I’m still assuming that Dominion will win handily, and then the court will reduce the penalty to a desultory amount and a desultory retraction. As usual.
I’m surprised that Rupert Murdoch’s deposition has not been a bigger story:
He has basically admitted under oath that Fox News lied and that he could have done more to discourage them.
It’s an interesting dynamic because Murdoch obviously does not want his company to be sued but he dislikes Trump. Fox hosts and producers were terrified of other right wing news outlets undercutting them and taking their audience. But this could be a devastating blow to their reputation. Of course they didn’t have a reputation amongst most normal-thinking people, but no doubt many ordinary Republican voters believed in Fox being a truthful source of news coverage.
Murdoch’s reputation has already been trashed in the UK after his newspapers admitting to phone hacking, including hacking the phone of a missing school girl, causing her parents to believe at the time that she was still alive. (Though sadly his newspapers survive.)
Do you think that the average Fox viewer knows who Rupert Murdoch is or has heard of his statements in their bubble? Did Fox News itself report it?
Unless things have changed in the last few days, apparently not.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3874914-fox-news-howard-kurtz-says-company-wont-let-him-cover-dominion-voting-case/
Yeah. Last I checked, Fox News hasn’t seen the wisdom in running a 24/7 crawler on the bottom of the screen, saying:
We lie to you when it matter. We lie to you when it doesn’t. It’s not (entirely) that we think you’re stupid. It’s more that we know you’re in a cult, we’re part of that cult’s management, and we’d be awfully sorry (read: out of business) if you left us now.
Nope. Nothing. Dead silence on the FoxNews site … about any of this.
Partly, the “ongoing litigation” thing, and there’s probably some validity to that.
But the rest (ie, overwhelming majority)? Craven self-interest.
Poor Fox apparently doesn’t have any money to hire editors and proofreaders. From an article I saw this evening on the Fox site about Carnival Cruises announcing a big fine for disruptive spring break passengers:
“The cruise line branded as “all about fun vacations” is getting serious inappropriate guest behavior after there has been an uptick of rowdy behavior across the terrorism industry.”
I think they meant “tourism industry”. 
Do I think the average anti-immigrant Fox viewer knows who a wealthy immigrant is? Nah, not at all.
Yeah, the fact that this case is such a slam dunk is making me nervous.
FOX needs to lose billions on this (when we include the Smartmatic case) *and* be forced to issue some kind of public retraction, for this to have any impact now.
Because if FOX gets away with a piddling fine, it’s open season. All the channels will know that no amount of deliberate lies is worse than losing viewers.
It would help if Alex Jones cannot dodge his obligations too.
I love this video because it just reinforces so much of what this thread is about.
It’s focused mostly on Tucker Carlson, and how he spouts out so many things he doesn’t believe (especially his praise of Trump, who he secretly hates with a passion), but also touches on how much the network lies to its viewers, and as Seth Myers puts it, it treats its viewers like an abusive cult leader might.
Also, I gotta love how Trump was compared to Cocaine Bear. That made me laugh.
Smartmatic’s lawsuit gets the green light:
So far, attempts by Fox lawyers to have the Smartmatic case dismissed have fallen on stony ground. Last week the New York state supreme court in Manhattan gave the green light for the case to proceed against Fox News, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former business anchor Lou Dobbs and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Maria Bartiromo used to be just a normal CNBC news person. It’s a shame she went off the deep end.
I was wondering the same about Dobbs, but he’s always been a bit of a crank. He’s just gotten progressively worse over the years.
He has become pretty much a white supremacist, right? Super anti-immigrant for white purity reasons? Maybe I’m wrong about that.
I don’t know who actually believes what, but – AIUI – Bartiromo clocks in at about 10 million a year, and Dobbs ended his tenure at about half that.
Wasn’t it Ghostbusters that used the great line, “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you want.”
I generally hew to the notion that these people are far closer to evil than to stupid.
Fox’s latest argument for keeping Dominion lawsuit discovery out of the public record: they fear that Newsmax and OAN and the rest will learn their sooper sekrit techniques for spreading lies and propaganda.
Fox’s “proprietary journalistic processes” are pretty obvious already.
One of my faves is the story composed of the following elements: 1) Democratic/left-wing/“woke” person makes semi-controversial statement, 2) various knuckleheads take to Twitter and other social media to rant incoherently about it, 3) Fox puts out story headlined “Dem/lefty/woke figure is “roasted” on Twitter”. This formula is repeated on a virtual daily basis on the national Fox website.
Ooops, I’ve revealed a “proprietary journalistic process”. Hope Fox lawyers don’t track me down.
Or offer you a job.
Minor, but still saddened that Baritromo’s husband’s dad was Saul Steinberg. (basically a three-degrees-of-separation sad story)
Having no shame. That’s it.