About Dominion v. Fox, and the news itself
Commenter “Kate” writes:
The whole problem with the Dominion lawsuit is that news organizations are supposedly free to report what political factions are saying. Apparently they are only free to repeat leftist charges. Fox News has folded and damaged news reporting in general in the process.
I do agree that the Dominion lawsuit would have had rougher going if it had been launched against one of the regular MSM outlets on the left. I also agree that news reporting has been damaged as a result of Fox’s settlement, but it was already so damaged that it barely matters.
However, I want to emphasize that the Fox lawsuit had certain unusual non-political characteristics that were operating to make Fox believe it was going to lose. The suit wasn’t just based on the fact that Fox had reported damaging information – that apparently turned out to be untrue – about Dominion. It was that internal memos and emails indicated that the news and/or opinion Fox employees airing that information on Fox knew or strongly believed at the time that it was false and did not reveal that.
Lawsuits of this sort, against news organization, must contain at least one of these two elements that would prove what’s known as actual malice: that the defendant knew that a statement was false, or was reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was true.
An equivalent case on the right would be if there was email or other evidence that news or opinion people on the networks that aired the views of the “Trump was in league with Russia” hoaxers knew that the story was false at the time they aired it. That’s where politics come in, though. The plaintiff or plaintiffs would have to choose their venues very very carefully, and I’m not sure they wouldn’t be limited to areas such as DC or NY that are reliably blue and would almost certainly rule against them. Dominion’s case (actually, cases plural, because others are pending) was filed in New York [correction: the settled case was filed in Delaware, another blue stronghold, but several other Dominion lawsuits are pending in New York, as described in the link].
That said, there is no question in my mind that the Dominion cases will have a chilling effect on the airing of any news that doesn’t meet with establishment and/or leftist approval and leaves the door open, even a crack, to such lawsuits. And that is, in part, how the Dominion case may have been one of the things that helped prompt the firing of Tucker Carlson. It’s not that he had much to do with the Dominion situation itself – he didn’t – but that he’s somewhat outside the box, and Fox can’t afford to have much more of that.
fox took a dive, there is plenty of evidence that shows Dominion had serious flaws over many years, that were not corrected to any one’s satisfaction, state run pbs ran a documentary the months before the election,
what becomes clear, is that rupert murdoch or those who run the corporation in their name, value the truth so little, ‘in a time of deceit, it has become a revolutionary act’
there were too many sacred cows set ablaze the fate of ftx, what really happened with epstein, the nature of ai, this suicidal slalom to world war 3, were on track for,
its just a bizarre system where actual criminality is buried in concert by the media, see hunter’s laptop, or epstein’s client list, fraudulent claims are admitted as govt exhibits the danchenko dossier, but opinions based on actual technical reports even those by whistleblowers are deemed out of bounds,
If Fox isn’t going to provide dissident perspectives, let it die. You certainly wouldn’t watch it for the production values.
I recall that both Chesterton and Orwell were worried about the use of defamation suits by companies to silence critical publications. In GKC’s case, it involved sticking up for his brother, though no doubt he would have said the same anyway. Of course, they were talking about British law, and long before Sullivan.
Neo, the case Fox settled was in Delaware state court, not New York.
I have also read talk that Murdoch and Son were not happy with the trend of Fox News, and settled to get rid of the issue, and used that as cover to clear out Carlson. Sounds possible.
Having read 5 books on the 2016 election, first being mainly on the electronic fraud part of it as well as overloading my tablet with the entire Pennsylvania precinct voting numbers I am sure there is plenty of facts to defend a position Dominion has been compromised.
But also of the opinion no one in the media for sure wants to open than can of worms because once it’s proven the election was a fraud the whole house collapses. The coursts proved that with not 1 taking a case.
plus riots there was a strong flavor of damocles sword, hanging over us, but we recall the hanging chad debate, and the diebold!! by the dems,
one recalls in 2000, the dems thought w might win the popular vote, so they had plans to challenge that, when the contest changed to electoral vote, they took that talk
djf:
Yes, thanks – fixed.
