Or, to boil it all down: What this all suggests is that Fox News leadership is genuinely worried that their viewers will perceive them as a propaganda outlet, instead of a news organization. Why that bothers them is hard to suss out. As the court filings show, the leadership of Fox News felt pressure from their audience to downplay actual facts and play up conspiracy theories. It feels like theirs is not an audience who cares about facts, or even the illusion of facts. But watching Fox’s machinations around this case, it seems that they believe keeping up the pretense that they are “news” matters to their viewers, even if no one actually believes it.