Malice Toward All?

Whatever happens in Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox, it has exposed the network’s contempt for its viewers.

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Tucker Carlson. (Photo by Jason Koerner/Getty Images)

“Actual malice is Fox’s only hope.” 

Legal scholar Jeff Kosseff wasn’t offering Fox News business advice when he said that—he was engaged in legal analysis. But the bosses over at Fox News might as well translate that sentence into Latin and carve it above the doors at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. Actual malice is all they’ve got these days. 

Kosseff was referring to a remarkable development in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, which broadcast all sorts of false, defamatory, irresponsible, and positively loopy claims about Dominion in the wake of Donald Trump’s loss to former vice president and full-time human jack-o’-lantern Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

The case would have made the late Tom Wolfe throw away his fountain pen and declare satire a thing of the past. Beyond the imbecilic stories about Venezuelan hackers and the predictable George Soros stuff, Fox News hosts such as Maria Bartiromo sat there nodding like well-dosed junkies while Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell put forward a series of fantastical claims that were based in part—this is the part you cannot make up—on an anonymous email from a source who at times claimed to be a ghost and at other times said she received the information in dreams and visions. “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live,” the ghost said. Not all of the ghost’s stories made it on the air: The same source apparently claimed that the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia had been killed during a human-hunting expedition organized by the Bohemian Club and that Roger Ailes spent the 2020 election season plotting against the president in spite of his being inconveniently dead since 2017. 

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  1. Tristan Barron

    I'm stumped. What's the 13-letter participle adjective?

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      Ben Connelly

      Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but in case you aren’t it’s “mother****ing.”

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    Cfghytr

    I would not be so quick to dismiss a ghost's testimony about someone's being not dead

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    Joe Delanis

    Quote:

    One of the legal terms of art that comes up in determining “actual malice” in a libel or defamation case is “reckless disregard for the truth.” I am a former newspaper editor, not a lawyer, but if a reporter had brought me a piece and the source was a [profane 13-letter participle adjective deleted] ghost, I would fire that reporter on the spot, lament that in these civilized times I could not throw him out the [same participle] window, and write “RECKLESS DISREGARD FOR THE TRUTH” on the HR paperwork.
    _____

    Mr. Williamson, I wish you wouldn't beat around the bush and be so obtuse in articulating your thoughts...how do you REALLY feel?

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    Rlritt

    The voters don't care and Republican politicians no longer care about the voters because they can now get rid of legislators and judges from the opposition party either by making false claims, threats, or paying them off.

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    1. Randall Briggs

      Actually, the problem is worse. The Republican politicians are terrified of their voters. Most of them know the truth and understand the damage that they are doing. But to admit that in public would cost them what they hold dearest in all the world--their political offices.

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        Rlritt

        True.

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  5. MikeS

    I don't see how groveling equals contempt.

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  6. Rune485

    FOX is a dumpster fire, and has been for years. They aren’t the only one, unfortunately.

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    1. GenZConservative

      The saddest thing here is they acted this way because they were afraid of being out-dumpstered.

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  7. Lanceimorgan

    I don’t know what it’s going to cost them, but any settlement price Fox pays will be cheaper than the cost they will bear by having their anchors testify, under oath, in a court of law. Going to trial would be suicidal.

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  8. Emetz

    [LONG] When I was a kid watching the news with my parents, every once in awhile Walter Cronkite, or Peter Jennings, would turn to some bespectacled semi-bald guy who was obviously not a well-coifed anchor and say something like,"and now a word from our editor." The editor would then commence to lecturing the audience about some person I've never heard of or that a new Ice Age was imminent. It was clearly labeled OPINION, NOT NEWS. Then the anchor would go back to reporting fact based stories (someone will argue about "facts", but that's another thread and beside the point I am trying to make).

    Those opinions might get rehashed again on one of the Sunday morning political argument shows. Why was a watching those as a Kid, you may ask? Because I was bored on Sunday mornings and the pickup baseball game never started until Jimmie got back from Church and could bring his catcher's gear. If a good Godzilla or Abbot & Costello movie wasn't airing on the local UHF affiliate, I might try to amuse myself by watching Face the Nation an mocking the stiffs in my mind. But I digress.

    I hate new legislation and would prefer it that institutions adhere to self established standards that are both supported by the general consensus of the people and in the interest of the public good, but perhaps some new laws putting some teeth behind more clear labeling of an OPINION versus NEWS. What Fox news did was unethical if not illegal. I really hope that Dominion wins this thing if only to help bank the behavior of all of the networks.

    Sadly, most of this current media behavior came about because of the rise of the internet and new ways of communication. Trad media could not longer bet the gatekeepers what the public new. Alternative sources provided additional information more opportunities to chew the current cycle like mass psychological cud. Sites like the Dredge Report started beating the traditional outlets to the punch even. Many times these new sources didn't use the same journalist standards as the traditional redoubts. Did the general public assume that these Johnny Come Lately have the same standards? Maybe. Did some people not care? I was say definitely. Regardless, their has been a race to the gutter to attract and keep eyeballs. Gradually the boundaries between fact and fiction were blurred. The public flipped from being "a skeptical public" to "assume everything is a fact until found otherwise." The problem is that technology has condensed the news cycle into a hyper-short window that surpasses the ability of human nature to every process the "found otherwise" phase. We just move on to the next thing, and item A remains locked in as a fact. Throw in a media king who built his empire tabloids (by nature not news unless they were lucky) and increasing micro-fragmentation

    A Media Business is run as a series of products managed by a P&L just like Kellogg's manages cereal and Gillette razors. "Don't like Raisin Bran, boom here is Fruity Pebbles." Thus we are really victims of our own desires. Lots of versions of Fruit Loops out their now.

    I would posit that a portion of the media business needs to have an alternative form of capital and ownership that could help impose some adherence to higher public good standards of proof, and modulate the rapid and amoral aspects of Capitalism. These sources hopefully would be the respective load stones of what is fact and fiction (potential fact, but clearly not established as such) in society at a given point of time. Rebuild the beacon towers!Show less

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    Beatrix.Kido

    This is why I pay for The Dispatch..."emotionally incontinent"...love it.
    Thank you Mr. Williamson.

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    Kmregan7

    Fox tells their viewers what they want to hear, what they feel in their guts is true.....and then they can claim they heard it on a news source and back it up. It's a vicious circle really because I doubt most people started watching Fox thinking "I want to be lied to or told what I want to hear"....they wanted a different news source, one that focused on things they felt wasn't being told on other news sources. But then, Fox lies or misleads, and gets them all rage-besotted and emotionally incontinent, and they LIKE it...it confirms their priors. And so on, and so on....

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      Rlritt

      They are actually brainwashing a large part of the population.

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