media matters

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Farfromgeneva
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Re: media matters

Post by Farfromgeneva »

Aside from the top spot, Navarro is the one I want gone so so so very much.
Same sword they knight you they gon' good night you with
Thats' only half if they like you
That ain't even the half what they might do
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See Jesus, Judas; Caesar, Brutus
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kramerica.inc
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Re: media matters

Post by kramerica.inc »

Chuck Todd tired of listening to answers after asking a question:

https://twitter.com/BrentHBaker/status/ ... 05156?s=20
Farfromgeneva
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Re: media matters

Post by Farfromgeneva »

kramerica.inc wrote: Wed Jan 06, 2021 1:26 pm Chuck Todd tired of listening to answers after asking a question:

https://twitter.com/BrentHBaker/status/ ... 05156?s=20
If I were a journalist I wouldn’t let some liar use my platform to amplify absolute untruths repeatedly without pushing back or challenging.

Now is Chuck Todd a weirdo tool? Of course. Does he have the worst hair since trump? Absolutely. But Ron Johnson needs to stfu.
Same sword they knight you they gon' good night you with
Thats' only half if they like you
That ain't even the half what they might do
Don't believe me, ask Michael
See Martin, Malcolm
See Jesus, Judas; Caesar, Brutus
See success is like suicide
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dislaxxic
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Re: media matters

Post by dislaxxic »

Videos show prominent Trump supporters in Capitol riot — but his Fox News fans blame “antifa"

"Some of President Trump's supporters have tried to blame Wednesday's mob assault on the U.S. Capitol on left-wing "antifa" protesters — even though numerous prominent Trump fans posed for photos during the riot and bragged about their involvement after publicly planning the assault for weeks.

Many of these claims are based on a Washington Times report that cited facial recognition company XRVision, claiming it had "matched" two purported antifa members to "men inside the Senate." The company issued a statement calling the report a lie and clarifying that it had actually matched the photos to two members of a neo-Nazi organization and a QAnon supporter. The statement confirmed what was already obvious from countless photos, videos and live-streams posted by the rioters themselves while waving Trump flags and wearing MAGA gear."


..
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Kismet
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Re: media matters

Post by Kismet »

Read the story about Neil Sheehan, NYT reporter who famously broke the Pentagon Papers story back in 1971.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/p ... eehan.html

This account was to be published only after his death which was yesterday. It is an incredible story of a journalist's unflinching goal to get the truth out to the public. Not everything he did was above board but he managed to rationalize his actions with his desire that the public know the truth about what their government had done over a long period of time to deceive them. The last four paragraphs says it all

"In the interview in 2015, Mr. Sheehan said he had never revealed Mr. Ellsberg’s identity while the project was underway. To his editors he always spoke only of “the sources.” It was another journalist, outside the paper, who blew Mr. Ellsberg’s cover not long after the Pentagon Papers story broke.

Nor did Mr. Sheehan ever speak about how he had obtained the papers. In 2015, he said he had never wanted to contradict Mr. Ellsberg’s account or embarrass him by describing Mr. Ellsberg’s behavior and state of mind at the time.

There was no contact between the two men for six months. Shortly before Christmas 1971, Mr. Sheehan said, they ran into each other in Manhattan. In a brief conversation, he said, he told Mr. Ellsberg what he had done.

“So you stole it, like I did,” he recalled Mr. Ellsberg saying.

“No, Dan, I didn’t steal it,” Mr. Sheehan said he had answered. “And neither did you. Those papers are the property of the people of the United States. They paid for them with their national treasure and the blood of their sons, and they have a right to it.’”"

Sheehan also was a war correspondent in Vietnam for the Times (he was a frequent contributor to the recent Ken Burns PBS Documentary The Vietnam War.)
seacoaster
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Re: media matters

Post by seacoaster »

No surprise here, but it can certainly bear some responsibility for the current problems:

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/2 ... -800-times
seacoaster
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Re: media matters

Post by seacoaster »

Dominion update:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/20 ... ement.html

"We received a lengthy letter from Dominion's defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement:

American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively “Dominion”) of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion’s supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion’s machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted fraudulently.

These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims.

It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.
"
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Kismet
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Re: media matters

Post by Kismet »

seacoaster wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:21 pm Dominion update:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/20 ... ement.html

"We received a lengthy letter from Dominion's defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement:

American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively “Dominion”) of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion’s supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion’s machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted fraudulently.

