When Dominion Voting Systems filed a complaint in January and a lawsuit last week against Fox News Corporation, it came as no surprise to anyone who has paying attention to the timeline of activities by former president Donald Trump before and after the November 2020 election cycle. Trump months prior to election day sowed the seeds that would sprout and spread “the Big Lie” that millions of registered voters were somehow disenfranchised by having their votes “switched” to then presidential candidate and Vice President Joseph Biden by voting machines, or simply thrown out. Other misinformation and outright lies purported that “suitcases of ballots” in favor of Biden were delivered to polling stations in vans in the middle of the night.

Who can forget the riveting testimony by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss as they recounted to the January 6 Committee of being nefariously singled out by Trump, the Trump campaign, and Rudy Guliani as a “professional vote scammer” and “vote stealer,” when in fact it was Trump himself who could be heard on tape requesting that Georgia officials steal or “find 11,780 votes”? Research has shown that the 2020 election cycle was indeed secure with no widespread voting fraud detected, and Trump’s own Homeland Security agency agreed that “the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” With all these facts known firsthand by Trump and his inner circle, it did not stop them from fomenting lies in order to remain in power and circumvent a Biden White House.

For this plot to work, there had to be willing participants to spread the misinformation. There had to be a way to tilt public opinion to believe that there was a plausible case for voter fraud, thereby giving power to “the big lie.” Enter Fox News and its on-air talent. Fox News has for the past 20-plus years been the exclusive arm of the Republican Party and the now defunct Tea Party. Fox News does not shy away from being an obvious rightwing news organization. Fox News organization made famous, and rich, on-air personalities who proudly pontificate the logistics and political musings of the Republican Party – such as Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Meghan McCain, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

What makes Fox News questionable, and at times dangerous, is that instead of disseminating news with a conservative flavor and incorporating all other pertinent news, national and global, with true journalistic intent, “fair and balanced” Fox News executives made the choice to offer viewers murky and toxic waters in the way of news in exchange for ratings and advertiser dollars to sip on continuously.

It did not matter to Fox News executives that in doing so they would become the direct feeding tube to radical White nationalists and White supremacist alt right groups because the bottom line is ratings – ratings which plummeted when competitor NewsMax began pushing false claims that Dominion Voting Systems machines were responsible for Trump’s Nov. 3, 2020, loss.

To woo its viewers back to Fox, its executives made the fateful decision to go along with the Trump “big lie” and disinformation even though the “Brain Room,” the centralized research department of Fox News, had investigated the allegations of voter machine fraud and found the accusations unfounded.

While Fox News is being placed on the proverbial hotseat for being less than honest in its new reporting, White corporate news organizations have for decades persisted in murky journalism especially when it involves Black America. If it pushes or campaigns for White supremacy, and in the process demonizes or vilifies African Americans, White corporate news organizations have a history of printing or broadcasting it. African American journalist and activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett noted this in the way a lynching was reported in a White newspaper as opposed to a Black newspaper. When a local Black Memphis grocery store owner, Thomas Moss, a close friend of Wells-Barnett, was lynched, the White newspapers reported that the business was “a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on: a resort of thieves and thugs.” Wells-Barnett wrote in her autobiography, “so ran the description in the leading white journals of Memphis of this successful effort of decent black men to carry on a legitimate business.” White newspapers often published stories of lynchings as a justification for the rampant crime of rape against White women, sometimes blatantly publishing the date and time of a proposed lynching so that White families could watch and participate as some type of recreation and entertainment.

White media organizations would continue the practice of the vilification and lies against Black Americans into the 20th and 21st centuries, with news magazines demonizing the plight of Black men on their covers. The so-called “war on crime” used White newspapers and news broadcasts to show drug-infested slums, poverty, and hopelessness as the total Black experience in America. Newscasts’ nightly format was “if it bleeds, it leads.” Through slanted and racist journalism, White corporate news organizations have helped to spread the false narrative that Black men are thugs and gangbangers, Black women are uneducated and serial baby incubators on welfare, and our Black children are aimless, hopeless products of an angry, violent drug-filled environment. This is why Black newspapers and Black media is important.

We must tell our own stories and report the news that our community deserves to read. However, it is inherently necessary that we all put the sources from which we extract our news to the test. News should have facts at its core and anything outside of facts is commentary or opinion. Blogs, social media, and entertainment websites are not verifiable sources to get solid news, and media outlets that declare they are “fair and balanced” should be held to the test when they blur journalism with tabloid news.