Heather Cox Richardson picks out the money quotes from the legal filing in the case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox Bew Coroiration. The pundits at Fox gave hours and hours of air time to election deniers, yet none of the Fox hosts believed the nonsense they broadcast to millions of people. Fox gave their viewers support for their misguided belief that the 2020 election was stolen. Yet, all of them said in emails that they were broadcasting lies.
A legal filing today in the case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox News Corporation provides a window into the role of disinformation and money in the movement to deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
Dominion Voting Systems is suing FNC for defamation after FNC personalities repeatedly claimed that the company’s voting machines had corrupted the final tallies in the 2020 election. The filing today shows that those same personalities didn’t believe what they were telling their viewers, and suggests that they made those groundless accusations because they worried their viewers were abandoning them to go to channels that told them what they wanted to hear: that Trump had won the election.
The quotes in the filing are eye-popping:
On November 10, 2020, Trump advisor Steven Bannon wrote to FNC personality Maria Bartiromo: “71 million voters will never accept Biden. This process is to destroy his presidency before it even starts; IF it even starts…. We either close on Trumps [sic] victory or del[e]gitimize Biden…. THE PLAN.”
FNC’s internal fact checks on November 13 and November 20 called accusations of irregularities in the voting “Incorrect” and said there was “not evidence of widespread fraud.”
On November 15, Laura Ingraham wrote to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity: “Sidney Power is a bit nuts. Sorry, but she is.”
On November 16, Carlson wrote to his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, “Sidney Powell is lying.”
On November 19, FNC chair Rupert Murdoch wrote: “Really crazy stuff.”
Hannity later testified: “[T]hat whole narrative that Sidney was pushing. I did not believe it for one second.”
Fox Politics Editor Chris Stirewalt later testified, “[N]o reasonable person would have thought that,” when asked if it was true that Dominion rigged the election.
The filing claims that FNC peddled a false narrative of election fraud to its viewers because its pro-Trump audience had jumped ship after the network had been the first to call Arizona for Biden, and its ratings were plummeting as Trump loyalists jumped to Newsmax. “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company,” Carlson wrote to Suzanne Scott, chief executive officer of Fox News, on November 9. “Kills me to watch it.” On November 12, Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”
They went to “war footing” to “protect the brand.” For example, when FNC reporter Jacqui Heinrich accurately fact checked a Trump tweet, correcting him by saying that “top election infrastructure officials” said that “[t]here is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” Carlson told Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the f*ck? I’m actually shocked…. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
Heinrich deleted her tweet.
The filing says that not a single witness from FNC testified they believed any of the allegations they were making about Dominion. An FNC spokesperson today said, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
Today, part of the report of the special purpose grand jury investigating possible criminal interference in the 2020 election in Georgia was released under court order. It explained that 26 Fulton County, Georgia, residents, three of whom were alternates, made up the grand jury, and 16 of them made up a quorum, enabling the jury to conduct business. Beginning on June 1, 2022, the grand jury heard testimony from or involving 75 witnesses, almost all of it in person and under oath. It also heard testimony from investigators and got digital and physical media.
The grand jury found “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2022 presidential election.” It also reported that “[a] majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it,” and it asked the district attorney to “seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling.”
Also today, in the wake of the inauspicious first hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on November 9, a bipartisan group of 28 former officials who were part of the Church Committee wrote an open letter to Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH). Republicans have claimed Jordan’s new subcommittee is a modern version of the 1975–1976 committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), that discovered illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens, CIA operations to assassinate foreign leaders, drug testing on government personnel, discrediting of civil rights and anti-war activists, and so on.
The letter’s authors reminded Jordan that while the chair of the committee had been a Democrat, its work had been carefully bipartisan, and its members investigated both Republican and Democratic administrations. They had rigorously reported facts in context, “resisting political temptations to assemble misleading mosaics from isolated tidbits.” They had also protected ongoing intelligence and law enforcement operations.
The committee’s 2,700 pages of exhaustive research were also bipartisan and resulted in the creation of Senate and House intelligence committees to provide congressional oversight of intelligence, as well as the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The former staffers of the Church Committee advised Jordan to follow the model he claimed, remaining objective, grounding the committee’s findings in relevant evidence and applicable laws.” They urged the subcommittee to “consider in good faith whether [Trump attorney general William] Barr and [John] Durham,” whom Barr appointed to discredit the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives, “themselves may have strayed into such weaponization.”
