The 4th Estate Thread Has Surrendered

[Unagi]

I'm only on page 30 - but hot damn, there is plenty of crap in there for the other news stations (wait, I forgot - do we even have news stations anymore?) to broadcast these emails. As a pure "Business Competition" move, why on earth don't they all bury FOX News with all this information? What do we all know FOX News would do if this sort of thing was to be revealed in the MSNBC world?

edit:
As I continue to read, seriously... I know defamation lawsuits are hard to win - but damn, these guys have just blown the cover off FOX's own discussions about it. They knew they were lying and they did it to feed people that needed to be lied to, if they were going to keep watching FOX News. They say it over and over.

[Zarathud]

Hopefully it is the first of many defamation lawsuits that shuts FOX down. It was never news, it was political propaganda.

[Blackhawk]

The problem is that the Fox audience will still exist, and someone will make them the product they're waiting for, whether that means OANN moving up, or something new arising.

I think the only real way to solve the problem would be to start teaching critical thinking in school (good luck with that), and then waiting a couple of generations.

[Pyperkub]

Hopefully it is the first of many defamation lawsuits that shuts FOX down. It was never news, it was political propaganda.

Yeah, but the Courts (see Tucker's lying on air lawsuit) haven't seen it that way. I have little faith that will change BUT if the Sandy Hook/Alex Jones trials are any indication, we might get there. Fox however, is a LOT more influential than Jones, and also a lot less stupid.

IMHO, what *should* happen with the Dominion lawsuit is that Dominion should be awarded a year of *earnings* (not just profits) from Fox News. What I *expect* is a trivial judgement for Dominion - say in the millions of dollars, which, to Fox, is trivial (probably less than Carlson or Hannity's salary).

[LordMortis]

IMHO, what *should* happen with the Dominion lawsuit is that Dominion should be awarded a year of *earnings* (not just profits) from Fox News. What I *expect* is a trivial judgement for Dominion - say in the millions of dollars, which, to Fox, is trivial (probably less than Carlson or Hannity's salary).

Assuming Fox is found guilty, I'd hope it would be more than a million. If Dominions earnings hit doesn't make it 10s of millions then it should become punitive and make it 10s of millions (Substantially more if I had my druthers). It needs to hit the bottom line for their tax on cable, currently estimated at nearly 2 billion a year before adding ad revenues.

First source I could find:

https://unfoxmycablebox.com/

[Unagi]

I thought I heard they were asking for $1.x billion. Which they won’t get. But they also apparently want FOX to have to make public announcements about their being wrong / like officially apologize to Dominion.

[LordMortis]

I thought I heard they were asking for $1.x billion. Which they won’t get. But they also apparently want FOX to have to make public announcements about their being wrong / like officially apologize to Dominion.

About a quarter's earnings? I'm OK with that. They'll never get it, but I'm OK with it.

[malchior]

Note: Relocated from the DeSantis thread because this has tread into light death watch territory.

Fun side note on that Damon Linker piece (referenced in the DeSantis thread). The level of fragility displayed here is pretty sad. He is battling for the title of worst NY Times pundit but honestly he has no chance against say Douthat or Stephens. That he calls himself a liberal is...amusing. I almost wish it was a troll. That'd make more sense. I suppose he might be arguing that he is a classical liberal but it's a misleading usage in the piece's context.

[El Guapo]

Damon Linker seems like a tool, although I'm more worried about headline writers for NYT and CNN than I am about him.

[malchior]

Damon Linker seems like a tool, although I'm more worried about headline writers for NYT and CNN than I am about him.

Yeah he is. I tried to give his podcast a chance to see if it was just his writing style I disliked. I think he is a rather weak analyst and worse self-important about it.

I also wonder if this might be an era of incredibly weak OpEd columnists at NYT as well and he is sticking out because he is fighting some imaginary battle between liberals and progressives. Which in my book is the calling card of a radical centrist.

I agree the headline writers are a bigger problem. There has been several times recently where the headline was incredibly misleading. Worse on occasion people properly call them out and they just silently change them. This of course makes them look dishonest at times and it really calls into question the dubious decision to end the public editor.

[Pyperkub]

Journalists with Integrity and courage can save lives.

https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/ap-jour ... s-ukraine/



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[malchior]

Another good opinion piece by Rubin. The press is failing us again.