These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims.

It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.
"
So if we say we're really sorry....you won't sue us for every dime we have???? :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
Reminds of that line from Goodfellas - "Eff You. Pay me!"
Typical Lax Dad
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Re: media matters

Post by Typical Lax Dad »

Kismet wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 1:13 pm
seacoaster wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:21 pm Dominion update:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/20 ... ement.html

"We received a lengthy letter from Dominion's defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement:

American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively “Dominion”) of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion’s supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion’s machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted fraudulently.

These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims.

It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.
"
So if we say we're really sorry....you won't sue us for every dime we have???? :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
Reminds of that line from Goodfellas - "Eff You. Pay me!"
Take them to the cleaners!
“You lucky I ain’t read wretched yet!”
Farfromgeneva
Posts: 22325
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Re: media matters

Post by Farfromgeneva »

Kismet wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 1:13 pm
seacoaster wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:21 pm Dominion update:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/20 ... ement.html

"We received a lengthy letter from Dominion's defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement:

American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively “Dominion”) of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion’s supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion’s machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted fraudulently.

These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims.

It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.
"
So if we say we're really sorry....you won't sue us for every dime we have???? :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
Reminds of that line from Goodfellas - "Eff You. Pay me!"
Few important distinctions that are differences:
1. They are behaving perfectly acceptably by the law/legal framework. Pesci was not.
2. As a fiduciary (C suite/board of a company), it’s hard to argue against taking legitimate action and getting capital for the business. There can be some qualitative considerations powerful enough to override the benefit of taking free money, but very infrequently and I don see it here.
3. There’s a corporate reputation that some people have invested in while building franchise value. Even if the accuser(s) are a bunch of dishonest, mouth breathing acolytes and crushed super fast in court it still makes sense to take the position of always defending oneself from the defensible.

I think the civil legal system is abused horribly mostly. Hey this is an area where out of court settlement should not occur imo.
Same sword they knight you they gon' good night you with
Thats' only half if they like you
That ain't even the half what they might do
Don't believe me, ask Michael
See Martin, Malcolm
See Jesus, Judas; Caesar, Brutus
See success is like suicide
Farfromgeneva
Posts: 22325
Joined: Sat Feb 23, 2019 10:53 am

Re: media matters

Post by Farfromgeneva »

Kismet wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 1:13 pm
seacoaster wrote: Fri Jan 15, 2021 12:21 pm Dominion update:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/20 ... ement.html

"We received a lengthy letter from Dominion's defamation lawyers explaining why they believe that their client has been the victim of defamatory statements. Having considered the full import of the letter, we have agreed to their request that we publish the following statement:

American Thinker and contributors Andrea Widburg, R.D. Wedge, Brian Tomlinson, and Peggy Ryan have published pieces on www.AmericanThinker.com that falsely accuse US Dominion Inc., Dominion Voting Systems, Inc., and Dominion Voting Systems Corporation (collectively “Dominion”) of conspiring to steal the November 2020 election from Donald Trump. These pieces rely on discredited sources who have peddled debunked theories about Dominion’s supposed ties to Venezuela, fraud on Dominion’s machines that resulted in massive vote switching or weighted votes, and other claims falsely stating that there is credible evidence that Dominion acted fraudulently.

These statements are completely false and have no basis in fact. Industry experts and public officials alike have confirmed that Dominion conducted itself appropriately and that there is simply no evidence to support these claims.

It was wrong for us to publish these false statements. We apologize to Dominion for all of the harm this caused them and their employees. We also apologize to our readers for abandoning 9 journalistic principles and misrepresenting Dominion’s track record and its limited role in tabulating votes for the November 2020 election. We regret this grave error.
"
So if we say we're really sorry....you won't sue us for every dime we have???? :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
Reminds of that line from Goodfellas - "Eff You. Pay me!"
Few important distinctions that are differences:
1. They are behaving perfectly acceptably by the law/legal framework. Pesci was not.
2. As a fiduciary (C suite/board of a company), it’s hard to argue against taking legitimate action and getting capital for the business. There can be some qualitative considerations powerful enough to override the benefit of taking free money, but very infrequently and I don see it here.
3. There’s a corporate reputation that some people have invested in while building franchise value. Even if the accuser(s) are a bunch of dishonest, mouth breathing acolytes and crushed super fast in court it still makes sense to take the position of always defending oneself from the defensible.

