Agreed. Comedy shows at least have the benefit of making you laugh. But they should still be consumed in limited quantities.
Opinion shows are just outrage generators. Every element of them has negative value.
It wasn’t just that statement; it was taken in light of the entire context:
had inserted her own colorful commentary into and throughout the segment, laughing, expressing her dismay (i.e., saying ‘I mean, what?’) and calling the segment a ‘sparkly story’ and one we must ‘take in stride.’
For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context
I agree that the Tucker case seems a little more generalized in that it seems to refer to the tenor of his show as a whole as opposed to one particular segment, but that’s getting to be a really fine distinction.
Tucker undoubtedly spews misinformation at 10x the rate of Maddow. But both are well below the threshold of positive utility.
Not exactly. The argument in Carlson’s case was that nothing he says should be taken seriously; in Maddow’s it was that one specific statement about OAN being “literally” paid Russian propaganda was obvious hyperbole.
Maddow is a little bit more trustworthy than Carlson.
I have to draw a granite-solid distinction between acts like Tucker or Limbaugh (may he rest in pain) and Bill Maher, SNL, Colbert, the Daily Show, etc.
The former genre just makes you made enough to spit nails (and go hunting for minorities). The latter gives you equal measures of information – slanted though it is – and laughter.
What makes today’s RW laugh … other than any of the myriad photos shown on SNL’s “Weekend Update” where Colin Jost says, “… seen here …”
??
I say … basically incomparable at their respective cores.
I would say that Maddow is less untrustworthy than Carlson (and not by a little). Nevertheless, that still puts her in the negative.
Both arguments relied on the “general tenor” of the work as a whole–that there is enough exaggeration and other clues that an informed viewer wouldn’t conclude that they were making factual statements. Even if Maddow’s lawyers were arguing a narrower point about a specific statement, from a viewer’s point of view there’s no difference: as long as the tone of the show is “sparkly”, you can’t take any of her statements as factual.
[Sorry, I apparently missed that @wolfpup had made pretty much the same points I was making a few minutes before I posted. So I didn’t see @Dr.Strangelove’s reply to him.]
I watched Maddow for a while years ago, but I got tired of her practice of making an interesting claim and then drawing out a long exposition to get to the supposed meat of the subject.
So I haven’t see her recently, and can’t judge if she is as untrustworthy as you believe. I didn’t get that sense while I was watching her. She seemed to have reasonably good sources for her claims.
But AFAIK, she’s never been credibly accused of simply fabricating stuff the way Carlson has, has she?
Probably not. I’m not trying to make a “both sides” claim in terms of their behavior as a whole. But the case was about a statement that, in isolation, would be totally false and probably defamatory. However, within the context of being an opinion show, and with the additional clues about exaggeration and such, it should be treated as non-factual. This is the meat of the argument IMO and the same in both cases.
I don’t like having to judge if my sources of information are being non-literal or not. Since my ability to distinguish these things is not perfect, I think it’s better to assume everything by sometimes-non-literal sources is non-literal. Which means there’s no actual value to the source and it should be ignored. The logic is the same whether it’s 5% or 95% that’s non-factual.
I have to disagree with this kind of what-about-ism. Sure, in any opinion show you can expect opinions, and just as many of us do here when we post our opinions, there can be exaggerations to make a point – but most of the time (and I think pretty clearly with Maddow) the hyperbole is pretty obvious and clearly not meant to deceive.
But there’s a much larger point here that applies to Tucker and also to Fox News in general. Substitute the concept of “bias” instead of the concept of whether something should be taken literally or not. The hyperbole of the latter is usually obvious, but bias can be much more subtle, and it can take many forms – distorting facts, nuances of language, omitting facts, and the general tone and emphasis of news coverage.
From that standpoint, one can compare CNN and Fox News. Is CNN biased? Sure. They’re sensationalist, their website loves click-bait, but mostly they’re biased in the way that Noam Chomsky described commercial media in general: “… as a broad generalization, I think it is fair to say that the media adopt the basic framework of state and private power”. A good example of this was during the ill-advised second Gulf War of Bush Junior, when “embedded” CNN reporters offered breathtaking accounts of the patriotic exploits of brave US troops.