The Church Committee staffers warned Jordan that if he wanted to claim the mantle of that committee, he would need to move forward with the “same spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship.”
To see the sources, open the link.
Anyone who believes that Jim Jordan might run a bipartisan investigation believes in unicorns. He is one of the nastiest partisans in Congress.
I believe this excellent written commentary fits perfectly with this video commentary:
They knew. The Frankenstein they built has turned on them.
The monster was there before the Doctor
It always has been! We see it all the time, don’t we?
Fox spent decades distorting & manipulating reality for millions of viewers. Hung by their own petard.
Any journalists – including opinion journalists – who transmit information to the public that they know to be false are no longer true journalists. They are political activists and propagandists. The Fox personalities who participated in deceiving their viewers are a disgrace to their profession, and in a just world they would lose their positions.
Unfortunately, this problem exists elsewhere in addition to Fox. The Columbia Journalism Review – not at all a conservative outlet – recently published a lengthy article on how wrong almost all political journalists got the allegations of Trump-Russia collusion. But few media outlets have even informed the public of those problems. And those media outlets are completely unapologetic about what they did. Trump lost, so in their minds they have nothing to apologize for. That’s political activism, not ethical journalism.
lines crossed- “nobody believed Trump’s lies”
In addition to Richardson’s story, media is writing about the conviction of Jesse Benton for illegally funneling money he received from a Russian national to the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump. Benton may have been a political opportunist (there was a subsequent Telegraph sting involving a Chinese national’s money for Trump) but, he was indicted in the charges along with Doug Wead, who was in George W. Bush’s inner orbit. (Wead died a few months after the indictment.)
Wead may be a good example of the crossover between conservative religion and politics. Wead received an honorary degree from Oral Roberts University. He attended Canyonville Bible Academy and Central Bible College. Interestingly, George W. Bush said about himself that he was not worried about getting corrupted because he read the Bible daily.
Wead, who gushed in video promotion for Roman Vasilenko’s business (the Russian national in the indictment case) was more well-known for his books, some of which were about religion. One title, likely selected for ratings appeal was, “Tonight They’ll kill a Catholic.” It has blood imagery on the cover.
It’s probable that Trump’s Doug Wead was the Doug Wead who wrote at Charisma, an article in 1977, reprinted in 2015, “A Classic Pentecostal Encounters Charismatic Catholics.” The following are excerpts. “My first impression…happened in 1967 at the Notre Dame campus…some referred to (the event) as the birthday of Catholic Pentecostalism…. Pentecostals proclaimed innocently, ‘We are so glad that Catholics are becoming Christian.’ …In 1969-70, the American Council of Bishops surprised a lot of people by deciding the movement should be…allowed to develop.”
Wead, at first, was uncertain about the movement referencing his experience at Calvary Temple (Assembly of God) where his father was a pastor. After awhile, he deduced that the Catholic pentecostal movement could “include millions of people before it reached the saturation point.” Wead concludes the article by saying, “I found myself praying, “God…make us one.”
A scholarly treatise about the movement that Wead observed was titled, “Unification of all Christianity”. With Trump’s presidency we saw a a scenario where Russian orthodox Christians like Putin and American conservatives could advance unification.
Privatization of schools is a significant component of the conservative Christian agenda. Conservative Catholic, Paul Weyrich, who was funded by Koch, included a discussion in his political manual about how to create parallel schools.
It goes beyond professional ethics to a matter of personal integrity.
That’s okay — pretty soon all these human chatbots will be replaced by machine chatbots.
The Hannity Bot, the _ucker Carlson Bot, The Laura Ingrown Bot. The JD Advancing Backward Bot. Sounds like an episode of Futurama to me!
Bite My Shiny MAGA Bot 🤖
Priestbot says, there–bot for the grace of God–go I.
I think the best name for these people is not journalists, or even pundits, but presstitutes.
Both the human and machine chatbots are bullshit generators.
The only difference is that the machine versions don’t understand (are fundamentally incapable of understanding) the difference between truth and fiction.
A chatbot can effortlessly spew falsehoods but is incapable of knowingly doing so.