I think the civil legal system is abused horribly mostly. Hey this is an area where out of court settlement should not occur imo.
Same sword they knight you they gon' good night you with
Thats' only half if they like you
That ain't even the half what they might do
Don't believe me, ask Michael
See Martin, Malcolm
See Jesus, Judas; Caesar, Brutus
See success is like suicide
seacoaster
Posts: 8866
Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2018 4:36 pm

Re: media matters

Post by seacoaster »

Interesting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/busi ... e=Homepage

"On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.)

Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family came just before its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, were set to be questioned under oath in the case, a potentially embarrassing moment. And Fox paid so much that the network didn’t have to apologize for the May 2017 story on FoxNews.com.

But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.

Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?

Fox News and its lawyer, Joe Terry, declined to answer that question when I asked last week. And two people close to the case, who shared details of the settlement with me, were puzzled by that provision, too.

The unusual arrangement underscores how deeply entwined Fox has become in the Trump camp’s disinformation efforts and the dangerous paranoia they set off, culminating in the fatal attack on the Capitol 11 days ago. The network parroted lies from Trump and his more sinister allies for years, ultimately amplifying the president’s enormous deceptions about the election’s outcome, further radicalizing many of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

The man arrested after rampaging through the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs had proudly posted to Facebook a photograph with his shotgun and Fox Business on a giant screen in the background. The woman fatally shot as she pushed her way inside the House chamber had engaged Fox contributors dozens of times on Twitter, NPR reported.

High profile Fox voices, with occasional exceptions, not only fed the baseless belief that the election had been stolen, but they helped frame Jan. 6 as a decisive day of reckoning, when their audience’s dreams of overturning the election could be realized. And the network’s role in fueling pro-Trump extremism is nothing new: Fox has long been the favorite channel of pro-Trump militants. The man who mailed pipe bombs to CNN in 2018 watched Fox News “religiously,” according to his lawyers’ sentencing memorandum, and believed Mr. Hannity’s claim that Democrats were “encouraging mob violence” against people like him.

And yet, as we in the media reckon with our role in the present catastrophe, Fox often gets left out of the story. You can see why. Dog bites man is never news. Fox’s vitriol and distortions are simply viewed as part of the landscape now. The cable channel has been a Republican propaganda outlet for decades, and under President Trump’s thumb for years. So while the mainstream media loves to beat itself up — it’s a way, sometimes, of inflating our own importance — we have mostly sought less obvious angles in this winter’s self-examination. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan concluded last week that the mainstream press is “flawed and stuck for too long in outdated conventions,” but “has managed to do its job.” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said the media had “failed” by normalizing Trump.

I took my turn last week, writing about how a man I worked with at BuzzFeed played a role in the insurrection. One thoughtful reader, a former engineer at Corning, wrote to me to say she’d been reckoning with a similar sense of complicity. The engineer was on the team that developed the thin, bright glass that made possible the ubiquitous flat screen televisions that rewired politics and our minds. She’s now asking herself whether “this glass made it happen.”

When I shared the engineer’s email with some others at the Times, one, Virginia Hughes, a Science editor and longtime colleague, responded: “Everyone wants to blame themselves except the people who actually deserve blame.”

And so let me take a break from beating up well-intentioned journalists and even the social media platforms that greedily threw open Pandora’s box for profit.

There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.

These are the people ultimately responsible for helping to ensure that one particular and pernicious lie about a 27-year-old man’s death circulated for years. The elder Mr. Murdoch has long led Fox, to the extent anyone actually leads it, through a kind of malign negligence, and letting that lie persist seems just his final, lavish gift to Mr. Trump.

The company paid handsomely for it, according to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, who first reported on the settlement and has covered the case extensively.

The Murdoch organization didn’t originate the lie, but it embraced it, and it served an obvious political purpose: deflecting suspicions of Russian involvement in helping the Trump campaign. That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.

The story of Fox’s impact on the fracturing of American society and the notion of truth is too big to capture in a single column. But the story of its impact on one family is singular and devastating. Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron, reflected on it Friday from his home in Denver, where he’s a software engineer. Seth was his little brother, seven years younger and two inches shorter, but more at ease with people, more popular, better at soccer in high school.

