Ethics Dunce (Again): Fox News

/ Jack Marshall

From the New York Times today:

Shortly after learning he was being indicted a third time, former President Donald J. Trump had a private dinner with the top leadership at Fox News as they lobbied him to attend the first Republican presidential primary debate this month, three people familiar with the event said.

The dinner between Mr. Trump, the Fox News president Jay Wallace and the network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, was held in a private dining room at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., according to two of the people familiar with the event. The dinner was scheduled before the indictment news.

In a break from its recent practice, the Times did not attempt to spin or characterize the facts in order to make its usual anti-Trump, anti-Fox, anti-conservative points. It didn’t have to.

Whether or not the dinner had been scheduled before the indictment, it should not have taken place on the same day as the indictment. That it did is the essence of the appearance of impropriety, a concept one might think that Donald Trump is familiar with by now, but then, one would be wrong. Fox executives taking part in such a dinner makes it looks as if a Trump ally was strategizing with him regarding how the news network could assist him in the court of public opinion. There is already widespread belief that Fox News slants its news coverage and punditry toward Trump and Republicans (because it does), but evidence of direct cooperation and coordination is especially damning to the network’s credibility.

Even if the dinner was only about persuading Trump to take part in the first GOP candidates debate—because Fox wants the ratings boost—the dinner is still suspicious and damning. What quid pro quo did Fox offer Trump? What accommodations did the Master of the Deal demand from Fox if he agreed to debate?

Imagine if Bill Clinton had been spotted having a dinner with the editors of the New York Times the day the House impeached him. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had dined with the Times’ editors and columnists the night before the paper announced that Donald Trump was such a threat to the nation that it would no longer report on him objectively. Those dinners happened because, as unethical and biased as the Times is, its management is not that stupid. They have some functioning ethics alarms.

Fox News does not.

16 thoughts on “Ethics Dunce (Again): Fox News”

  2. Not sure how timing matters here.

    *Any* news agency that appears buddy buddy with (dinner or any other informal meeting) *any* entity they may have to report on, by definition will bring into question the objectivity of the news agency.

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    • Yup. It also calls into question the independence of the entity being reported on. The power of the press to destroy or elevate an entity in the eyes of the public is a mighty power.

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  3. Here is an interesting comment on Reason.com.

    If a criminal charge against a former President requires “a nuanced look at strengths and weaknesses of the indictment” then the law is a very bad law and should be struck down. If lawyers have serious, legitimate disagreements from all angles over these indictments and almost all of them conclude that a fair jury would have problems convicting the former President, then how would an ordinary, non-lawyer citizen know if their actions violated the law? My own non-nuanced opinion is that it is impossible to “defraud” the government by saying you think the election itself was fraudulent. One might defraud the government by contracting to sell grapefruit to the army and then delivering it grapefruit seeds. One cannot, in my opinion, defraud “the government” by agitating to overturn an election in a political or legal process.

    – MWAocdoc

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  4. Imagine if Bill Clinton was spotted chatting with Loretta Lynch on his private jet while Hillary was under investigation. It would have looked so wrong.

    Is there anyone who does not like FOX or Trump who would have liked them if they had not met at that time? Is there anyone who liked them that now does not because of this meeting? No and no.

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  5. Was just recalling, Obama’s chief of communications was the brother of the president of CBS, and no one objected. Ever. Cue Gomer Pyle.

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  7. On another related note.

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  8. On another related note.

    Making History in the Wrong Way: The Second Trump Indictment is a Threat to Free Speech

    Below is my column in USA Today on second indictment of former President Donald Trump. While many are celebrating the charges, the implications for free speech are chilling. While Smith did not charge incitement or insurrection (or seditious conspiracy), commentators (and Special Counsel Jack Smith) portrayed the case as holding Trump accountable for the actual riot in the Capitol. Notably, the same pundits and politicians previously insisted that the rejected crimes were obvious and well-established. Indeed, Trump was impeached on incitement charges. They are now shrugging off the conspicuous omission of those charges while attacking those of us with free speech concerns as apologists.