Robert Barnes thoughts (previously linked here on Off Topic thread), include the devastating fact that Don’t union last sokd for a mere $30 million.
What on earth justifies damages of most of a billion dollars in settlement?
What is son Lachlan Murdock paying such ridiculous danegelt?
Because it’s clearly a give-away? Previously, he donated some $1500 to Buttiejudd’s (phonetic sp) present drntial run.
But that wasn’t even peanuts compared to this King’s ransom!
Barnes also believed that not only were Newscorp’s lawyers incompetent advisors, so is their BofD. Expect shareholder lawsuits against the latter.
Skip avers “Having read 5 books on the 2016 election, first being mainly on the electronic fraud part of it as well as overloading my tablet with the entire Pennsylvania precinct voting numbers” are strong evidence of tabulation vote fraud.
Well, just mention 90% “voter turnout” in parts of Wisconsin, 100% in Detroit, And even 120% in some place in Pennsylvania, what else could one conclude?
These FNC owners threw money at The People’s enemies over the worst election in our history. But why?
IT’S FREAKING INSULTING TO US!
their value was 80 million so this was 10X net worth
The plaintiff or plaintiffs would have to choose their venues very very carefully, and I’m not sure they wouldn’t be limited to areas such as DC or NY that are reliably blue and would almost certainly rule against them.
If conservatives who were victimized by outlets like the New York Times just had to sue outlets like the New York Times in a reliably red jurisdiction to get a billion-dollar payout, the precedents would get re-examined in a big hurry, and it would be found that journalism has to be protected from that kind of liability.
A political party or movement that actually cared about changing things would get right on this.
Frederick:
I get the impression you think it’s merely a failure of will on the part of Republicans that they don’t sue in similar lawsuits brought in red states. But I’m not at all sure the NY Times could be sued in a red state. There are rules about choice of venue and I’m not especially familiar with them, but they exist. For example, the Dominion lawsuit was brought in Delaware, a very blue state. But the corporations involved are incorporated in Delaware:
Why are they all Delaware corporations, when they’re not based there? Delaware is very corporation-friendly:
Tucker was the class act at Fox.
Aside from “Special Report” week-nightly news, there’s nothing else left but tepid right-of-center chatter.
Two comments:
First, this is why running Trump is a monumentally awful idea. He sensed that something was wrong with 2020. (Good on him for that.) Lacking either understanding or proof, however, he latched on to the theory that Dominion changed the vote totals, among other nonsense theories. (Does anyone remember that the Dominion thing was ripped off from crazy Democrats 2004 with Diebold?) We now have a better idea of Democratic monkey business from 2020 (i.e., Zuck bucks, using intelligence agencies to spread misinformation, failure to follow election laws, etc.) Unfortunately, we also have the albatross of Trump’s crazy theories. That makes it much more difficult to make progress against what Democrats actually did because any efforts at reform are going to be tarred by association with Trump’s lies. They say, “that’s not a real problem, you’re just repeating Trump’s lies.”
Also, whether we like it or not, Trump’s braying gives oxygen to Biden’s whole schtick about “defending democracy.” If you actually try to reverse an election based on crackpot theories about votes being changed by secret servers in Germany, then yes, there is a good argument that democracy needs to be defended from you.
Second, there is certainly an assymmetry here in that the mainstream media repeated crazy lies about Trump and Russia for years immediately before the 2020 drama. Neo hits the nail on the head, though. The difference is actual malice. Fox went down because Dominion was able to obtain proof that network personnel knew that Sidney Powell, Rudy, and the like were peddling nonsense. Maybe that evidence exists with respect to Trump/Russia, but I actually doubt it. I think that many Democrats and mainstream media figures (but I repeat myself) really believed all that. Obama’s CIA director and DNI were telling them it was true, after all. Fox’s sin wasn’t reporting false information, it was reporting false information that it knew to be false.
actually no, there were reports about dominion flaws going all the way till october 2020, dominion was the card counter to elias’s stacked deck, when they rigged the game like with the ohio secretary of state, finding 600,000 votes for obama, then it’s democracy,
miguel cervantes – Fox had access to discovery with respect to Dominion on the specific issue of Trump’s theories about vote switching. Despite this, they decided to settle for three quarters of a billion dollars, something like 25% of the company’s total value. That’s not just “go away” money to settle a nuisance suit. Fox almost certainly paid that settlement because they feared that their actual liability was going to be bigger if they went to trial.
