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.”
The case concerns Fox News’s repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.
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.
Tucker Carlson called the charges “ludicrous” and “off the rails”. Sean Hannity texted about “F’ing lunatics”. A senior network vice-president called one of the stories “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”.
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.
“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of. These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”
Horton said Dominion’s case gets “huge benefit” from the way Fox employees “express themselves with a huge measure of hyperbole about absolutely everything”.
Tribe agreed: “This is one of the first defamation cases in which it is possible to rule for the plaintiff on summary judgment. This is not a request to go to trial. There is no genuinely disputed fact. The defendants were deliberately lying in a manner that was per se libelous and they clearly knew it.”
Dominion's $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/92676/
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/92612/
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/87530/
" “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press."
I LITERALLY LOL AT THAT ONE!! WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF "FREEDOM" ~ "SPEECH" ~ "PRESS"???????
SHOOT, THERE AIN'T GONNA BE NO NEWS STATIONS NO MORE, IF EQUAL JUSTICE IS SERVED. HAHAHAHAHA
When questioned, Murdoch said “some of (Fox’s) commentators were endorsing” the narrative of a stolen election, including “maybe Lou Dobbs” and “maybe Maria (Bartiromo).”
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This is crazy that he's still trying to protect Tucker(who has devoted huge portions of dozens of his shows featuring this bunk) and others during his/Fox's high ratings weekday evenings, that to this day continue with their constant election fraud false narratives.
The 2 he mentioned are disposable, so he can sacrifice them and pretend to be honest.
Carlson’s job is to make money for Fox, not tell the truth.
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/26/fox-news-tucker-carlson-dominion/
So in the end, the problem with Fox News is the problem of all for-profit news organizations. Fox may present it in an especially distilled, enraging, shameless form. But neither advertisers nor, unfortunately, most people want to hear things that conflict with their treasured illusions about the world. For-profit news outlets can do great investigative reporting, but that reporting is itself generally not profitable and is subsidized by their cooking apps or sports coverage that actually do make money. By itself, telling the truth is generally not just unprofitable, it’s also actively anti-profit. The lesson of the Dominion lawsuit isn’t that Fox is extremely bad, although it is. It’s that to have a news system that works, we have to take profit out of the equation.
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I was chief meteorologist at WEHT in Evansville for 11 years.
There was rarely a month that went by that we weren't told how important ratings are.
The best news director (previously an investigative reporter) I ever worked for, John Hmurovic quit because of this.
Before he resigned, he got us 20+ employees under him together to tell us "When I got into this business, I thought that I could inform people to help cause changes to make the world a better place. The past 2 years, I found out that my only job was to make more money for Jim Gilmore(the owner) by increasing ratings"
On the this same topic is sensationalism of the news, especially weather.
ABC news tonight spent almost 10 minutes exaggerating how extreme the current weather is in the US.
Spending minutes on a couple of tornadoes that injured a few people and constantly referring to them as F2's with winds of 110 mph as if this was impressive. Those are considered weak tornadoes.
Going to Champaign IL to show video of students taking cover in a hall for a tornado WATCH and discussing that NON event as if it was a big deal for those poor students that had their classes interrupted.
Maybe it was a communications class teaching them that to be successful in the media today, you must embellish, exaggerate and sensationalize everything for ratings(-:
Seriously? That's part of their top story on nightly news covering the entire globe?
Greatly beneficial rains in drought areas.........and they show a mudslide in California and pretend its really bad news.
That's their whole thing, Mike. Every. Single. Night. their breathless reporting leaves viewers with the idea the world is coming to an end with that climate crap.
Yes, and great to read you Bill!
The main networks used to have a complete franchise on broadcast tv news for many decades.
In the old days, ABC, NBC and CBS. That's where everybody got all their national news from, along with the local affiliate that broadcasts local news.
You would also get day old news by reading the newspaper.
No outside competition because that's all there was.
Now, there are literally thousands of sources to get the news and most of them are not on tv.
So ABC, CBS, NBC and others are doing everything possible to attract people and keep viewers that are slowly but surely going elsewhere. Weather sensationalism is at the top because you can readily capture vivid images of tornado damage or flooding or snow drifts and many other elements that are part of weather.
I think this is worthy of a new thread to focus on that, independent of this one which was started to discuss and entirely different topic.
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/most-watched-channels-2022-tv-network-ratings-1235475170/
https://variety.com/vip/fading-ratings-how-far-broadcast-tv-has-tumbled-since-2015-1235124641/
PRECISELY WHY I HAVEN'T TURNED ON A TV, IN YEARS!! (I WAS ALWAYS SCREAMIN' AT IT! LOL) I CAN'T STAND DECEIT!! I LIVE BY INTUITION & WHAT I SEE.
IN FACT, THE VERY 1ST LINE OF MY RENTAL APPLICATION STATES: FIRST & FOREMOST ~ I HAVE ZERO TOLERANCE FOR ANY FORM OF DISHONESTY ~ LIEING, STEALING, CHEATING, ETC.!
I POINT THAT OUT TO WHOMEVER WANTS TO RENT THE HOUSE & TELL THEM, TO THEIR FACE: "ALL LIARS EVENTUALLY TRIP THEMSELVES UP & GET CAUGHT. I CATCH YOU IN ONE LIE, YOU'LL BE LOOKIN' FOR ANOTHER PLACE TO RENT ~ BECAUSE YOU HAVE PROBABLY STOLEN FROM ME, TOO!"
NONE OF THEM BELIEVED ME, I GUESS! THE 1ST ONE DIDN'T LAST 2 MONTHS & I KICKED HIM OUT. THE 2ND ONE HAD A KID, SOOOOO LAWFULLY, I HAD TO GIVE HER 6 MONTHS TO GET OUT. THE 3RD ONE (AN UNMARRIED COUPLE WITH 2 KIDS) WAS THE ABSOLUTE WORST! WHAT PSYCHOPATHS THEY ARE ~ THE BEST I'VE EVER SEEN!!
HE FINALLY, AFTER 3 1/2 YEARS, TRIPPED HIMSELF UP, BIG TIME! HE'S A HIGHLY PAID SALES REP, WITH AN EXCELLENT REPUTATION! FIST HOLES PUNCHED IN DOORS ~ AN OAK CABINET STOLEN FROM A WALL~A CEILING FAN STOLEN RIGHT OUT OF THE CEILING~ THE LIST IS LONG!!
IF EVERYONE WOULD JUST TELL THE TRUTH, WE WOULDN'T HAVE TO DECIDE WHAT TO BELIEVE!
IF FOX WOULD GET RID OF MARIA ~ THEY'D BE IN A WORLD OF HURT, IMO. SAME WITH KUDLOW.(LOL THEY GOT RID OF PIRRO FOR TELLIN' THE TRUTH! I'M GLAD SHE'S BACK!)
IF IT WEREN'T SO SAD ~ IT'D BE LAUGHABLE!
I "FELL OUT OF BED" WITH FOX, WHEN THEY HIRED DONNA B., AFTER SHE GOT "CANNED" OVER GETTIN' CAUGHT IN THE BIG DEBATE LIE.
I LOST ALL RESPECT FOR SCALISE FOR TAKING DONNA B. TO BIDENS' INAUGURATION.
YET, "EVERYBODY" PILES ONTO FOX OVER THEIR TRANSGRESSIONS, WHILE THE MSM CONTINUES ON THEIR MERRY WAY.
Court Records Show Political Pressure Behind Fox Programming