Apparently, neither the media nor supposedly sober Republicans have learned anything from the past. Trump gave a bonkers speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, musing about Russia blowing up NATO headquarters, claiming President Biden had taken the border wall and “put it in a hiding area,” and telling the crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

We do not get headlines acknowledging this is unhinged. Instead, we get from the New York Times: “Trump Says He Would Stay in 2024 Race if Indicted.” And a similar angle from CNN. ABC started its website report this way: “Former President Donald Trump continues to reign supreme over the conservative wing of the Republican Party.” From The Washington Post: “Trump takes victory lap at conservative conference."

[El Guapo]

Yeah, this is the thing. When most people are directly exposed to Trump's crazy ravings they recoil, because it's just incredibly obvious how crazy and stupid he is. Hence whenever Trump has had to debate in a general election context his numbers go down. But the press continuously fails to show the public clearly how crazy he is. And on top of that if Trump is the nominee in 2024 he probably won't debate this time, so we won't even get that this go round.

[malchior]

Right. It's clear he knows what they will and won't do and tailors to the audience. All that crazy stuff will be packaged up and shipped to the right-wing infosphere. Some of it might make it to the general population but the GOP strategists know the fight is in the margins and are again exploiting the Corporate media which is afraid to get too far out of bounds. Honestly I think they know what is happening but don't want to chance being on the wrong side if/when big problems go down.

[Unagi]

It seems like the press takes everything he does and says - and then dresses it up in a suit and tie to make it seem legitimate - seemingly to keep all that box office money we all pay to watch their show.

[malchior]

Let's compare what I know if I read the account in the NY Times versus getting some context from Twitter! Rando Twitter posters did a better job providing basic context than the NY Times. They're in a complete failure state. As much as they want to make these into dry normalized proceedings. They aren't. They just aren't. And the NY Times frankly deserves the lack of trust they've earned. The guy wrote a book that is pretty much as infamous as the Bell Curve but sure talk up his enabling credentials.

NY Times

The House panel investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic opened its first public hearing on Wednesday with Republicans and their witnesses making an aggressive case that the virus may have been the result of a laboratory leak — a notion that has become the subject of intense political and scientific debate.

“There is no smoking gun proving a lab origin hypothesis, but the growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests a gun that, at the very least, is warm to the touch,” said Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former State Department official.

Dr. Metzl was one of three witnesses invited by Republicans. The others were <snip> and Nicholas Wade, who was the science editor of The New York Times in the 1990s and left the news organization at the end of 2011.

[El Guapo]

Also not great that the guy was science editor at the NYT for 10 - 20 years. Unless he suddenly went crazy around when he left.

[malchior]

Also not great that the guy was science editor at the NYT for 10 - 20 years. Unless he suddenly went crazy around when he left.

He might have. I don't know. A science editor can certainly do some damage by subtly manipulating what makes it through the story idea sieve or how articles are edited.

[Blackhawk]

I'm running out of reliable news sources. Sigh.

[Smoove_B]

“There is no smoking gun proving a lab origin hypothesis, but the growing body of circumstantial evidence suggests a gun that, at the very least, is warm to the touch,” said Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former State Department official.

He holds a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian history from Oxford University (1994), and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Clearly an expert on virology, pandemics and infectious diseases.

[El Guapo]

I'm running out of reliable news sources. Sigh.

I don't want to go too far knocking the NYT. Their reporting is among the best in the world - when they report a story you can have a lot of confidence in the facts that they're reporting. They just have their issues and blind spots, including dealing with bad faith political actors and domestic extremists.

[malchior]

I couldn't agree more. They are the gold standard for reporting. They have had failures over the years (Whitewater! Yellowcake uranium!) but they are relatively rare.

It's more about their blind spots and that their editorial voice sounds like a group of old white people with one foot in the grave. They also heavily overreact to criticism from the right but they are hardly unique there.

Edit: Just to reverse engineer what I think may have happened with the hearing today. A Democrat brought up these issues with Wade during the hearing. Adding the *relevant context* of his wacky views would have required quoting the Democratic representative. NY Times internal standards almost certainly would have required an offsetting Republican voice which would have expanded the scope of the piece. Faced with those issues of "fairness" they may have went with a slimmed down approach that unfortunately left the reader with a very incomplete view of the hearing. It's a side effect of trying to play it even in a time of the asymmetric polarization of crazy.

[Carpet_pissr]

I feel you(se) are perhaps focusing too much (solely, really) on the NYT. Just because it’s motto is the paper of record or whatever, doesn’t mean it (still) is.

I assume they have lost influence and readership just like other major newspapers have in the past 20 years due to the obvious.