Seth Rich was murdered in the early morning of Sunday, July 10, 2016, on a sidewalk in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Aaron was still wrestling with the shock, reeling from the worst week of his life, when a friend told him that something was happening on Reddit. A news story had mentioned that Seth was a staff member at the Democratic National Committee. While some of the top comments were simply condolences, the lower part of the page was full of unfounded speculation that the young D.N.C. employee — not the Russians — had been WikiLeaks’ source of the hacked emails. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks encouraged the speculation, but it remained low-level chatter about confusing theories for about 10 months. That’s when Fox claimed that an anonymous federal investigator had linked Seth Rich to the leak.

The story took off. It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”

The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”

“It fell apart within the general public within 24 hours,’’ Aaron Rich recalled, yet “Hannity pushed it for another week.” Finally, Aaron Rich said, he sent Mr. Hannity and his producer an email, and the barrage stopped, but he said he never received an apology from the Fox host.

“He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”

A Fox News spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Mr. Rich’s request for an apology.

Fox also pulled the story down a week after it was published, with an opaque statement that “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”

The damage had been done. The story is still in wide circulation on the right, to the point where Mr. Rich was reluctant to share a photograph of himself and his brother for this story with The New York Times. Every time he has done that, he said, the photo — of the brothers at Aaron’s wedding, for instance — has been reused and tainted by conspiracy theorists.

Aaron Rich, who with his brother grew up in Nebraska, said he hadn’t thought much about who beyond Fox’s talent was responsible for the lies about his brother. When I asked him about Rupert Murdoch, he wasn’t sure who he was — “I’m really bad at trivia things.” That’s the genius of the Murdochs’ management of the place: They collect the cash while evading responsibility and letting their hosts work primarily for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Rich isn’t party to the settlement with his parents, and he declined to discuss its details. His parents said in a court filing that the barrage of conspiracy theories had damaged their mental health and cost his mother, Mary, her ability to work and to socialize.

But he said he simply doesn’t understand why Fox couldn’t simply apologize for its damaging lie — not in May of 2017, not when it reached the settlement in October, and not when it finally made the settlement public after the election and wished his family “some measure of peace.”

It reminds me of a well-known political figure now leaving the stage, one who has been strikingly allergic to apologizing, expressing any empathy or engaging in any soul searching about his role in mobilizing the ugliest of American impulses.

“I was glad they stopped doing it,” Seth Rich’s brother said, a bit hopelessly. “But they never admitted they lit the fire
.”
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Matnum PI
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Re: media matters

Post by Matnum PI »

Don Moynihan@donmoyn
17 hours ago
Fox paid enough money to Seth Rich's family to avoid disclosing any wrongdoing before the election.
Which is the sort of thing you do when you are in the business of peddling conspiracy theories to influence elections. nytimes.com/2021/01/17/bus…
Caddy Day
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CU88
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Re: media matters

Post by CU88 »

seacoaster wrote: Mon Jan 18, 2021 11:47 am Interesting:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/busi ... e=Homepage

"On Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.)

Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family came just before its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, were set to be questioned under oath in the case, a potentially embarrassing moment. And Fox paid so much that the network didn’t have to apologize for the May 2017 story on FoxNews.com.

But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.

Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?

Fox News and its lawyer, Joe Terry, declined to answer that question when I asked last week. And two people close to the case, who shared details of the settlement with me, were puzzled by that provision, too.

The unusual arrangement underscores how deeply entwined Fox has become in the Trump camp’s disinformation efforts and the dangerous paranoia they set off, culminating in the fatal attack on the Capitol 11 days ago. The network parroted lies from Trump and his more sinister allies for years, ultimately amplifying the president’s enormous deceptions about the election’s outcome, further radicalizing many of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

The man arrested after rampaging through the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs had proudly posted to Facebook a photograph with his shotgun and Fox Business on a giant screen in the background. The woman fatally shot as she pushed her way inside the House chamber had engaged Fox contributors dozens of times on Twitter, NPR reported.

High profile Fox voices, with occasional exceptions, not only fed the baseless belief that the election had been stolen, but they helped frame Jan. 6 as a decisive day of reckoning, when their audience’s dreams of overturning the election could be realized. And the network’s role in fueling pro-Trump extremism is nothing new: Fox has long been the favorite channel of pro-Trump militants. The man who mailed pipe bombs to CNN in 2018 watched Fox News “religiously,” according to his lawyers’ sentencing memorandum, and believed Mr. Hannity’s claim that Democrats were “encouraging mob violence” against people like him.