So in the future, there will be no emails between chatbots that reveal they were knowingly spreading falsehoods.
As a result , the machine chatbots are ideally suited for producing propaganda.
The program is not BSing. The program is just “running”. What’s at stake is the #LocusOfControl. In the cases of recent interest a corporate entity is using the program to misdirect, obfuscate, “prestidigitate” for purposes of its own. And doing a damned good job at that.
The output of ChatGPT can be — and often is — complete bullshit and the computer “scientists” who are pawning it off on the rest of us as “artificial intelligence” are the ones doing the bullshitting.
There is no “intelligence” involved.The process is statistically based, with no necessary connection with reality and truth and no understanding of what is written.
It’s all just “sentence completion” based on probabilities of word appearances in billions of writing samples it has processed from the web.
We need a law that requires holds any purported news organization accountable for its content. News organizations should not be allowed to knowingly mislead the public and create a climate of “fake news.” What Fox News and some other news organizations do is broadcast propaganda and present it to the people a news. Sinclair Broadcasting is another example of this foul practice. There should be a law that requires a certain level of veracity in any show that claims to be news. I support free speech, but fake news goes beyond the limits of free speech. Fake news is almost like yelling fire in a crowded theater. It is deliberate deceit and dangerous when it is used to sway an election.
“Fox is a Republican super PAC masquerading as a news network–and Dominion’s lawsuit proves it.”
From a brilliantly argued DailyKos essay.
And it’s true. Fox News is piped into airports and dentist offices as if it is NEWS. Blogs like DailyKos make it clear what they are. Fox News is simply a Republican super PAC and should be treated as such.
^^^
“It’s not just building up Republicans, though. Damaging Democrats and their agenda has been part of Fox’s core daily mission, too. Hillary Clinton was a near-daily focus for 25 years. Why? Because she was capable of becoming president. Because she was an adept messenger of Democratic ideals and progressive goals. And because it is financially lucrative to feed the hate of millions of mostly older, mostly white curmudgeons who tune in for the performative outrage.
It’s precisely the reason Fox now regularly targets the brilliant and likable Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has “it”—and Fox News knows it. It’s the reason the network focuses on damaging Pete Buttigieg in his current role as secretary of transportation. It isn’t so much about what Ocasio-Cortez and Buttigieg are doing now; it’s about where they are going next. It’s about laying the groundwork now to make them a little more unstable in the future. The amount of negative coverage a Democrat gets on Fox News is often directly proportionate to their ceiling. In both of these cases, the ceilings are high.”
(We should all take note that the people MOST demonized on Fox News are the ones most dangerous to the right wing agenda. They will never demonize Manchin or Sinema unless one of them seems likely to support an agenda that would thwart their power grab.They didn’t start demonizing Biden until they realized how dangerous to the right wing agenda he was. Bernie Sanders was never dangerous to them because he never ran directly against a Republican who was important to the right wing agenda. Fox would have turned Bernie into someone people hated as much as any democrat if he had been the nominee. It’s important to understand this and we need to stop helping them and start calling it out.)
It’s one thing to tell a lie. It’s another to believe in one and orient your life around it. But it’s quite another when you know you are lying to people who are sure you are telling the truth about fundamental ideas. Reading some of these Dominion revelations lowers my opinion of people and things I thought could not be lower.
They have no shame or scruples. They have always been simply advertising to get people to buy a product – and the product was always the right wing agenda.
They are like those “advertorial” inserts that used to be in magazines and were noted as different from the rest of journalism. Or late night tv when there used to be half hour “infomercials”.
Fox News is an informercial for right wing politics. But it was treated by others who should have known better (I’m looking at you, so-called liberal media) as if it was journalism.
No doubt Tucker Carlson and the other Koch- like Fox swill will praise the libertarian move of the management of Temple University, a public school, in its actions against employee unionization.(CNN has a report about it.)
Temple’s President has zero experience at any institution that isn’t private, most of it at elite schools- both his former work and educational experience. Harvard, Stanford, Emory, University of Pennsylvania make for poor training grounds in democracy.
Shame on Temple U, my alma mater, for its anti-union tactics.
The astonishing thing to me is that anyone ever thought that these people believed what they were saying. These are con artists. Just like Donnie Boy.
Reblogged this on dean ramser.
