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2020 stolen election time! There's been some rather big developments with my favorite cute little hobby horse. I haven't had the time to make a deep-dive write-up, but it's has already been extensively reported on elsewhere (e.g. this post by Jacob Sullum). To summarize, Dominion voting systems sued Fox News (and Newsmax, and OAN) for defamation. Dominion has been past the discovery stage for more than a year now but their filings only recently became public and, no way to say this lightly, it's been extremely humiliating for Fox. Tons of text messages from the big names (Carlson, Hannity, etc.) either talking shit about how crazy Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are, or (especially for Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo) credulously accepting and repeating the stolen election theories.
One especially funny example involved Sidney Powell credulously forwarding an email to Bartiromo from a complete rando claiming they had "Election Fraud Info". In that same email, the anonymous rando claimed that they got their information from their dreams, that the wind tells them they're a ghost, and that Justice Scalia was murdered during a human hunting expedition. As evidenced by the filings she submitted to court, Powell's skepticism faculties appear to be basically non-existent, and the fact that so many people took her seriously at first is a good illustration of the pitfalls of siloed reasoning.
Maybe the most damning revelation of how Fox was operating (from both a legal liability as well as a journalistic ethics perspective) is how they treated their fact-checking process. When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted on November 12 that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised" Carlson texted Hannity "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." If Dominion needed to prove the actual malice (and it's not yet clear if they would need to) in a defamation case, they couldn't have asked for better evidence.
There isn't much for me to say that I haven't said before. My operating theory has long been that some people seemed to earnestly believe the crazy theories they were spouting about Hugo Chavez or whatever (e.g. Powell, Giuliani, maybe Dobbs) while many others were just pretending to entertain it because it was in their best financial interests (e.g. Carlson, Hannity, Murdoch, etc.) and the text messages confirm this. To Carlson's credit though, he endured a lot of negative pushback from his criticism of Powell.
I've already done my hand-wringing on how the media seems to love shooting itself in the foot, except it was framed in context of how liberal outlets fucked up the Covington debacle from four years ago. The Dominion lawsuit demonstrates the problem behind audience capture; Fox pundits and reporters had to deal with a credible financial pressure to cater to the crazy fringes of their audience for fear of losing them to their less scrupulous competitors. If so, it would be a demand-side problem. I'm not sure if the problem with liberal media fuck-ups follows the same framework, but I'm open to arguments. My general impression there is that the call is coming from inside the house: liberal journalists too afraid of their fellow cohort to break ranks. I suppose a good test-case scenario would be to see how NYT's current "trans youth reporting controversy" plays out. They obviously already got a severe amount of criticism from the activist fringe, but would a significant portion of their audience care? And if so, where would they go?
One last question: has anyone here changed their opinion on the 2020 stolen election theories?
I was a huge fan of right wing media losing their mind on election fraud. I never saw hard evidence it happened and hoped it did not happen. That being said I loved it. I feel like we did have election interference in 2020. I thought it was deeply wrong when 50 former spooks used their credentials to say the Biden laptop was Russian (without evidence and I don’t think they believed it). Was just pure elites propagandizing commoners. Or the FBI telling twitter what they wanted suppressed. Despite being in possession of the laptop which should have proved it wasn’t Russian. And besides the interference I felt like I lived thru a half dozen leftist psyops. So loved the right losing their mind like the left.
That being said if theirs one failure in this by Fox it’s that they didn’t do it the RIGHT way. Like Scott’s recent post that the media tells you factually correct information but by selective disclosure and narrative building they can shape beliefs. Fox should have stayed in this wheelhouse. Perhaps they did and will win these lawsuits. Misinform by telling the truth. But always tell the truth.
The right anger after the election I believe was justified. Just need to funnel the anger correctly and within the law.
That’s kinda been my take. I don’t believe in a “stolen election” in the Dominion or ballots being either harvested or dumped. I base that on the fact that most polls actually overcounted the support Biden had, which shouldn’t happen if the fraud is in Biden’s favor. Adding Biden votes would’ve made Biden undercounted, not overcounted.