And yet, as we in the media reckon with our role in the present catastrophe, Fox often gets left out of the story. You can see why. Dog bites man is never news. Fox’s vitriol and distortions are simply viewed as part of the landscape now. The cable channel has been a Republican propaganda outlet for decades, and under President Trump’s thumb for years. So while the mainstream media loves to beat itself up — it’s a way, sometimes, of inflating our own importance — we have mostly sought less obvious angles in this winter’s self-examination. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan concluded last week that the mainstream press is “flawed and stuck for too long in outdated conventions,” but “has managed to do its job.” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said the media had “failed” by normalizing Trump.

I took my turn last week, writing about how a man I worked with at BuzzFeed played a role in the insurrection. One thoughtful reader, a former engineer at Corning, wrote to me to say she’d been reckoning with a similar sense of complicity. The engineer was on the team that developed the thin, bright glass that made possible the ubiquitous flat screen televisions that rewired politics and our minds. She’s now asking herself whether “this glass made it happen.”

When I shared the engineer’s email with some others at the Times, one, Virginia Hughes, a Science editor and longtime colleague, responded: “Everyone wants to blame themselves except the people who actually deserve blame.”

And so let me take a break from beating up well-intentioned journalists and even the social media platforms that greedily threw open Pandora’s box for profit.

There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.

These are the people ultimately responsible for helping to ensure that one particular and pernicious lie about a 27-year-old man’s death circulated for years. The elder Mr. Murdoch has long led Fox, to the extent anyone actually leads it, through a kind of malign negligence, and letting that lie persist seems just his final, lavish gift to Mr. Trump.

The company paid handsomely for it, according to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, who first reported on the settlement and has covered the case extensively.

The Murdoch organization didn’t originate the lie, but it embraced it, and it served an obvious political purpose: deflecting suspicions of Russian involvement in helping the Trump campaign. That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.

The story of Fox’s impact on the fracturing of American society and the notion of truth is too big to capture in a single column. But the story of its impact on one family is singular and devastating. Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron, reflected on it Friday from his home in Denver, where he’s a software engineer. Seth was his little brother, seven years younger and two inches shorter, but more at ease with people, more popular, better at soccer in high school.

Seth Rich was murdered in the early morning of Sunday, July 10, 2016, on a sidewalk in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Aaron was still wrestling with the shock, reeling from the worst week of his life, when a friend told him that something was happening on Reddit. A news story had mentioned that Seth was a staff member at the Democratic National Committee. While some of the top comments were simply condolences, the lower part of the page was full of unfounded speculation that the young D.N.C. employee — not the Russians — had been WikiLeaks’ source of the hacked emails. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks encouraged the speculation, but it remained low-level chatter about confusing theories for about 10 months. That’s when Fox claimed that an anonymous federal investigator had linked Seth Rich to the leak.

The story took off. It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”

The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”

“It fell apart within the general public within 24 hours,’’ Aaron Rich recalled, yet “Hannity pushed it for another week.” Finally, Aaron Rich said, he sent Mr. Hannity and his producer an email, and the barrage stopped, but he said he never received an apology from the Fox host.

“He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”

A Fox News spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Mr. Rich’s request for an apology.

Fox also pulled the story down a week after it was published, with an opaque statement that “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”

The damage had been done. The story is still in wide circulation on the right, to the point where Mr. Rich was reluctant to share a photograph of himself and his brother for this story with The New York Times. Every time he has done that, he said, the photo — of the brothers at Aaron’s wedding, for instance — has been reused and tainted by conspiracy theorists.

Aaron Rich, who with his brother grew up in Nebraska, said he hadn’t thought much about who beyond Fox’s talent was responsible for the lies about his brother. When I asked him about Rupert Murdoch, he wasn’t sure who he was — “I’m really bad at trivia things.” That’s the genius of the Murdochs’ management of the place: They collect the cash while evading responsibility and letting their hosts work primarily for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Rich isn’t party to the settlement with his parents, and he declined to discuss its details. His parents said in a court filing that the barrage of conspiracy theories had damaged their mental health and cost his mother, Mary, her ability to work and to socialize.

