The FOX/Dominion lawsuit is providing some interesting reports in discovery, which contradict their on-air positions; they knew they were lying, but they also knew what their viewers wanted to hear.

It turns out that you can smear individuals and vaguely-specified groups all day long but if you tell a big enough lie about a business, they sue you.

The only problem of course is the amount at play: barely more than one billion dollars as damage for Dominion, when the only thing that will teach Ruppert his lesson is to set a multiplier of about one hundred and make this the punitive damage amount for the American people.

Here's waiting for the supreme court to step in and adjust.

Well, the court gets to determine it, and "courts: the last bastion of truth" doesn't sound so unreasonable.

But, yes, this is why democratic pluralism is so important; you can't fight a big bully all by yourself, and sometimes it's better to get some medium-sized slightly less bullying third parties as allies against them.

(See also Ron DeSantis vs Disney)

Sadly, it seems pretty unreasonable once you're made aware of some of the rulings that have come out of courts.

If you would rather be amused than angered, you could limit yourself to court cases involving tax and tariff law, e.g.,

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden, which rules Tomatoes are vegetables rather than fruit * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz,_Inc._v._United_States, which ruled that the X-Men and Fantastic Four are nonhuman creatures so their action figures can be taxed as toys rather than dolls.

I particularly relish the irony of the second ruling, given a major theme behind the X-Men is a struggle to be treated like humans in a society determined to other them as mutants.

I mean, if you wanted to go about usurping the enforcement of truth by eliminating actual bastions of truth, and you succeeded, then of course, in your success, everyone will think you're the last bastion of enforcing truth. After all, you, who are the last bastion of truth, are saying you are, so that proves it.

Which is why bastions of enforcing truth are just a really bad idea. If you want truth to flourish, you can't silo responsibility for it away in some benevolent elite. Critical thinking, media literacy, awareness of rhetoric, and the intersection of all of that with accounts of history have to be bog standard skills in the population.

It's unfortunate that most Americans are opposed to teaching those things. They don't like it when kids come home asking questions like "Why doesn't the Declaration of Independence say all men and women are created equal?" or "After a corpus callosotomy, is there still one soul in the body, or two, or two half-souls?" or "Why can't three people be married?" or "Why aren't you answering my questions?". Parents don't want their kids growing up to be free. They want them growing up to be copies of their parents.

Oh god we're all f*cked

"The people that disagree with me are stupid and easily manipulated, not smart like me."

And any situation where people disagree with me is due to dark and malevolent forces.

This kind of offhand dismissal sometimes makes sense, but sometimes there are actually dark and malevolent forces at work. Which is true this time?

I dunno but alot of things could be described in this way, not just the stuff that sits outside left-wing orthodoxy.

For example, opening a border to illegal migrants in record-breaking numbers, to ultimately sway the voter demographics in your favour, is an incredible betrayal of democracy. Not to mention at the cost of 300 fentanyl deaths a day. These things could be described as dark and malevolent too.

The border is not open? The huge fence is still there? Illegal immigrants can't vote, can they?

What are you talking about?

They ain't illegal once the border is open buddy.

By getting so many more roads built in the desert at the southern border of the USA to ferry stuff for building a little bit of wall, the president that's most helped illegal immigration is Donald Trump. He's also helped trucking drugs around, but this is less surprising considering the way that man is.

I had no idea that you "don't think it's for demographics in their favor". This completely discredits the idea that politicians might consider the electoral impact of decisions they make (or intentionally dont make). And you've used a buzzword like "dog-whistley" which makes your argument twice as powerful.

The Libertarian Party has never seemed too particularly concerned with favorable demographics.

I very infrequently watch the news. it is obvious to me that major news outlets, at least in the US where I am familar, are definitely attempting to push political agendas and shape public opinion and manufacture consent.

However, Fox news is consistenly the only news source that I see which is explicitly trying to fearmonger, to use identity politics to pit people against each other, and is the only news source that allows airing people that advocate for the reduction or freedoms and rights of certain classes of people.

I can count on the rest of the news sources to be vaguely pro-police, pro-capital, pro-land-owner, pro-status-quo. There are negatives to having news be so favoring to the ruling elite. But on the topics of who gets to live with decency in the US, at least the other major news outlets agree that the answer is 'anyone with money'. The American dream. On fox news though there are 1000 ways to be the wrong kind of person who needs to be shamed and harmed and removed from society.

500%. Keeping people glued to the tube, sensationalism, is uncomfortably high many places.

But you're dead on right, there is nothing remotely close in equivalency. To the people Vs people hating & lies of one side of the media. There's coverage of issues & actions on one hand, & coverage about how fallen & bad everyone on the other side is from the not so honorable opposition.

Tucker Carlson's rebirth as a dark soul, after being shamed by John Stewart, is one of those dark bitter tales of humanity where someone, faced with crisis, tripled down on every bad aspect. There's a certain White House Correspondence Dinner that begat another shameless fall towards power, also of note.

I can imagine media products "lie" (by omission, by implicit bias, or even blatantly) but will need some references to reorient to the idea the scale is the same.

My prior is still heavily tilted by the lead up to the Iraq war -- and think the time since has only seen a further embrace of "tell the audience what they want to hear over evidence" (see "top talent" texts re. dominion suit)

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-republicans-wmds... > 52 percent [fox viewers] say that they believe it to be “definitely true” or “probably true” that American forces found an active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq. > Overall, 42 percent still believe that troops discovered WMDs, a misleading factor in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

FWIW the iraq war is on my mind after reading https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/iraq-war-u.... Bad war, bad reasoning, terrible consequences, but maybe Iraq could be worse today.

One could argue that the lies aren't as egregious, since CNN, MSNBC etc etc aren't getting sued over it?

One could also argue that the courts and/or government are tilted in favor of one false narrative over the other, and thus refuse to investigate or hear arguments against their chosen channels.

I'm not arguing that this is or is not true, but the argument you're making here is not philosophically different from "if they were bad people then bad things would happen to them; since bad things aren't happening to them they must not be bad people". The reality is that bad people escape punishment all the time, especially when their bad actions benefit the people who should be responsible for punishing them.

Your dismissal of it assumes those lies can't be worse though, which they certainly can and whether or not they are is kind of what the lawsuit is about.

It also implies that fox new's lies don't suit a political party or ruling class interests when they certainly do.

What a fallen awful disgraceful argument. What lies do you think anywhere remotely match the vile soul-splitting known-falsehoods Fox spun for the ratings? Say one thing, say anything. You got nothing. Screw this pandering excusism. There's nothing like the aggressive at-an-cost lie-machine of instigation going on anywhere but in the vulnerable, sad, hurting Fox neo-world that these monsters have fictated into being with their absurd woe-begotten misery trail of falsehoods. There is no equivalency what-so-ever. This has been long dwelling cancer in the psyche of America & it's utterly unshocking there's some records of these monsters being savage demons, the only surprise is it took so long to come to real light in such undeniable obviousness.

Statistics please.

I agree with the conclusion but Thom Hartmann is a regular contributor for Common Dreams. This article isn't particularly enlightening or interesting. I'm struggling to see what makes it worth posting here. It kind of feels like Reddit content.