One potential wildcard here is how Fox valued the negative publicity of a trial. But even given that, it is very, very difficult to square the facts of this settlement with a scenario in which the allegations against Dominion are actually true.
they didn’t want to challenge them, as they were a party to the fraud in arizona and other places, you see how blatantly they are suppressing the truth to support this traitorous gang, that is burning our country down,
Also – If you want to see the mirror image of some of the crazier Trump theories on 2020, read Hitchens and Mother Jones on 2004. It’s the same mixture of conjecture and cherry-picked oddities. It more or less the same case.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/03/hitchens200503
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2005/11/recounting-ohio/
Dominion bragged about the ability of authorities to change vote totals remotely in its sales pitches years ago.
I don’t think there is anything we can possibly conclude about the actual facts re: Dominion’s machines based on Murdoch’s decision to fold. Having been involved in the settlement negotiations for hundreds of lawsuits there are just way, way too many other factors involved. And this case has a lot more of those than most.
Tucker Carlson called evil out in his speech over the weekend. He was right. I’ve made a similar point that we don’t have political arguments anymore. The Left is a religious cult obsessed with destruction.
We’ve seen serious doubts about touch-screen voting systems like Dominion for a long time. They are inherently impossible to audit. Paper ballots fed into optical scan counting machines are reliable; touch-screens are not. This means that, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, questions about results from Dominion systems were not outside the range of rational discussion, despite Democrat insistence to the contrary. Did Fox hosts “know” without possibility of error that these charges from Republicans were false? If news programs cannot air claims from political campaigns in the aftermath of contested elections, then all of the legacy news sites should be off the air following their behavior in 2000, 2004, and 2016.
@neo:I get the impression you think it’s merely a failure of will… There are rules about choice of venue and I’m not especially familiar with them, but they exist.
I wouldn’t say merely. But it doesn’t make sense to point at rules like the Left hasn’t stacked them in its favor. The Left had them changed or reinterpreted. What has been done can be done again.
If those rules systematically favor left-leaning entities, then a serious opposition party will change those rules in the states they control.
California, for example, doesn’t seem to have a “failure of will” for this sort of thing, nor does any other blue state that decided it was a “sanctuary” for illegal aliens, or sex change operations for children.
And if those rules don’t systematically favor left-leaning entities, then a serious opposition party will start bringing these suits.
I am agnostic as to whether it made sense for Fox to settle with Dominion; given the venue in Delaware, Fox would certainly lose at trial, but they may or may not have prevailed on appeal to SCOTUS on the constitutional issue. I just don’t know enough about the underlying issues with Dominion or about the basis for Fox’s reports to have an opinion on that.
However, it certainly made no sense, as a legal matter, for Fox to pay Dominion ten times (or however many times it was) the total value of Dominion as a business, lock, stock and barrel. A payment of the magnitude that Fox made bears no relation to any actual damage Dominion could plausibly claim to have suffered and puts Dominion in a much better position than it would have been in had Fox never reported on the claims.
The only explanation for this capitulation is that, as indicated by the firing of Carlson, Fox is repositioning itself as part of the MSM and leaving behind its part-time “populist” conservative (for lack of a better term) orientation. Perhaps it will still offer the kind of “conservative” outlook acceptable to the Bush/Cheney/Romney/McConnell crowd, if you think that sort of outlook qualifies as “conservative.”
Frederick:
Are you suggesting a change of the rules about venue? Those are overarching rules that go to the heart of law.
stan @ 9:06am
You would likely find episode 182 of Glenn Beck’s podcast interesting.
