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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?
It's ironic or bittersweet how Dominion, a private company, is now Fox's greatest adversary, not the Biden administration. Usually government is framed as being tyrannical or overreaching, compared to the private sector as the 'little guy' or victim, but it's flipped.
It shows that free speech does not apply to libel. Unlike governments and bureaucrats, private companies and individuals can fight back. being targeted by a private entity is worse than being targeted by a government, unless it's something really bad like terrorism or Jan 6th. There are many people who have years of back taxes and the IRS waits years or longer, if ever, to do anything, except sometimes arresting celebrities to make examples. Private lawsuits are slow only because the courts are slow, not out apathy of the plaintiff.
It is still very much up in the air that suits so political in nature and related to political debate will be allowed in the reverse scenario. Is the owner of that computer repair shop going to succeed against people who called him a Russian plant? Will lab leak hypothesizers ever recover for being called agents of various states. Indeed, will anyone called a Russian agent in the 2016-current era recover?
Does CNN and WaPo settling with the Coventry Catholic kids qualify? The same lawyer is now representing Rittenhouse in his own suits; if he recovers does that work?
Defamation law is kind of complicated, and I'm not super familiar with it myself, so we're likely to see results that strike our basic moral barometer as screwy, or things that seem inconsistent along a normal morality but are consistent with the law. I see statements all the time that strike me as libelous but aren't, and I probably make statements that are factually outside the law but don't really matter every now and then.
I'm not sure your first example works as a pure counter-argument since they settled before the case went to court but the rest that waited got their cases thrown out. Though, it's possible CNN and WaPo were considerably more defamatory, I don't know, but based on the wording in the ruling it seems like the judge would've likely thrown the lawsuit against them out as well.
If there was no chance they'd collect then they wouldn't have settled. No indication as to the amount, but settling is a good outcome for the plaintiff.
It's possible but I think it's also possible that the culture-war could've played a role in the judge's decision to throw the cases out. Part of what the judge says is that there was a valid reason to cover Sandmann because the video was "of great public interest". It's like a cito-genesis blank check for the media to just call out and cover whomever they want because they have enough sway to make anything "of great public interest." A bunch of reporters share a video between each other and stir a huge outrage and then cover it in the real media based on the outrage they stirred up. Anyway, I've yet to see anything from anyone about how CNN and Wapo's coverage was substantially different and I find it hard not to be cynical.
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