Raj Shah, the Senior vice-president of Fox Corp., is on the record saying of Tucker Carlson’s viewers, “This isn’t an audience that can easily be persuaded and are willing to believe just about anything.” And that seems about right, even it appears to be completely contradictory. The important thing to keep in mind is that they will believe just about anything but the truth.

Suzanne Scott, the CEO of News Corp., put it this way, “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories. The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us …. We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.” That’s her way of saying that it’s insulting to provide factual information to an audience that will not believe factual information. In order to show the Fox News viewers proper respect, it’s important to never tell them the truth. If you tell them the truth, it’s almost like making fun of them for believing in things that aren’t real.

Kurt Cobain once sang, “Load up on guns, bring your friends. It’s fun to lose and to pretend…Here we are now, entertain us, I feel stupid and contagious.” That, too, sounds about right for how the Fox News audience treated Donald Trump’s election loss in 2020. At least, that’s what the executives at Fox Corp. thought the moment called for, rather than any dispassionate effort to provide news coverage. Let’s all pretend Trump didn’t lose, no matter how stupid that might be, and no matter how that might metastasize into an actual coup attempt to keep Trump in power.

It’s no great insight that people have an appetite for things they want to hear and want to believe. You can definitely make a good living off that insight, both honestly and dishonestly. But it’s not an appropriate role for news coverage to just lie about who won an election.

This is another thing Trump broke. He lied so brazenly that it broke Fox News. They felt that they had to treat his lies as least potentially true when they knew better. They could carry water for the Republican Party without completely coming apart at the seams as a “news” organization, but they couldn’t find a way to finesse the size of Trump’s election lies.

I hope they lose their defamation case and face a staggering penalty.