But you can interfere without committing fraud. You can spread lies through social media. You can block discussions. You can selectively cover the election. You can prevent unfavorable stories from being spread. A lot of this actually happened. The laptop story was withheld and prevented from going viral from the few outlets that did carry it. Trump was accused of trying to slow the mail service so Biden ballots wouldn’t be delivered on time. Trump was accused— before a single ballot was cast — of preparing to dispute the election. Trump was also often slandered with the accusation of being helped by Putin, to the point that SNL had a skit of Trump French-kissing Putin. Twitter and really most social media was pushing Biden and silencing Trump.
If we're going to start counting "media conspires to suppress stories harmful to their favored candidates during an election cycle" as "stolen elections" then every major election since the invention of democracy has probably been stolen.
Well, yes. This election happened with the entire weight of the establishment trying it’s best to elect Joe Biden. Negative news about Biden was pretty systemically repressed, even when that information was relevant to whether the man should be president. It’s pretty clear looking at Biden’s unscripted moments that he’s probably pretty deep in dementia. He turns the wrong way leaving podiums, attempts to shake hands with nobody, looks for people who died years before — these things if known before the election would have been causes for concern. Things like Biden’s cognitive ability, the Hunter laptop, these would have had a negative impact if actually reported on. And if such systemic one sided shilling by the media doesn’t count toward an unfree election, we owe an apology to a lot of “failed democratic states” who have elections and a controlled press.
A government controlled press is different than a press that is loosely tribally (in the Blue/Red Tribe sense) affiliated though. Over 90% of farmers are Republican and Red Tribe. They have generally the kind of opinions you would expect. over 90% of journalists are Democrats and Blue tribe, they generally have the kind of opinions you would expect.
If Democrats want better penetration in the farmer's market (heh) they have to change their positions to do so. If Republicans want better penetration in the journalist market they have to change their positions to do so. Or they can each not and understand that most members of specific groups are going to be hostile to them and plan accordingly.
Biden is almost certainly not (in my opinion) deep in dementia, having worked with people in Adult Social Care in the past, if he is suffering it is very mild and in the early stages. Having met him personally a couple of times before he was President (or even vice President) he looks to have declined slightly but not much more than the passing of 20 odd years would indicate since then. Old people are gonna old people. That is not the same thing as dementia.
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Times, technology, and visibility into these things change.
Is it normal to have former intelligence leaders and staff imply a candidate is committing or enabling treason? Is it normal to have the wider mainstream media actively suppress and turn eyeballs away from a scandal, against their usual approach? Normal for the adults in the room to heavily imply or outright claim their opponents are the literal reincarnation of Nazis?
Maybe it is. Perhaps all that's changed is the advent of Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, and ever-watchful eye of the internet to record everything for future analysis and dissection. And maybe now is the time to cut this beast down a size or two.
I'm used to media bias and political acrimony being things. I grew up through Clinton-Obama. The Trump years were fucking inexcusable.
It seems to me that American politics goes through cycles of greater or lesser political acrimony. The period roughly between Watergate and Trump (with a nadir in the early Clinton years and a gradual ramp-up afterwards) was one with outwardly good behavior and fair play on the part of politicians and the media. Before that we had the 60's with all their unrest, political assassinations, riots at party conventions, and the infamous daisy ad. Before that we had a president-for-life whose predecessor denounced his programs as socialistic and fascistic.
Growing up in a time of relative tranquility may have given many of us the impression that that state of affairs was normal rather than astoundingly and miraculously unpartisan, but like another era of good feelings it was bound to come to an end as all the problems we put on the backburner for decades finally burst back into public awareness.
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Kennedy did a lesser version of it to Nixon with the "missile gap" line which he and Nixon knew to be false (because they were both getting classified briefings), but which Nixon couldn't rebut without disclosing classified info.
Yeah, and to most people born after their presidencies, all that is behind the smoky curtain of history. It's the perpetual meme that all that shady stuff that happened in the past is just the messy, unglamorous history of an imperfect nation - but we certainly don't act like that any more!
And I feel extremely silly for writing that, because the naivete is blinding by now. I considered myself more cynical than most, and the degree to which people went mask-off during Trump was shocking to me. At the very least, I expected them to manage their appearance better.
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