Why Fox Information canceled Lou Dobbs -

Dobbs was the highest-rated host on Fox Enterprise. He typically doubled his lead-in’s rankings.

Though Fox is not saying, the timing of Dobbs’ cancellation Friday seems to be no coincidence: It befell 24 hours after Dobbs and Fox have been named in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed by voting expertise firm Smartmatic.

Fox might even see Dobbs as a suitable sacrificial lamb.

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik mentioned on CNN’s “Dependable Sources” Sunday that the community’s determination to cancel Dobbs’ present reminds him of the best way Rupert Murdoch’s information tabloids in London dealt with their phone-hacking scandals a couple of decade in the past.

“They might throw any individual over the facet and see if that was sufficient,” he mentioned. “That is an effort to cauterize the wound to distance Fox from this feverish conspiracy idea.”

Murdoch’s media firm Information Corp. confronted a sequence of scandals, starting in 2005, after journalists at British newspapers have been accused of hacking into the telephones of celebrities, lawmakers, royalty, homicide victims and different figures within the information. As lawsuits rolled in, Murdoch tried to place out a sequence of fires, issuing an apology for telephone hacking by way of full web page adverts in seven nationwide newspapers in 2011.

Now Murdoch is making an attempt to put out the fires that have been connected to Lou Dobbs and his pro-Trump rhetoric. “Lou Dobbs Tonight” is off the air, efficient instantly, a Fox spokesperson confirmed Friday, and an interim present will take Dobbs’ place beginning Monday.

However Dobbs wasn’t the one one espousing conspiracy theories on air. Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, who have been additionally named within the Smartmatic lawsuit, stay on Fox.

“Dobbs goes away. That is one present on one channel. There are various different reveals like him,” CNN’s Chief Media Correspondent Brian Stelter mentioned on “Dependable Sources.” “There isn’t a signal that Fox is shifting towards the middle, again to the type of centrist, reality-based center. No signal of that in any respect. Dobbs looks like an anomaly.”

Demand for reveals like Lou Dobbs’ stays excessive, Stelter famous. So why lower ties with Dobbs and never one other host?

“I believe he was partly dismissed simply ‘trigger administration had sufficient of him,” Stelter mentioned. “They have been simply bored with his BS. However they have loads of different folks there promoting the identical story.”

Pushed by “truthiness and instinct” networks like Fox “cloak themselves” within the freedom of speech supplied by the primary modification, College of Delaware professor Dr. Danna Younger instructed Stelter. “Lawsuits have a method of forcing folks and entities to reckon with empirical reality and actuality,” she mentioned.

However sources at Fox indicated that the Smartmatic lawsuit was only one issue within the determination to cancel Dobbs’ present. His weak efficiency with advertisers was additionally a big issue, one supply mentioned.

Dobbs was one in all Trump’s most vocal on-air supporters, which saved his present’s rankings excessive.

Folkenflik says Fox is being led by its viewers proper now. “It does not have a transparent sense of the way it needs to function within the post-Trump world when Trump nonetheless instructions a lot loyalty from his core viewers,” he mentioned.

— CNN Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy contributed to this report.

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