Jonathan Cahn
https://www.glennbeck.com/glenn-beck-podcast/
@neo:Are you suggesting a change of the rules about venue? Those are overarching rules that go to the heart of law.
If the rules are stacked so that people like us can be sued for whatever in friendly courts and always lose, and the people who do that to us can use those rules to bring lawsuits against them into friendly courts where they always win, then it seems it would be pretty important, for people like us, to willing to change those rules.
Certainly the Left has no shyness about making changes that go to the heart of law.
If those rules are not stacked against us, then people like us need to respond in kind, or we’ll be a banana republic all the sooner.
Here you say “The left is interested in power, and it intends to obtain it and change the rules so that it will never lose it and the shoe will never be on the other foot.” This is already happening. Getting to keep the rules as we’ve had them is not on the table: too many of the humans in charge of executing and enforcing those rules are already on the other side and are letting our enemies do as they will.
We need to fight back within the rules where we can, and change the rules where we can to make it easier to fight back, or lose. How much more stark do things need to be?
Frederick:
The rules are not “stacked” in order for that to happen. The rules are that lawsuits are brought where the cause of action arises, because that makes sense. Otherwise, 100% forum-shopping is the name of the game.
There would be no basis for reversing the rules except partisanship, and I don’t think the justices on the right at SCOTUS would support that. One of the handicaps of the right in the power struggle is that it still believes in the rule of law and not just in whatever results in a win for the right. You’re saying essentially that the right should bring a gun to a gunfight, and not care about principles but only about power. That’s the old question the right continually faces: how much principle to compromise in order to win? I wrote about the issue in another post recently.
@neo:That’s the old question the right continually faces: how much principle to compromise in order to win?
Yes, it is. In 1776 and 1861 the answer was to compromise a lot, as the legal structures in place then were not sufficient to settle the issues of who had what power and got to use it. I’d like to find a solution before it comes to anything like those “compromises” again.
I think the only answer that avoids that is a willingness to retreat to our centers of power and strengthen them, and establish a new equilibrium where either the playing field is level again because both sides use the same tactics, or where the Left learns its lesson about opening cans of worms and retreats back to using rules the way they were intended.
But this circumstance where one side gets whatever it wants by breaking rules and the other doesn’t respond in kind, simply can’t go on much longer. It ends in banana republic, or war, or 1984.
Frederick:
The left isn’t breaking the rules here by choosing legal venues that happen to favor it. Nor is it breaking the rules by inconsistent enforcement of certain laws. It is, however, breaking the conventions that have held the whole edifice together.
The right doesn’t do the same for different reasons at different times. Sometimes it’s principle, and sometimes it’s that they don’t have enough activist lawyers and/or that they don’t have the opportunity (for example, many corporations are incorporated in Delaware, which is a blue state and therefore the court system there favors the left).
The question of what tools to use in this fight, and how much to stretch or even break the rules, is a very serious one that I’ve pondered long and hard.
You write:
But it is my contention that when both sides break the rules, you get those same results. That’s the basic problem.
Neo: … many corporations are incorporated in Delaware, which is a blue state and therefore the court system there favors the left).
In that case, does the cost benefit of incorporating in Delaware compensate for being (more likely or potentially) exposed to a Left leaning judicial environment? Does it cost $787+M to incorporate somewhere else?
But as Stan mentions, there are many factors in deciding to settle, so maybe this aspect is very small potatoes.
But it is my contention that when both sides break the rules, you get those same results.
You get a new equilibrium where there is either a level playing field again and new norms get established, or the side that broke the norms renounces doing so and the norms get restored.
Too many historical examples to mention. It can’t happen until the norm-breaking side is made to feel the consequence of the lost norm.
You can’t shame someone out of doing something they don’t think is wrong especially when they derive great advantage from it. It has to be made costly.
Frederick:
Those “new norms” are often either tyranny, or the back-and-forth corruption of a banana republic.