Was an icon of journalism at one time, and ok, let’s mourn its title, or death, but I feel like NYT is being equated with ‘journalism’, which feels like overstating.

[malchior]

I feel you(se) are perhaps focusing too much (solely, really) on the NYT. Just because it’s motto is the paper of record or whatever, doesn’t mean it (still) is.

I assume they have lost influence and readership just like other major newspapers have in the past 20 years due to the obvious.

They have but there is a solid argument that they are still the center of the journalism world in the United States. Just in terms of revenue they are by far the biggest paper in the country. Like 3 or 4 times the size of the Washington Post alone. I think they have revenue of the next 4 or 5 city papers combined tbh.

[Carpet_pissr]

I feel you(se) are perhaps focusing too much (solely, really) on the NYT. Just because it’s motto is the paper of record or whatever, doesn’t mean it (still) is.

I assume they have lost influence and readership just like other major newspapers have in the past 20 years due to the obvious.

They have but there is a solid argument that they are still the center of the journalism world in the United States. Just in terms of revenue they are by far the biggest paper in the country. Like 3 or 4 times the size of the Washington Post alone. I think they have revenue of the next 4 or 5 city papers combined tbh.

Fine. I take my ‘feelings’ and sit down in the face of actual numbers stated above. (although I might quibble with focusing solely on newspapers vs ‘news sources’, and maybe with using revenue vs readership (although I assume it correlates).

Proceed.

[Holman]

The NYT has *always* had a huge bias towards ["This-is-Fine"-Dog-meme.gif]

Even up to Kristallnacht they were treating Hitler like an interesting and dynamic European statesman.

[Grifman]

[Grifman]

[LordMortis]

“We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists who continue to deliver breaking news from around the world and will continue to fight for the preservation of the First Amendment as Dominion attempts to suppress basic rights protected by our Constitution.”

Yeah, I can't think of anything less than soul crushing is deserved.

[Kurth]

The NYT has *always* had a huge bias towards ["This-is-Fine"-Dog-meme.gif]

Even up to Kristallnacht they were treating Hitler like an interesting and dynamic European statesman.

Well, stating the obvious, they were by no means alone in that.

[malchior]

There historically tends to be a bias to describe nation scale things as existing in a normal range. Stalin was described in a fairly normal range while he was literally murdering millions of people. We just hoped the information age would change that. It somehow got worse.

[malchior]

Why? Apparently racism/antisemitism/sedition = "intense" nowadays.

[malchior]

Well guess we have to hope that enough people watch this and are turned off because the deplorables are lapping this mind poison up.

[malchior]

Just to smash on this one more time because I was watching live coverage in NYC. MTG showed up for 5 minutes (really) and about 100 journalists trampled over each other to wave their microphones to capture her divine wisdom. Which means they are enabling her to spread hate and disorder in the exact same way they did with Trump in 2016. And like Stahl they're failing us. They've LEARNED NOTHING.

[Smoove_B]

Her official government Twitter account posted a democrat pedophile video this morning, so everything is going great.

[Zaxxon]

[El Guapo]

Just to smash on this one more time because I was watching live coverage in NYC. MTG showed up for 5 minutes (really) and about 100 journalists trampled over each other to wave their microphones to capture her divine wisdom. Which means they are enabling her to spread hate and disorder in the exact same way they did with Trump in 2016. And like Stahl they're failing us. They've LEARNED NOTHING.

Serious question - do you think Stahl is a dope or that she's cynical? Like it's hard to believe that she can seriously regard MTG as smart. Is she just working to find a frame that will generate views, or is she more on the clueless side of things?

[Isgrimnur]

[Jaymann]

Just to smash on this one more time because I was watching live coverage in NYC. MTG showed up for 5 minutes (really) and about 100 journalists trampled over each other to wave their microphones to capture her divine wisdom. Which means they are enabling her to spread hate and disorder in the exact same way they did with Trump in 2016. And like Stahl they're failing us. They've LEARNED NOTHING.

Serious question - do you think Stahl is a dope or that she's cynical? Like it's hard to believe that she can seriously regard MTG as smart. Is she just working to find a frame that will generate views, or is she more on the clueless side of things?

My guess is they don't want to alienate the mentally challenged crowd.

[Pyperkub]

FWIW, while EVERY SINGLE NEWS ORGANIZATION has solicited multiple Opinion pieces about Trump's Indictment, NONE of them have actually seen the Indictment.