OK, so how about Fox News? Fox is all of those things in spades, but with a huge additional difference: they’re not a news organization at all, but simply a ruthless and unprincipled propaganda arm of the Republican Party. They lie without any qualms, they fabricate information as readily as they omit information, all in the service of targeted political objectives, which happens to happily coincide with making a shit-ton of money.
And that’s the difference between Fox and the likes of Tucker Carlson, and every other news network. Including MSNBC, which indeed can be called biased, but they’re biased within the normal parameters of a legitimate news organization, whereas Fox is more analogous to Julius Streicher’s infamous WW2 era Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer.
Totally agreed. Fox is without a doubt far worse than the other networks. And not always in a way where they can get away with an “opinion” excuse–see the Dominion lawsuit settlement. Other networks aren’t settling cases like that.
My point is narrower than that: is a particular opinion show worth watching or not? It should have some benefit to the viewer if so. Humor is a positive. Factual information is a positive. Outrage is a negative, and misinformation is a big negative.
IMO, Carlson, Maddow, and frankly all the others do not nearly meet the threshold for positive utility. The misinformation outweighs the positive. And this is compounded by mixing the two together in a way where I constantly have to evaluate if they’re exaggerating or being non-literal or something else.
It’s not there there’s any information in these shows that I can’t get elsewhere, but without the other stuff. So I don’t watch them (and think nobody else should either).
I was responding to Sage_Rat’s comment about political comedy shows like Colbert. Fine in limited doses. Probably not wise for them to be a primary source of information.
Outrage generators like Carlson should not be consumed in any quantity. Unfortunately, visiting my parents requires some level of exposure. Though maybe not now!
No, I know. I was just stunned to see a complete dismissal of comedy as an art form. Especially since comedic satire is one of the great conveyors of truth in a fascist curious nation like the US.
If you want only straight news from reliable well-vetted sources, that’s fine – we need those sources and I watch, listen to, and read them, too. They’re critically important.
But as humans we also need an injection of colour and humour into some of these stories. The best example I can think of is The Daily Show back in the Jon Stewart days – with apologies to Trevor Noah, but I no longer watched the show after Stewart left. Jon Stewart wasn’t a newscaster and never pretended to be, but he made the news funny and entertaining, and despite obvious exaggerations for comical effect, I’m not aware of any instance where he intentionally misrepresented any substantive fact. I heard it said that many young people got more current events news from that show than from anywhere else, and that’s surely a good thing. Do you think no one should watch such shows?
Stewart wasn’t averse to ridiculing liberals, either, it just turned out that, humour-wise, conservatives had so much more to offer!
Like Sage_Rat said, it should be like dessert. Fine as long as it isn’t your only source of information. But try to vet it against other sources, at least. There’s probably some value in getting young people interested. But that, by itself, certainly isn’t enough–I certainly don’t give Carlson any credit for getting people fired up enough to vote. Methods matter.
As a very general point, I worry that a huge fraction of the US lives in a world where truth and fiction, fact vs. opinion, etc. are not clearly distinguished. While I think the left has firmer ties with reality than the right, they are not immune to this problem. I think outrage-bait opinion shows contribute greatly to this problem. Fox is the worst at this, but any time there is this constant flux between fact and opinion, there is the risk of getting them conflated. Mere exposure to misinformation is enough for it to implant in your memories, even if you know at the time that it’s an exaggeration or otherwise.
Comedy has value, but also some of the same dangers. Satire is great, but it’s not always easy to distinguish satire from reality, to put it lightly. So my only suggestion is to use it judiciously and compare against other sources.
[teeny-tiny hijack] They’re having rotating hosts now, and some of them are quite good. You might want to dip your toe back in? Or not. [/teeny-tiny hijack]
Fox lawyers got nothing for legal fees when Carlson, Hannity were judged to be liars but the audience should have known that (roll eyes). Newsmax lawyers got a $250,000.00 bill for trolling.
