We All Pay the Price for Fox's Lies

Fox News Settles Defamation Suit, But Incalculable Damage Has Been Done

Fox News lied about Dominion Voting Systems, over and over and over again.

And yesterday, on the cusp of a trial, those lies cost them nearly $800 million. But how much more has it cost our country? There’s no price tag that could touch it.

I was saddened to see this update in the immediate aftermath of the big news yesterday afternoon:

“Under the terms of the settlement, Fox News will not have to apologize or admit to spreading false claims on network programming, according to a person familiar with the details of the agreement.”

So, you can bet there will be no apology and there will be no admission.

One might wonder how I can state, without equivocation or qualification or attribution, that Fox lied. Because the first defense against libel is the truth. And the truth is, Fox had no defense for its profit-seeking, conspiracy-stoking approach to “news.” That’s why it settled.

In Related News — and It All Feels Related, Doesn’t It?

Heard about Charlie Javice?

I hadn’t heard of her (yes, “Charlie” is a lady) until a few days ago, when I tuned in to a recent episode from The Wall Street Journal’s podcast The Journal. In the episode, A $175 Million `Huge Mistake,’ Javice is introduced as the founder (and alleged fraudster) behind Frank, the college financial planning startup. She has been sued by JPMorgan Chase, which purchased her company less than two years ago for $175 million, and she now faces criminal fraud charges.

A central element of Frank’s allure was Javice’s claim that the company had four million users. Of course, that was hogwash, another huge lie rationalized by some people as a necessary part of the “Fake it `Till You Make It” startup ethos.

But the number wasn’t always four million users. The podcast mentioned that Javice had been named to the Forbes “30 under 30” list in 2019, part of the “buzz” upon which her house of cards was built. That prompted me to look up the Forbes article, which pegged the number of users, four years ago, at 300,000. (My hunch: it never came close to that figure, either. Did Frank ever attain 30,000 users?)

Quoting from that blurb:

“Frank's software aims to make the application process for student loans faster and easier. Javice founded the 15-person startup in 2016. She has since raised $16 million, and Frank has helped 300,000 users apply for financial aid.”

Forbes proudly proclaimed that the 30 Under 30 list “was personally vetted by a blue-ribbon panel of experts in their fields” and “the honorees were vetted during an extensive three-layer process that leveraged the knowledge and authority of Forbes’ wide-reaching community, skilled reporters and expert judges.”

Uh-huh. Yeah, right.

It brings me back to the time, some 15 years ago, when I put up the red flag on a “30 Under 30” finalist for Realtor magazine. As I recall, I had been assigned five or six up-and-coming Realtors to interview. Through that process, this one fellow, maybe 23 years old (let’s call him Liam) made some athletic claims that I couldn’t verify.

Put more bluntly, based on my searching in vain to find any shred of evidence that he played for the college team that he claimed to have excelled for, it was apparent that Liam was lying about his athletic exploits. And where there’s smoke, there is very likely fire – if he was lying about this extraneous detail, what else was Liam fibbing about? Particularly, what should I make of those eye-popping statistics about his supposedly extensive real estate sales prowess?

So, at my behest, the magazine pulled him from its list.

Within a few weeks, unaware that his profile had been nixed, Liam was trying to cozy up to me with contrived interest in retaining my writing and PR services. Within a year, he had exited the real estate industry entirely – a peculiar shift, if he had truly been rocking and rolling enough to be “30 Under 30” material.

As for the other finalists, none of whom were foolish enough to utter a clearly demonstrable falsehood: I could not say with any real confidence that there was no additional “Liam” (or Charlie Javice) in the bunch.

Moral to the story: beware of any “Blah-Blah-Blah Under This Age” or “Yak-Yak-Yak Professionals to Watch” list. This is truer now than ever before, with media resources growing thinner and claims of “blue-ribbon panels” vetting nominees amounting to so much puffery.

In those “Top” and “Under” weeds lurk an unknowable percentage of hustlers snaking their way up the media-darling ladder. Consider this: for Forbes alone, the size of those weeds is in the thousands – its “30 Under 30 alumni network” exceeded 5,000 in 2019 after only eight years of compiling these lists.

Counsel for Con Artists

If you’re going to lie, steer clear of military, academic or athletic claims – they’re all far too easy to check out. As Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes and Charlie Javice and Trevor Milton, among so many others, have all discovered, it’s in the murky realm of private industry that you can go a lot longer with tall tales.

Sure, they got caught, but they each made many, many millions first. And how many others have gotten away with their cons?

Here are snapshots of those other three recurring categories that are much more apt to get folks in hot water:

1. Military Service and/or Decorations, such as my July 2007 story about a man who claimed to be a Vietnam War hero and was slated to lead the Independence Day parade in my town.

At the time, I had pretty much transitioned from reporting for the Chicago Tribune to running my PR business. But I was still in regular touch with editors and when a local newspaper gullibly lapped up the man’s Forrest Gump-esque yarns, I cautioned my editors against any similar coverage. In my travels, I had met the guy a few times and he had regaled me with far-fetched stories about his heroics on the football field for the University of Michigan.

If anything, we should debunk this nonsense, I advised editors. A few days later, the Tribune assigned me the story (below):

2. Academic Background & Credentials. See George O’Leary, the short-lived Notre Dame football coach as the poster child of this phenomenon.

O’Leary also padded his athletic resume. Of course, when it comes to being a multi-category lying phenom, Leary was no George Santos. Then again, George Santos probably isn’t even George Santos, given all the pseudonyms he’s gone by over the course of his LLPOF (Liar, Liar Pants on Fire) existence.

3. Athletic accomplishments. 

Because of my passion for playing and covering sports over the years, inflated accounts in this arena are especially intriguing to me.

There was the time in 1998 when a Cook County Board candidate, Mike Olszewski, claimed repeatedly, and in various circles, to have played for the Pittsburgh Penguins. First, I reeled him in during an interview in which I asked him at length about his faux National Hockey League glory days — he detailed an on-ice fight with Doug Gilmour and emphasized, after I pressed him on this point, that he had seen regular-season action.

Then, about 25 minutes into our conversation, I confronted him with my research. I told him that in consulting a thick, official encyclopedia listing all former and current NHL players, I had not seen his name on any page. He backpedaled like “Get Smart” secret-agent Maxwell Smart. Suddenly he had played for a minor league hockey team in Decatur, in downstate Illinois. When I tried confirming even that modest claim, the evidence was less than compelling.

A quarter-century after the Watergate scandal that had brought down U.S. President Richard Nixon, I had given this local saga a similar name in my conversations within the newsroom. An editor thought my quip would make a clever headline, so “Penguingate” greeted readers when they came across my article in The Courier News of Elgin.

A short time later, Olszewski lost in his bid for public office. That was 25 years ago. Today, candidates exposed for routinely trading in falsehoods are much more electable. Chalk it up to the price we are paying for the erosion of standards so cynically modeled by Fox.

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