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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   20540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

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I think part of the point is, people will have to come out and identify as election deniers. The next thing, they're being accused of supporting the Jan 6th coup, wanting to overthrow the legitimate government, and being a fully-signed up fascist.

There's plenty of election deniers who openly admit to it and would probably have no problem with it even in conversations with strangers. What has happened to them that is bad?

Fox news was sued and lost almost $800 million.

Am I misremembering, or was this the one in which Fox was shown to have peddled the idea that Dominion's voting machines were rigged but not even the hosts saying it believed what they were saying?

That's not what the lawsuit alleged. It said that hosts were allowed to make claims that executives believed were false, and that guests were brought on and made claims that the hosts believed were false. I don't think there were any claims that were (provably) disbelieved by the person who made them. The argument was that executives/hosts had enough control over the claims of hosts/guests that allowing those claims to be made was tantamount to making them directly.

But in this case that means the podcast itself would be analogous to Fox executives/hosts, and the motte members would be the hosts/guests, so it's not a direct example.

That's not what the lawsuit alleged. It said that hosts were allowed to make claims that executives believed were false, and that guests were brought on and made claims that the hosts believed were false.

Okay, yeah, this is the case I was thinking of. I recall going through the evidence brought against them and I found it fairly convincing that Fox had no reason to believe what they were peddling and also didn't believe it themselves.

The actual proof can be found in the pdf at the bottom of this article. It's 192 pages, but it's either screenshots that can quickly be read or large font question-answer segments. I think it clearly indicates that the people at Fox didn't believe what they were saying, because their own research team was telling them there wasn't any evidence, and it notes that Fox believed executives had an obligation to correct people from stating falsehoods on their own network.

Ultimately, what did Fox in wasn't the view that the election was stolen. It was not believing their own public statements.

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