaintif’s claims.

What I’ve said thus far, though, is well known among those of us who have paid attention to reports of developments, and many of us have a shared hope that now, at last, the Fox viewers will have to face up to the fact that they’ve been conned— that the Fox anchors have played to their audience’s wishful thinking rather than reporting facts that their viewers would fnd disappointing. And another widely known fact is that Fox has consistently avoided reporting about the progress of the pre-trial preparations, including the admission by its most favored anchors that they had been deliberately lying to their most loyal fans.

And there’s good reason to suspect that if it turns out that the trial goes against Fox and that the decision includes the requirement of a very large payment — possibly measured in billions — it would be the network’s policy simply not to mention it. Since it’s been asserted that a very large percentage of the Fox audience obtains ALL of its news from Fox, it seems entirely possible that the Fox public would still never know that they have been conned by the TV personalities on whom they had been relying.

That’s all a lead-in to a proposal that if the Dominion legal team learns about it and agrees could solve the dilemma: Assuming a victory by Dominion, the terms laid down by the court should include not only the monetary relief granted in the decision, but also that Fox News be required to report in its newscasts the results of the trial, accompanied by the concession that those eminent anchors knew full well that they were lying, and that the policy of lying had been supported all the way up to the top of the corporation in the person of Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

That may well fulfll Fox’s greatest fears: Its audience could lose faith and seek other sources, its advertising revenues would consequently diminish, and the price of its shares would decline, probably afecting the net wealth not only of Chairman Murdoch and his family but also of those who receive any portion of their compensation in some form of participation in shares of company stock.

Furthermore, there might even be a broader beneft to the solution I suggest. I’m sure that many will remember the contention, in the aftermath of the fnancial near-meltdown of 2008/09, the protests that many of the corporate managers who had been responsible for the problems that led to the crash seemed to have gotten away with little, if any, penalty; indeed, some actually earned large bonuses, often in the form of participation in company shares, for helping the business recover from the crisis they had helped create.

If those Fox individuals are seen to bear some personal cost for having shared in the creation of the Great Scam, it just might be considered a just and fair retribution.

Robert I. Adler Port Washington