A former official in the Biden administration, Nina Jankowicz, has filed a lawsuit against Fox News over a lengthy campaign of harassment she has faced in a perceptibly never-ending cascade of deceptive coverage of her work from the conservative network.
Jankowicz was originally meant to lead an entity in the Department of Homeland Security called the Disinformation Governance Board, about which Republicans incessantly lied, vastly overstating what the board and Jankowicz would even be able to actually do. In short, the board wasn’t meant to exert any direct power over Americans. Its work would have been focused internally, helping shape the department’s response to established threats like foreign misinformation campaigns. Republicans, though, including on Fox, evidently decided that the board’s existence was emblematic of some kind of nonexistent conspiracy to silence their political corner and in substantially ridiculous terms described Jankowicz’s planned body of work in the government as possibly even involving control of armed personnel threatening Americans who disagree!
As with other individuals who have become the subject of waves of lies from Fox News and other sources in the far-right media ecosystem, Jankowicz has faced serious and continuing threats to her safety. She filed her new lawsuit in the same court system in Delaware where the elections technology company Dominion Voting Systems filed its now concluded case against Fox.
Dominion somehow became a key player in pro-Trump conspiracy theories about imaginary fraud in the 2020 presidential race, and its court challenge ended with a settlement arrangement in which Fox agreed to pay some three-quarters of a billion dollars, avoiding a trial. Jankowicz’s lawsuit alleges Fox’s deceptive, antagonistic treatment of her, which continued even after she resigned, which some falsely described as a firing, is “consistent with Fox’s practices in other contexts, including in its election denialism and the related defamation of Dominion Voting Systems.”
With a page on GoFundMe, Jankowicz crowdsourced funds in support of her efforts before filing her lawsuit, although it doesn’t appear that campaign has concluded. In a video she created to accompany that fundraising effort, she spotlighted frankly bonkers claims around her now past role, including Laura Ingraham (the Fox host) suggesting jail-time could follow for those opposing Biden’s policies. On what planet does Ingraham live? This line of rhetoric, like that about an “invasion” by migrants over the southern border, the supposedly crashing economy, or an imaginarily rigged election, doesn’t reflect reality at all!
