Ever wonder why it is that Fox News can lie over and over and over again - yet continue to call itself “News”?

It’s because Fox News is a corporation - and ever since that 1886 Supreme Court case of Southern Pacific Railroad versus Santa Clara County when a rogue court reporter named John Chandler Bancroft Davis slipped corporate personhood into the legal record - the courts have ruled time and time again that corporations - since they have all the rights that actual people have - could also lie just like people can.

Actually, there was one exception.

Back in 1998 - a political activist named Mark Kasky sued Nike alleging that Nike was lying to its customers by publishing in the San Francisco Examiner a letter assuring everyone that the corporation’s workers around the world enjoy basic labor rights like a minimum wage - health and safety regulations - and equal opportunity employment.

Kasky knew that the claim wasn’t true.

A 1996 audit of Nike revealed that workers in Vietnam, for example, were routinely exposed to cancer-causing chemicals that here in the United States were illegal.

And a Mother Jones article later cited a Nike-funded study that found, “evidence of physical and verbal abuse and sexual harassment at nine of its contract factories in Indonesia.”

After realizing that he and thousands of other Nike customers were lied to and were buying Nike products under false assumptions - Kasky took the corporation to court.

And in 2002 - Kasky won his case before the California Supreme Court which ruled that Nike did indeed break laws against unfair competition and false advertising.

But rather than paying the fine - Nike appealed and took the case to the Supreme Court.

And the high court actually agreed to hear the case in 2003 - and Nike claimed that as a corporate person it was entitled to freedom of speech - which means freedom to lie.

Kasky’s lawyers shot back - and even referenced my book, “Unequal Protection” to the Supreme Court Justices, in an effort to prove that the 1886 corporate personhood case was a sham - that the Supreme Court never ruled that corporations are people - that instead that rogue court reporter I told you about had hoodwinked the nation.

That’s when something strange happened.

After hearing the argument against corporate personhood - taken from my book - by Kasky's lawyers - Chief Justice William Rehnquist suddenly dismissed the case - basically saying, oops, we made a mistake here in agreeing to hear it in the first place.

So the lower court’s decision was upheld - Nike lost the case - and settled up with Kasky - agreeing to make a seven-figure “gift” to help sweatshop workers around the world.

It was actually a rare win against corporate personhood - but it was short-lived.

Because just as Nike was coughing up the cash - Fox News was about to, Fox Corporation, was about to mount its own defense of a corporation’s right to lie in that very same year.

In 1998 - two investigative reporters - Jane Akre and Steve Wilson - working for a local Fox affiliate produced a series on how a synthetic hormone known as Bovine Growth Hormone or BGH - routinely given to cattle down in Florida, or all over the country, in fact - could be causing cancer in America - and not in Europe where it had been banned.

But since the local Fox station - owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp - forced Akre and Wilson to re-write the story several times until finally it was just an outright lie that was pretty much consistent with Monsanto’s PR, even though Europeans have banned the stuff, here we shouldn't worry, we should just be be happy."

But Akre and Wilson refused to tone it down - they believed as journalists it was their job to tell the public the truth about what’s in their milk… so the Fox TV station fired them.

And Akre and Wilson fired back by suing the Fox TV outlet for wrongful termination - and a jury of 6 of their peers unanimously agreed with Akre and Wilson and awarded them $425,000 in damages.

The jury found that:

[Fox] acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs' news reporting on BGH."

Case closed?... not so fast.

In 2003 - just as the Supreme Court was dismissing the Nike case - Fox News was appealing its own case.

And sure enough - that year - an appeals court reversed the lower court’s ruling - and claimed that - as a corporation - Fox had the right to lie - and not only that - it had a right to force its reporters to lie with the threat of firing them if they don’t comply.

That decision still stands today.

Which means right now - Fox can tell its reporters to lie to protect corporate and political friends and interests - and those reporters MUST comply or else they’ll get fired.

And by the way, it's not just Fox - it's true of every media corporation in America.

And as we’ve seen in the recently-leaked emails uncovered by MediaMatters that show Fox News executives telling anchors to, for example, call the Public Option a “Government Option”, because it sounds better for Republicans - and to inject skepticism into every report about global warming - Fox News is up to their ears in the lying game.

And yet they still can call themselves “news”.

Everyone knows - well ALMOST everyone knows - that Rush Limbaugh isn’t news - and Rush Limbaugh himself doesn’t call his program a news program.

Heck - everyone knows the Big Picture with Thom Hartmann isn’t news - I don’t claim to be either - I do opinion.

But Fox News is in the same business as Rush Limbaugh - basically carrying the water for the Republican Party and corporate interests - yet it calls itself “news”.

Historically from the 1930s until the 1980s - when a media organization called itself news - it had to be free of bias - it had actually to be real news.

Then Reagan blew up the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 - the rule that required self-proclaimed news outlets to report straight news - and opened the floodgates of distortion and infotainment.

And the courts then piled on by ruling that media corporations have the absolute right to lie to their viewers and force their reporters to do so.

Now can you see why our news media in America is in complete and utter disrepair? And why nobody believes what they see or hear anymore?

As I speak - Republicans are pushing for a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.

But that’s not what America needs.

Our nation actually needs a constitutional amendment stripping corporations of their personhood - and thus their right to lie to us.

Then maybe we can once and for all force Fox to drop the word “news” from its name - and call the network what it really is - as Roger Ailes envisioned back in the 1970s when he worked in the Nixon administration - GOP TV.

That's The Big Picture.