How Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Blew the Voting Machine Lawsuit

Transcript of Peter's Latest Podcast

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST ON APPLE OR GOOGLE.

Hi. I’m Peter Navarro and in this edition of the Taking Back Trump’s America podcast and substack I’m going to slap you around a little bit. And when I say the word “slap”, I’m not talking about doing you any physical harm.  I just want to put the Fox News brouhaha with a voting machine company within its proper broader context of a phenomenon known in the American injustice system as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (a.k.a. SLAPP suit).

I don’t know if said voting machine company had anything to do with the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. I do know that its lawsuits against not just Fox News but also other news outlets like Newsmax and One America’s News (OAN) along with patriots like Mike Lindell and Rudy Giuliani have had the same kind of chilling effect on free speech and legitimate inquiry that traditional SLAPP suits have had in American politics. 

The term SLAPP suit was coined in the 1980s by a couple of University of Denver professors who wrote about the rise of lawsuits designed to intimidate people from speaking out by encumbering them with significant legal fees and the prospect of a big loss in a courtroom. In many cases, bogus claims were disguised as defamation lawsuits when the SLAPPOR knew damn well they didn’t have a pot to piss in.

In the current case, one must at least wonder about the legitimacy of the claims being made; and perhaps we will learn more about this at the upcoming Fox trial – if Fox doesn’t cut and run and settle. But it seems to me that Fox News made a fundamental error at the very beginning of this lawsuit by not devoting a tremendous amount of its resources to investigating whether voting machines were in fact doctored in some way to skew the presidential election.

Certainly, the hypothetical case can be made that voting machines are vulnerable to tampering in all manner of ways. This is particularly true as soon as you hook a voting machine up to the Internet and expose its flanks to various hackers.

Accordingly, I don’t understand for the life of me why Fox appears not to have done its due diligence in this matter. Instead, a company that is worth nearly $20 billion seems like it hasn’t spent a dime on this line of inquiry and attack.

Instead, Fox News has behaved like the worst kind of coward on the battlefield. The first thing it did was throw one of its most revered and successful employees to the wolves, Lou Dobbs, thinking that somehow this sacrifice would pacify the voting machine company. Good luck with that.

The next thing Fox News did – and this is where the First Amendment really took a hit – was to completely muzzle any on-air talent that might dare to explore the issue of election integrity. I include here everyone at Fox, including the top dogs in Tucker, Sean, the Great One, and Judge Jeanine.

At the same time, Fox executives quickly went down the cancel culture road and made folks like me, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Lindell persona non grata at the network. Of course, Fox also stopped covering President Donald Trump’s events and rallies like it used to and, until recently, has kept Trump largely off the network.

Perhaps the worst effect the lawsuit has had on Fox has been to enable the rise of the Never-Trumper’s within the network, who now rule the Fox roost.

Truth be told here is that Fox, even in an era when Roger Ailes ruled, always had their closet liberals and Never-Trumper’s. The worst of this lot were not some of the faces you know – the likes of the now departed Chris Wallace, the always acerbic Neil Cavuto (who I actually liked), the anti-MAGA John Roberts (who I didn’t), Raising Arizona Bret Baier, and the always dangerous Bush-Cheney puppet master Karl Rove.

No, the real damage being done now at Fox is among the producers and executive producers who dutifully implement the cancel culture dictates from the so-called “second floor” where top executives like Suzanne Scott and Lauren Petterson keep the Fox airwaves Trump-free.

My point here is that this simply did not have to be. If Fox had simply embraced a warrior ethic and the legal strategy of Donald Trump, it would have seen that it’s best defense against the lawsuit would have been a massive offense. All that may have been needed here would have been one or two examples of voting machine failures somewhere around the country and that alone might have been enough of a defense.  But we’ll never know.

The worst case now is that the deep-pocketed Fox will settle this case, pay out a few hundred million dollars, which is small change for them, and we won’t have a definitive jury decision that might liberate the First Amendment. If Fox goes this route, it is essentially throwing everybody else to the wolves and setting the precedent that lawsuits can indeed silence news organizations, particularly those with shallower pockets than Fox, which is to say, everybody.

So let’s see what happens here. In the meantime, I continue to urge everyone to cut the Fox News cable cord. And keep doing so until Fox ends its Never-Trump, cancel culture ways and once again fully televises Trump rallies and events and put the truth-telling faces of guys like Rudy and Mike back on the air. Peter Navarro. Out.