On Tuesday in Michigan, a judge dismissed charges against 16 people who signed certificates falsely claiming Donald Trump won Michigan in the 2020 election. “Right, wrong or indifferent,” the judge wrote, they “sincerely believe, for some reason, that there were some serious irregularities with the election, or with the voting, and that somehow their candidate didn’t receive all the votes” that were cast for him.
Fox News reporting on the election is one of the reasons they were duped.
The network seems primed to purposely mislead their audience once again. This time with regard to President Donald Trump’s relationship with the infamous accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The latest revelations in that sordid saga should awaken the conscience of Sen. Dan Sullivan.
“Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25% of Americans was a huge disservice to the country,” Rupert Murdoch said. “Pretty much a crime.”
But the executive chairman of Fox Corp never let his network’s audience know he felt that way. He wrote it in a private email the day Joe Biden was inaugurated. It surfaced during the discovery stage in a defamation lawsuit against the network. They paid Dominion Voting systems $787 million to settle the case.
Murdoch also wondered if his news hosts “went too far” pushing Trump’s verifiably false narrative. One of those hosts was Sean Hannity. Despite not providing him with shred of credible evidence, he let Sydney Powell air her allegations that Dominion rigged the election. He didn’t challenge her then, but when he was deposed by Dominion’s lawyers, he admitted under oath that he “did not believe it for one second.”
Hannity still tolerates Trump lying about the election. The subject came up during an interview after last month’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump told him “you covered better than anyone, but it was a rigged election and a horrible thing that took place in 2020.” Hannity didn’t correct him.
“Fox News is unique in American media history as serving more like the in-house propaganda arm of a strong-man dictator than operating by the accepted norms of professional journalism,” Stuart Stevens wrote in his 2020 book titled “It Was All a Lie — How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.”
For more than 20 years, Stevens had been a Republican campaign consultant. Much of his book reads like an insider confessional. But it didn’t change Fox’s lack of journalistic integrity.
The Wall Street Journal is also part of Murdoch’s media empire. In July, it published a story claiming that in 2003 Trump sent Epstein a “bawdy” 50th birthday letter with the typewritten message “framed by the outline of a naked woman.”
On Monday, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a copy of the birthday book containing the letter. And although Fox covered the story, both articles led with the fact it included a message from former President Bill Clinton. Trump isn’t even mentioned in one of them.
That’s a cue for Republicans is to either downplay the significance of the story or adopt Trump’s position that it’s “FAKE NEWS.” And ask, as Vice-President JD Vance did a social media post, if “anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”
That requires making believe some pretty damning facts are fiction.
“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump said in 2002 about his 15-year relation with Epstein. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
In the 2005 Hollywood Access recording, Trump boasted about getting away with grabbing any woman he was attracted to by her genitals. The same year, in a recorded interview with Howard Stern, he described going into the dressing room during beauty pageants while contestants were “standing there” naked.
So yes, what’s written in birthday letter is very much how Trump talked and behaved back then.
In a 2016 Empire opinion, Sullivan’s press secretary accused me of choosing “selective facts and misleading arguments” to discredit his efforts to “combat sexual assault and domestic violence.” But he’ll destroy his own credibility and legacy on those important causes if he ignores the very credible circumstantial evidence tying Trump to Epstein. And to paraphrase Murdoch, he’ll be doing the country a great disservice.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