But he said he simply doesn’t understand why Fox couldn’t simply apologize for its damaging lie — not in May of 2017, not when it reached the settlement in October, and not when it finally made the settlement public after the election and wished his family “some measure of peace.”

It reminds me of a well-known political figure now leaving the stage, one who has been strikingly allergic to apologizing, expressing any empathy or engaging in any soul searching about his role in mobilizing the ugliest of American impulses.

“I was glad they stopped doing it,” Seth Rich’s brother said, a bit hopelessly. “But they never admitted they lit the fire
.”
Stunning, but not surprising. The Faux News viewers here will say, "So what?"
by cradleandshoot » Fri Aug 13, 2021 8:57 am
Mr moderator, deactivate my account.
You have heck this forum up to making it nothing more than a joke. I hope you are happy.
This is cradle and shoot signing out.
:roll: :roll: :roll:
calourie
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Re: media matters

Post by calourie »

Looks like Fox is going full bore Newsmax, OneAmerica Network route, reportedly aiming to put Maria Bartiromo (who is promoting idea that the Capitol storming was perpetrated by Trump garbed Biden supporters) and Greg Gupfeld who is simply an unapologetic all things right wing jerk in prime time slots, moving a couple of their more moderate reporters to less viewed midday slots and firing Chris Stirewalt for not backing down from the network's early projection of Biden winning Arizona as well as a couple of other firings. Good luck in having an truth informed Republican opposition, or perhaps they are just putting all their eggs into Trump's new "Patriot Party" basket, at least until he gets impeached and/or incarcerted.
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old salt
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Re: media matters

Post by old salt »

calourie wrote: Wed Jan 20, 2021 2:39 pm Looks like Fox is going full bore Newsmax, OneAmerica Network route, reportedly aiming to put Maria Bartiromo (who is promoting idea that the Capitol storming was perpetrated by Trump garbed Biden supporters) and Greg Gupfeld who is simply an unapologetic all things right wing jerk in prime time slots, moving a couple of their more moderate reporters to less viewed midday slots and firing Chris Stirewalt for not backing down from the network's early projection of Biden winning Arizona as well as a couple of other firings. Good luck in having an truth informed Republican opposition, or perhaps they are just putting all their eggs into Trump's new "Patriot Party" basket, at least until he gets impeached and/or incarcerted.
At least Lou Dobbs apparently isn't going prime time FNC too ?
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old salt
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Re: media matters

Post by old salt »

old salt wrote: Wed Jan 20, 2021 3:46 pm
calourie wrote: Wed Jan 20, 2021 2:39 pm Looks like Fox is going full bore Newsmax, OneAmerica Network route, reportedly aiming to put Maria Bartiromo (who is promoting idea that the Capitol storming was perpetrated by Trump garbed Biden supporters) and Greg Gupfeld who is simply an unapologetic all things right wing jerk in prime time slots, moving a couple of their more moderate reporters to less viewed midday slots and firing Chris Stirewalt for not backing down from the network's early projection of Biden winning Arizona as well as a couple of other firings. Good luck in having an truth informed Republican opposition, or perhaps they are just putting all their eggs into Trump's new "Patriot Party" basket, at least until he gets impeached and/or incarcerted.
At least Lou Dobbs apparently isn't going prime time FNC too ?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/20 ... s-opinion/
Fox’s 7 p.m. hour has traditionally been reserved for news coverage. But in a shake-up that has raised concerns within its news division, the network last week announced it would bump veteran anchor Martha MacCallum from that slot — part of a larger shift toward the conservative-leaning punditry programming that made Fox the most-watched cable channel in 2020.

Kilmeade is among the six opinionators who will get informal week-long tryouts to become the permanent host of the 7 p.m. hour, which is being called “Fox News Primetime.” Also getting a turn are business news anchor Maria Bartiromo and conservative Fox News contributors Katie Pavlich, Rachel Campos-Duffy and former congressman Trey Gowdy, as well as commentator Mark Steyn, a favorite guest of Fox ratings champ Tucker Carlson. (The names were first reported by the Los Angeles Times.)

By trading an hour of news for opinion, the network quietly shifted the balance of programming, from one that gave a slight majority of its time to news — 11 hours compared with nine for opinion — to an even split. (Fox considers its afternoon panel show “Outnumbered” part of its news division, even though it often focuses on culture-war topics, like Monday’s segment on “cancel culture,” because lead panelist Harris Faulkner is a news anchor.)