    Here is the column:

    Special counsel Jack Smith made history on Tuesday.

    It wasn’t just the federal indictment of a former president. Smith already did that in June with the indictment of Donald Trump on charges that he mishandled classified documents.

    No, Smith and his team have made history in the worst way by attempting to fully criminalize disinformation by seeking the incarceration for a politician on false claims made during and after an election.

    The hatred for Trump is so all-encompassing that legal experts on the political left have ignored the chilling implications of this indictment. This complaint is based largely on statements that are protected under the First Amendment. It would eviscerate free speech and could allow the government to arrest those who are accused of spreading disinformation in elections.

    In the 2012 United States v. Alvarez decision, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that it is unconstitutional to criminalize lies in a case involving a politician who lied about military decorations.

    The court warned such criminalization “would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition. The mere potential for the exercise of that power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom.”

    That precedent did not deter Smith. This indictment is reminiscent of the case against former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. His conviction on 11 corruption-related counts was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in 2016, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that federal prosecutors relied on a “boundless” definition of actions that could trigger criminal charges against political leaders.

    Smith is now showing the same abandon in pursuing Trump, including detailing his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, before the riot while omitting the line where Trump told his supporters to go to the U.S. Capitol to “peacefully” protest the certification.

    While the indictment acknowledges that candidates are allowed to make false statements, Smith proceeded to charge Trump for making “knowingly false statements.”

    On the election claims, Smith declares that Trump “knew that they were false” because he was “notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue.”

    The problem is that Trump had lawyers and others telling him that the claims were true. Smith is indicting Trump for believing his lawyers over his other advisers.

    I criticized Trump’s Jan. 6 speech while he was still giving it and wrote that his theory on the election and the certification challenge was unfounded. However, that does not make it a crime.

    If you take a red pen to protected free speech in this indictment, it would be reduced to a virtual haiku. Moreover, if you concede that Trump may have believed that the election was stolen, the complaint collapses.

    Smith also noted that Trump made false claims against the accuracy of voting machines in challenging the outcome of the election. In 2021, Democratic lawyers alleged that thousands of votes may have been switched or changed by voting machines in New York elections. Was that also a crime of disinformation?

    Smith indicted Trump because the now former president “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.” The special counsel also says Trump “repeated and widely disseminated (the lies) anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

    Let’s acknowledge that Trump was wrong. The election wasn’t stolen. He lost, and Joe Biden won.

    But how do you prove legally that Trump truly didn’t believe his false claims? And even if you can prove that Trump lied, how do you legally distinguish his falsehoods from the lies other political leaders have told over the years? When, in politics, does making a false statement cross the line into criminal behavior? Those are questions Smith and his team must answer in court, and ones that Trump’s defense team is likely to raise.

    Polls previously showed that roughly half of the public viewed previous charges against Trump as politically motivated. That is why many of us hoped that any indictment would be based on unquestioned legal authority and unassailable evidence.

    Smith offered neither. This indictment will deepen the view of many in the public that the Justice Department is thoroughly compromised in pursuing political prosecutions.

    These concerns were magnified Tuesday by Smith, who announced the charges with comments that made him sound more like a pundit than a prosecutor. The special counsel gave an impassioned account of the Capitol riot that made it sound like Trump was charged with incitement. He wasn’t. Nor was he charged with seditious conspiracy, despite his second impeachment on those charges.

    Notably, many of the legal experts praising the indictment previously insisted that there was a clear case for incitement against Trump. Indeed, Democratic members made the claim the center of the second impeachment, despite some of us writing that there was no actionable claim.

    Even Smith wouldn’t touch the incitement or sedition claims that were endlessly pushed by legal experts and Democratic members.

    Instead, Smith will seek to criminalize false political claims. To bag Trump, he will have to bulldoze through the First Amendment and a line of Supreme Court cases. That’s why this latest indictment of Trump isn’t just wrong. It is reckless.

    Jonathan Turley, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley

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