You Will Anyway: It's not like Fox honchos don't know what's going on

Tuesday, September 6, 2022

It's not like Fox honchos don't know what's going on

As the summer has unfolded, Fox's star TV news hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have been grilled under oath. High-powered attorneys are bearing down on the Murdochs, the most powerful family in English-language media. And it's all part of an all-out legal war. Dominion is seeking to strip away the curtain protecting what happens behind the scenes at the nation's most watched cable news channel, which holds a singular role on the American political scene. The suit could also define what's fair game in journalism and politics in a democracy very much on the edge. The trial date is set for April of next year.

[...]

Besides Carlson and Hannity, the list of Fox figures already questioned under oath in the cases includes former stars (Shepard Smith) and fallen stars (Lou Dobbs and Ed Henry), as well as show producers and programming executives, court records show. Dobbs left the network in early 2021, the day after Smartmatic, the electronic voting company, filed a closely related $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox over similarly false claims about that firm made on Fox's airwaves.

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Dominion's attorneys have obtained emails, texts, WhatsApp messages and more, documenting how the network's executives and journalists behaved and acted behind the scenes, as well as determining what they actually knew about the claims.

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[A] November 2020 email from an anguished Fox News news producer to colleagues sent up a flare amid a fusillade of false claims.

The producer warned: Fox cannot let host Jeanine Pirro back on the air. She is pulling conspiracy theories from dark corners of the Web to justify then-President Donald Trump's lies that the election had been stolen from him.

[...]

Asked by NPR whether Fox still considers [Maria] Bartiromo a news anchor, and thus part of Fox's news and reporting division, rather than its opinion side, a network spokeswoman declined to comment. It is the first time Fox has not identified Bartiromo as a news-side journalist when directly asked by NPR.

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In the weeks that followed Election Day 2020, other prominent Fox stars, commentators and their guests heavily promoted them.

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The producer's email is among the voluminous correspondence acquired by Dominion's attorneys as part of its discovery of evidence in a $1.6 billion defamation suit it filed against Fox News and its parent company.

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The wide nets cast by Dominion in seeking depositions suggests, University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters says, that the company's attorneys are "exploring the extent to which Fox personnel published false statements with knowledge of their falsity or with a 'high degree of awareness of their probable falsity,' (the relevant fault standards)."

[...]

Defamation cases are generally hard to win in the U.S. and Peters says this one is no slam dunk. But given what's already known, he says, he'd rather be on Dominion's legal team than Fox's.

NPR

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

"It’s not about not having something to hide; it’s about having something to lose. What we lose when we’re under observation is our humanity...Rights are inherent to our nature, they’re not granted by governments, they’re guaranteed by governments. They’re protected by governments." -- Edward Snowden

"Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause.” -- Howard Zinn

"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

"News is what somebody does not want you to print. All the rest is advertising." ~ LACUNA

"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

"There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack." ~ Molly Ivins

"The brain of our species is, as we know, made up largely of potassium, phosphorus, propaganda, and politics, with the result that how not to understand what should be clearer is becoming easier and easier for all of us." ~ James Thurber

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plane....When you hold up your arm and swear to uphold the Constitution, you don’t say, 'Except in wartime.'" -- George McGovern

"I’ll believe that corporations are people when Texas executes one." ~ Bill Moyers

"When did hope become a political dynamic? Hope is right below wishful thinking and right above performing a rain dance on the scale of activity." ~ Rich Hall

Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.