The prime-time shift has rattled some staffers at the network — “a message that they care about opinion more than news,” said one news-side employee who was not authorized to comment publicly and so spoke on the condition of anonymity.

There was particular concern voiced Monday when Bartiromo’s name became public as a potential replacement, considering the criticism she has faced for comments she made questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election.

Bartiromo’s name and show were mentioned multiple times in a Dec. 10 legal letter from the voting technology company Smartmatic demanding the network retract “dozens of false and misleading statements regarding Smartmatic.” In response, Fox aired a short segment that corrected falsities about Smartmatic on several of its programs — though when it was Bartiromo’s turn to introduce the segment, she added as a postscript, “We will keep investigating.”

“It is ludicrous and disheartening that we are rewarding [Bartiromo] with a prime-time spot, knowing full well she is among the most responsible for propagating the big election lie,” a second news division staffer said.

“Maybe they wanted that sizzling-hot opinion anger,” said another.

For current and former Fox News employees who spoke to The Washington Post, the switch to opinion at 7 p.m. was a sign that the network’s news division has lost the larger battle to the opinion division, which generates far more viewers.

“They want to restore their conservative base. They’re going to serve the people who brought them to the dance,” said Carl Cameron, who spent 22 years as a reporter for Fox News before retiring as the network’s chief political correspondent in 2017. “Conservatives are going to want to hear what’s wrong with Joe Biden. It’s easier for Fox to beat Newsmax and everybody else back into the woods than it is for them to try to compete with the real journalism networks.”

As co-host of the network’s top-rated morning show, Kilmeade is seen internally and externally as the most likely candidate to get the job at 7 p.m., providing a like-minded lead-in to fellow opinion shows hosted by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. (Though weekend morning show co-host Pete Hegseth was viewed by many Fox observers as a potential fit as well, he is not among the initial tryout group.)

The network said in October that it “regularly considers programming changes,” and it has suggested the lineup adjustments are not tied to ratings concerns. Still, Fox has experienced an across-the-board ratings downturn since the election, according to pre- and post-election Nielsen data provided to The Post — down 37 percent between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., and down 35 percent from 4 to 8 p.m., compared with the month before the election. CNN and MSNBC, meanwhile, have gained during those hours.

At 7 p.m., the hour formerly hosted by MacCallum, the network has been down an average of 1.35 million total viewers, or 42 percent, compared with its pre-election audience, even as her show beat the competition for the year 2020. CNN and MSNBC are on the upswing. At 7 p.m., CNN anchor Erin Burnett has increased her audience by 25 percent, while Joy Reid has increased her MSNBC audience by 9 percent. The biggest percentage increase has gone to Greg Kelly, who hosts a 7 p.m. show on the right-wing cable news upstart Newsmax — his show is up 452 percent, 621,000 viewers, since the election.

Those trends have seen Fox fall to third place, behind CNN and MSNBC, for the opening weeks of 2021, in every key metric.

MacCallum, for her part, pledged her new show, at 3 p.m., will be the same as her 7 p.m. show. Still, her news hour took on a surprisingly rightward tilt during its inaugural airing Monday: Guests included millennial conservative pundit Charlie Kirk, Fox News conservative contributor Sara Carter and former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson, who has become popular on the political right as a skeptic of coronavirus precautions. Berenson said on the show Monday that mask-wearing has made “absolutely zero difference” in alleviating the pandemic, despite the scientific consensus to the contrary.
njbill
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Re: media matters

Post by njbill »

Fox is simply chasing ratings. They certainly knew that things were going to be decidedly different after Donnie X left office. How wasn’t so clear, but the drastic downturn in ratings since the election is the main mover here. A close second is their need to compete for conservative eyeballs with the more right wing outlets, although I don’t think those are widely available on cable systems yet.
njbill
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Re: media matters

Post by njbill »

Jim Acosta obviously drew the short straw at CNN. He had to cover Donnie X’s rally at Andrews, then had to fly on Air Force One with him to Florida. Hope he got double combat pay.
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youthathletics
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Re: media matters

Post by youthathletics »

These News outlets are going to be starving for ratings in the coming months/year. Trump was their cash cow, that is a fact.
The citizenry need a reprieve.
A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.
~Livy
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