The Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Dominion Voting Systems’ brief requesting summary judgment against Fox News for defamation – and $1.6bn – is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”
Tribe said the filing “establishes that Fox was not only reckless” but also that producers, owners and personalities were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated”.
Filed last week, the 192-page document makes it clear that senior figures at Fox News from Rupert Murdoch down knew immediately after the election that claims of voter fraud, in particular those aimed at Dominion, were false.
But none of this knowledge prevented hosts from repeating lies about everything from imaginary algorithms shaving votes from Dominion machines to non-existent ties between the company and Venezuela.
Tribe was one of several first amendment experts to call the filing nearly unprecedented.
“This is the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation,” said Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and litigator with clients including CBS and the Associated Press.
This article has “more interesting details” on the “evidence” Fox hosts used to repeatedly bring Sidney Powell on the air and let her spew her theories, even though they knew she was full of BS. Powell relied on a memo from a source titled “Election Fraud Info” which contained such gems as:
The source said she got her in formation from “time travel while being in a semi-conscious state.” She said the wind tells her she’s a ghost but she doesn’t believe it. The source also said she knew Anton Scalia had been killed in a human hunting expedition in 2016, even though it was publicly said he died of a heart attack in 2016. Also that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch secretly huddle each day to figure out how to best put President Trump in a bad light. [Ailes had already been dead for years by then.]
Maria Bartiromo, having received the memo, invited Sidney Powell on the air the next day. And it goes on…
It’s truly a shameful and damning story, and one which will make absolutely no difference to their viewers. Hopefully it will make a big difference to Fox’s bank account, and perhaps they will learn something.
But, as Goofy says, “It’s truly a shameful and damning story, and one which will make absolutely no difference to their viewers.” He couldn’t be more correct.
Somebody else might say that any evidence confirming the conspiracy theories is dismissed by THE CONSPIRACY itself.
It is very hard to believe that, in some countries I know, so many politicians who occupy extremely important positions were elected by a majority of voters. The presence of such politicians at the top of the world clearly fuels the conspiracy theories.
But if Einstein was right (“Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.”), almost everything around us looks like a conspiracy theory.
But it isn´t. Perception remains subjective, no matter which side you’re on.
My mom tries to throw this at me all the time. Problem is of course, this does not always apply. Sometimes it is extremely objective to say 1 + 1 = 2. And this is one of those times. There is nothing subjective about this particular thread. Fox News lied to its viewers and the country about something extremely important: the legitimacy of the 2020 election for the president of the USA. There is no subjective spin on this.
This talk is getting so severe that now MTG is calling for a national divorce. And breaking up of the USA. Members of Congress (how did GA elect here, twice?) calling for an end to the country they represent.
I have been proposing, for some years, that the US west coast, and north east, break off and join Canada. Then the rump Shiny-land will be “freee” to wallow in it’s bigotry and complaints.
I was only referring to the quoted sentence and the conspiracy theories.
Fact is, the voters whose party lost the election challenge almost always the policies of the party in power. Whether justified or not…
Therefore, perception has always been subjective.
I like to think of myself as liberal, tolerant and objective.
But I am convinced that many of my colleagues have a completely different opinion of me.
Swap Florida for Greenland. Problem solved. Residents of Greenland become US citizens and Florida residents get Danish citizenship (along with full health care, EU membership, and so on).
There are still people who have no critical thought process watching fox news. The lies are part of playing a game to use women and minorities in small businesses. Guys who should not be in business because they are really bad at it.
Explained this yesterday but I think it is worth exploring here. Have all of you talked yet with bots?
I have a young friend on Grafton Street Dublin. She busks for a living. I heard her in Dublin last year. I saw her on IG. She invited me to follow her on a second profile with fewer than 200 followers. Her main profile has something like 1.4 million people.
On my IG I have a very old fashioned bot that simply runs one single blurb anyone can fully deal with, “I am a one man shop. I do not respond here. I need my down time. I work hard. If you need a product please see my IG link. I appreciate your time. Thank you”.
Her bots triggered my bot. I then responded. It would have been a late response to gain a sale but this was not a sales call. The bot responded. Interesting but slightly off. I responded. Interesting small thing but even more off. Then I realized this decent but not beautiful young woman was not taking her 1.4 million followers serious because all of those men were oggling her and posting dumb comments endlessly about how beautiful she is. Her bot was heading in that direction even though I was not.
Now yes that was interesting for six of her bot messages. But now I have unfollowed her profile and wont ever see her again on IG.
The point is the bot failed. There is no conversation there. There was a theme for a conversion I was not having. That will be true and ineffective 90% of the time.
If people applied critical thought processes to Faux Snooze, they would not have lasted very long in business. The purpose of Faux Snooze is to cause their viewers to NOT use any thinking–because that is supposedly the job of their network. Of course, Faux does NOT rely on their own internal material. They outsource virtually any/all matters related to what one could possible identify as being a “thought” (about anything, anywhere, any time, any place). The ONLY thing they really think about is the $$$$$$$$$.
