This kind of of reminds me of this Pat Bagley cartoon about Punchable Shkreli.
He got in trouble for ripping off rich people and it’s a similar deal here. Fox and the shitbags have spent years lying , punching down and generally fucking over anyone they could get away with , and now they are in the shit because they messed with a company that had the resources to defend themselves rather than all the egregious bullshit they pulled in the past.
Happy for them to burn , it is a shame it’s for a lesser reason.
They don’t need no water, let the mother fuckers burn.
They won’t be - they were not named in the suit. As pure commentators rather than news anchors it is slightly more difficult to make them squirm for being “hyperbolic” (aka lying their asses off). Smartmatic was, well, smart - they were very careful about who they were leveling charges against and why.
Only slightly, but I would guess that by virtue of their status as entertainers, they’d argue that they were just reporting what Lou Dobbs said on the “news”. The smart move would be for Fox execs to steer them clear of that topic for a while. They might even ask them to come back with a retraction on their programs. Right now, Fox is in total damage control mode: their sacking of Dobbs is essentially a de facto admission that they’re going to be on the losing end of a lawsuit should it end up in court. They’re going to try to settle out of court and firing Dobbs + retraction is a way to negotiate a lower settlement.
It always bugs me when anyone that watches Fox complains about MSM. What exactly do they think Fox News is?
I’ve always wondered why they don’t attempt to make it more clear, just for legal reasons, that they aren’t news and they aren’t journalists. That’s what got Tucker out of a lawsuit not that long ago. I know at least some of the people on that station (don’t know which shows), when backed into a corner, will defend their comments by saying ‘hey, I’m not a journalist, this is just my opinion’ or something like that. But if they made it more clear that the show is just for entertainment or is meant to be viewed as political satire, couldn’t they get away with most anything?
Look at any late night host. They can, so far as I know, say anything they want without any real risk of losing a lawsuit.
I’m not defending Fox, I’m curious to why they haven’t gone this route. Is there a line between news and entertainment that requires more than simply stating it?
Or, look for some on-air apologies to voting machine companies, in an attempt to mitigate damages.
Fox knows that they will be massive losers in the upcoming lawsuit,and groveling apologies and retractions are necessary. I suspect good old Lou refused to apologize, so under the bus he went.
His show was a money loser anyway, as advertisers refused to put ads on his program.
Apologies aren’t enough in this situation; plaintiffs want 100% acknowledgment that the information they presented was categorically false - in other words, admit that they basically lied without actually calling themselves a liar.
No way was Dobbs going to do that, and he was probably told that even that wouldn’t necessarily save his job. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to his contract. Dobbs clearly didn’t say anything that made Fox News execs uncomfortable and were quite content to let him stay on the air – until their legal department gave them the bad news. But Dobbs may get to pocket that money that remains in his contract. Of course, he’ll have to spend some of that on his legal defense.
They can apologise, but it may be “too little, too late”.
If Smartmatic and Dominion can show that they have lost contracts and sales because of all the lies that have been told about them, on-air apologies may not do anything for their bottom line, and they’ll still want money from Fox, Dobbs, Guiliani and Powell.
[Fun Fact: I couldn’t remember Powell’s name just now, so I googled “crazy Trump lawyer”. The first four hits had her name in full, the rest gave articles that referred to her.]
Well, ackshually…increasingly, the folks who complain about “mainstream media” do count Fox News as MSM, criticize it as no better than CNN, and turn to even more extreme sources like Newsmax and OANN. Particularly since Fox News committed the sin* of accurately reporting election results and calling states against Trump.
*I think Trumpism at this point really is a quasi-religion, so I’m using the term “sin” pretty literally.
That’s exactly what they do whenever they’re meaningfully challenged. But only then. Their entire model is built on mixing “news” and “opinion” such that a casual viewer can’t tell the difference, but maintaining juuust enough separation that they can fall back on the “opinion” defense. Clearly and explicitly stating up front that a particular show is “opinion” rather than “news” would disrupt their whole model. Instead, when they’re challenged, they just say after the fact that clearly that show was an opinion piece, as should be obvious to any reasonable viewer. It’s a dodge that’s worked for them so far.
Years ago, when John Stewart was hosting the Daily Show and feuding with Fox News on the regular, he did a piece on this, and pointed out that going by Fox’s retroactive classifications, something like less than a quarter of Fox News’ airtime was actually devoted to news, in a couple of blocks, separated by much larger blocks of “opinion” and “discussion” programming (none of which was explicitly labeled or referred to as such in the actual programming).
Very good people are saying he was on the toilet when he got fired. If true it would be very very sad. But he is on the can 10-12 hours a day so it checks out on that score.