Fox News Needs to Ditch Guests Who Spread Falsehoods
For months now, journalists, fact checkers, diplomats, National Security Council officials, and yes, foundation presidents, have been calling out deceptions and distortions promoted by a group of guests on Fox News about the Ukraine scandal that led to President Trump’s impeachment. Maybe you’ve heard them; if you’re a regular Fox viewer, they were hard to miss.
A journalist named John Solomon published articles in The Hill newspaper alleging Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 elections to help Hillary Clinton. These claims were fueled by Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, and promoted as well by Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, well-known conservative lawyers in Washington, D.C., who also happen to act as Solomon’s lawyers. A review of Solomon’s work by The Hill undercut his reporting on Ukraine.
This group regularly went on air at Fox News to advance these false claims, despite the fact that they were debunked, under oath, by the U.S. intelligence community and multiple witnesses who testified in the House impeachment inquiry. I got involved when this disinformation campaign sought to impugn the work of George Soros, the founder and chairman of the Open Society Foundations, which I lead. The foundations have long supported anti-corruption work in Ukraine, so we knew this group of Fox guests were dispensing ludicrous conspiracy theories.
DiGenova went on the air claiming, in an attempt to discredit the career diplomats who risked their careers to speak truth to power under oath, that “There’s no doubt that George Soros controls a very large part of the career Foreign Service at the U.S. State Department.” This is absurd and eerily reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy’s notorious attacks on the State Department.
I wrote a letter to Fox’s CEO, Suzanne Scott, and the network’s board of directors, urging them to ban diGenova as a guest and take responsibility for the falsehoods and distortions they were broadcasting to their audience. To this day, Fox’s leadership has neither replied to my letter nor addressed this issue publicly.
But thanks to the reporting of the Daily Beast, we learned that Fox knew the propaganda that Giuliani and company were peddling was garbage. According to the Daily Beast’s reporting, an internal research unit published a 162-page briefing book, entitled “Ukraine, Disinformation and the Trump Administration.”
In it, the researchers took Solomon to task, crediting him with playing “an indispensable role” in a “Ukrainian disinformation campaign.” The research also noted that Solomon, over the course of his career, had established a pattern of “non-disclosure of conflicts, use of unreliable sources, publishing false and misleading stories, misrepresentation of sources, and opaque coordination with involved parties.”
The report also faulted Giuliani, who is still making claims on a poorly watched YouTube stream, for having a “high susceptibility to disinformation” and tweaked diGenova and Toensing for their role on air “spreading disinformation.” With this report, Fox brass has nowhere left to hide. It is time for them to take responsibility and tell their viewers the truth, and stop promoting guests who knowingly distort the truth. It is time for Suzanne Scott to demonstrate some leadership and for Fox’s board of directors to demand accountability.
The network has done so before. In 2018, Chris Farrell, director of investigations at Judicial Watch, went on Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business to falsely allege that Soros was funding a group of migrants walking northward toward the U.S. border with Mexico, and also invoking the paranoid idea that the State Department was “Soros-occupied.” Farrell’s comments were aired on a Thursday, and rebroadcast on Saturday, not long after a deranged gunman with a history of anti-Semitic views murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Gary Schreir, Fox’s senior vice president of programming, announced that the Farrell episode would be pulled from the network’s archives. “We condemn the rhetoric by the guest on ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight,’” Schreir said in a statement, adding that Farrell, “will no longer be appearing as a guest on Fox Business Network or Fox News Channel.
Fox should follow its own precedent in doing the right thing. They should announce that Solomon, Giuliani, diGenova and Toensing are no longer welcome as guests. They should apologize to their audience for conveying their disinformation. And they should set the record straight.
Patrick Gaspard is president of the Open Society Foundations.
