This morning, Wall Street Journal stalwart Peggy Noonan wrote on a subject near and dear to my heart: the lies told to us by the government and our media about Covid-19’s origins, the pressure they exerted to shape debate in the wrong direction, and the resulting destruction of public trust. I strongly recommend the piece; Noonan takes her time in swinging the hammer, but when it lands the blow is precise and brutal:
It will have bothered you that month by month the highest scientific and medical authorities in the U.S. government seemed to be discouraging the conversation, or insistently directing it toward natural transmission. Anthony Fauci, we later found, dismissed the subject in internal emails a few months into the pandemic as a “shiny object that will go away.”
That was rather patronizing. People had a right to wonder and were wise to do so. The disease killed millions. It was a world-wide economic, societal and cultural disaster. Why it happened matters. Where and how it started matters. There could be another pandemic tomorrow. What steps must be taken to see that it doesn’t?
And there was a sense emanating from scientific and medical establishments that people who think it started in a Chinese lab think that only because they’re racist, they hate Asians, or because they’re conspiracists. At this you would have thought: No, buddy, I think it because I’m normal. Murphy’s Law. You have 1,000 safety protocols and one day you satisfy only 998 of them. That’s all you need for an accident.
And you likely thought something else: This isn’t politics to me, but I gather it’s politics to you. This began to poison things. Once lies and finagling walk out of the Lie and Finagle Lab, they contaminate everything.
The force of her argument arises from the undeniable truth that American trust in our institutions, from the public-health sector to the federal government to the mainstream media, has cratered over the last seven years, our confidence shaken by so many serial scandals (Russiagate, the suppression of Covid-19 truths because they were held by “the wrong sort of people,” etc.) but more broadly by the activist tenor that has infected all public life — not just the mainstream media — since the Dawn of Trump. Far too many people now seem, on a coldly calculating level, to regard inconvenient facts or truths as a peacetime luxury . . . and friend, haven’t you heard? There’s a war on. Despite the eagerness of those complicit in this epistemic collapse to blame it all on Trump, they were the agents of their own reputational demise.
The thought of “reputational demise” of course then made my mind turn to the ongoing defamation case against Fox News. The lawsuit was filed by Dominion Systems over the conspiracy theories that Fox’s prime-time hosts let run rampant on the network during the post–November 2020 election crisis. (Remember how Dominion was supposedly owned by Hugo Chávez and operated by Venezuelan communists to defraud Trump? I wish I could forget.)
Have you read Dominion’s brief in the case? You may have seen bits and pieces of it reported in the press, but the demonstrable enormity only properly comes through once you’ve read the totality of Dominion’s arguments. You see, Dominion is not just making blind allegations anymore; the discovery process has been very unkind indeed to Fox News, revealing scores upon scores of internal emails and texts sent between top on-air talent and executives there that make it abundantly clear that your favorite night-time Fox News talking heads (1) knew they were peddling lies about the “stolen election”; (2) were okay with that as long as it meant they kept their ratings; (3) actively targeted the other employees at Fox News who were actually doing their jobs honestly simply because it affected their vulgar financial and/or ratings bottom line.
The last is most damning of all to me, frankly: I don’t know Tucker Carlson, and I assume that, after this, I never will, but anyone who would throw their co-worker into a shredder for telling a truth they are too craven to tell themselves does not strike me as a man with sterling character. Indeed, the overarching tale told in Dominion’s brief — which, again, makes for unforgettable reading — is one of a network whose talent is simultaneously contemptuous of its viewers yet so terrified of losing them (particularly to a startup like Newsmax) that all other considerations, including basic integrity, have fallen by the wayside. Some indication of how bad this looks for Fox on the PR side: A friend of mine with decades of experience in litigation practice simply said, in almost stunned horror after reading Dominion’s brief for the court: “Holy crap, how do you not settle this case with a blank check?”
Win or lose, the revelations about what Fox News personalities say and think privately, versus the cheap slop they ladle out to audiences they clearly have contempt for — that’s not going away. As for how they treat their co-workers, well, that has a tendency to catch up with people after a while too. (Just ask Keith Olbermann, last seen hawking his podcast randomly in other people’s Twitter comments sections.)
I normally try to end my pieces with some kind of punchline or joke, even if a mordant or sarcastic one. But I’m at a loss here because there is nothing funny about this; it is supremely depressing. What you feared is pretty much true: Most everyone in a position of institutional trust, on either side, is willing to sell lies to you for one reason or another, it seems. Did you trust in our public-health professionals, or the government? You were lied to about Covid, and so much more. Did you say, “I’m too smart to trust those lying liberals — I trust Tucker instead“? Well then, congratulations, friend, you were also lied to, about something equally important. Because the truth doesn’t sell.