@neo:Those “new norms” are often either tyranny, or the back-and-forth corruption of a banana republic
So if the Right unilaterally renounces the Left’s tactics, then we still end up in those places–which is what I’ve been saying, and even using those very words–so I’m really not seeing what the issue is.
Suppose the Right sticks to norms and the Left continues not to, how do you see it working out? What factor is able to intervene to reverse what’s been happening? What cavalry do we see coming if we stay pure, that won’t come if we sully our hands?
the new norms are a regime like orbans which the left denounces because they don’t get their way
Interesting exchange between Neo and Frederick on the “What is to be done?” and “How far should we go?” questions. It reminds me of a similar exchange I had with Neo at the beginning of this year, under her “A new Church Committee?” post from December 30, 2022. For those who might be interested, here’s the exchange:
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/30/a-new-church-committee/#comment-2659827
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/30/a-new-church-committee/#comment-2659829
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/30/a-new-church-committee/#comment-2659834
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/12/30/a-new-church-committee/#comment-2659838
My views haven’t changed. I think we should adopt the same tactics the Left uses–chiefly lawfare and nullification of federal laws we don’t like–at the state level and start giving them a taste of their own medicine. As for Neo’s warning about turning into what you’re fighting: in WWII, we–the Allies–carpet-bombed enemy cities and killed approximately 600,000 civilians (Turtler will correct me if that number is off). WWII combat veteran Paul Fussell wrote somewhere that we won the war because, in the end, we were better at mass murder than our enemies. More recently, I think it was Curtis Yarvin who said that we won in part because we “melted the faces off Japanese schoolgirls”. Ugly, but accurate. My father participated in that work, along with hundreds of thousands of other men who washed their hands after the war and did their best to resume their non-military civilian lives. Did we turn into the Nazis or the Japanese? No. Did the United States turn into a 1984-style tyranny or a totalitarian hellhole? No (although I think we need to re-visit the National Security Act of 1947–and rescind the Patriot Act of 2001). We won the war using very ugly methods, and it’s a damn good thing we did, because we were better than our enemies. Better in every respect. Until we adopt a similar mindset on the domestic front, we will continue to lose ground. (Caveat: of course we had much better people in charge then. And a very different demographic profile as a country. Neo may be right about how things would play out in the U.S. in 2023 if our side starts violating norms the way the Left does. In that case, we had better follow Tucker Carlson’s advice and start praying.)
@hubert: I think it was Curtis Yarvin who said that we won in part because we “melted the faces off Japanese schoolgirls”. Ugly, but accurate.
WWII was heavily whitewashed from the very beginning, and maybe it’s created the illusion that the good guys should be able to win without using any of the tactics of the bad guys.
I first thought of that back in 2002-ish when Bill Maher was saying, in the course of criticizing the War on Terror, that we won WWII without torturing anyone, which is simply not true. It was comparatively rare on the US and UK side of the Allies, but still went on. You can’t talk about any of it without getting flak from tailgunners, though.
But reality doesn’t choose sides. Things happened, or didn’t, regardless of who the good guys were.
Hubert:
I’m not against using lawfare at the state level. My point is that it is much more difficult to do so for the right, for two reasons. The first is that logistics (like corporations using Delaware, a blue state) favors the left. The second is that conservative judges are more inclined to not stretch the law, so a case has to be solid – whereas leftist judges are more inclined to find penumbras and the like to get the result they want.
I am not in favor of doing away with law itself or changing its protections in very fundamental ways, however. In this, I’m with More in this passage.
Frederick:
I’ve discussed this at length before. I’m not for the right keeping to politeness or comity, but I think it’s a question of where to draw the line in fighting harder and more dirty. See my above comment, to Hubert.
I think if the right calibrates things more effectively it still can counter the left. But I don’t pretend it’s easy or any sort of sure thing. I’m very worried that it won’t be possible, no matter what. But “cutting down a great road in the law to get after the Devil” makes a movement into the thing it is fighting against. That is the trap of all movements, and the right is not immune.