Reading all this reminds me of a person who ran for office my wife knew well. She was obviously suffering from some disorder that blurred the boundaries between reality and pure fantasy. People had heard her telling store clerks that she was the offspring of a local business family. She constantly talked of the next trip she would take or her personal relationship with some famous person in entertainment or politics. Once there was a disaster, and she emerged on local TV as a spokesperson for the families affected.
Then she ran for office. She appeared on local news, interviewed by the most astute of the journalists. Her answers were more reasonable than any of her opponents. She had the support of the police and fire department support organizations. She narrowly lost a bid for a spot on the Nashville city council.
That the news got this person so terribly wrong reminds me of the George Santos situation. But more it reminds me that news as we consume it today has reached a level close to the rumor mill in a cotton mill. Desperate to scoop the other news sources, stories are printed or broadcast as quickly as possible. Nationally, personality news outsells policy wonking, so news becomes about personalities. Rational discussion gives way to foil arguments, set up to make a point using someone opposed to the view of the newsroom.
WE are all familiar with the story of Roger Ailes and the creation of Fox in the wake of Richard Nixon’s fall from national grace. Ailes tapped into the disgruntled population of those who felt that their guy had been punished for “what they all do.” I had multiple conversations with people with this attitude for 20 years after his resignation. With Ailes creation, these people had a place to go to feel safe in a changing world. Sports freaks could go there for good sports coverage. Sit-coms on Fox were able to push the envelope a bit more, and decency rules were set aside in favor of the more prurient. Ailes succeeded in creating a place that perverted America on its shows and complained about the perversion on the news when it made the political point Ailes wanted to make. He made Fox triumphant.
I consider Fox to be a natural progression. Once truth was considered a relative thing, society organically produced a news network to fit this zeitgeist. Evolution. This was the news place that best fit the environment of bitterness and distrust that grew up post Nixon. Joe McCarthy, who once posed in a WWII plane to give the impression that he was a tail gunner during the war, must be smiling from heaven (if the omniscience of the departed is actually a thing, of course).
So we should not be surprised that the spawn of this evolution, Donald Trump, should be the catalyst for the ultimate lie. That a network would purposely fabricate a story that has such national implications should not come as any surprise. Hunter Biden’s laptop may yet save the country.
Rhetorically, which conservative religion do most of Fox’s on-air personalities have affiliation with e.g. Laura Ingraham?
“Sports freaks could go there for good sports coverage.”
If one considers Foxtrax “good sports coverage”, I’ve got some great ocean front white sand beach properties. . . . 🙂
“Once truth was considered a relative thing,”
Truth is a relative thing? I believe not.
There’s never really been any question that Fox “News” is a cancer on the American Republic. The lies have been egregious and constant. Certain kinds of people subscribe to them: racists, white supremacists, grifters, Neo-Nazis, “Christian” nationalists.
As Karen Tumulty at The Post pointed out,
“”In 1989, as he was pondering a run for mayor of New York, the city was shocked by the rape and beating of a white investment banker while she was jogging in Central Park. [Trump] ran full-page ads in the city’s four major newspapers calling for the death penalty for the five teenage boys — four black and one Hispanic — who had been accused of the crime. After years in prison, they had their convictions vacated, but Trump has never apologized or shown any second thoughts about his assumptions of their guilt….‘Donald Trump, he was the fire starter,’ one of the wrongfully imprisoned men later said. Similarly, Trump began his rise to the presidency by leading a campaign to slander the nation’s first African American president, demanding a birth certificate as proof that he was actually born in this country. And then, there was the most disgraceful comment of a presidency that has seen more than its share of them: Trump’s declaration that ‘both sides’ were to blame for the deadly violence that occurred last year when white nationalists marched in Charlottesville and one of them is accused of plowing a car into a crowd of people who had been protesting their racist display, killing a woman.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-plenty-racist-without-the-n-word/2018/08/14/69d35c78-9fcd-11e8-93e3-24d1703d2a7a_story.html?utm_term=.1cc1d3cf0151
Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough put it like this, about Republicans:
“What exactly are we to make of their disturbing behavior? Even after Trump’s intelligence chiefs handed Republicans incontrovertible evidence of Russian malevolence, Trump dismissed the warnings as a hoax, the GOP House Intelligence Committee chairman secretly plotted against those leading the Russia investigation and Senate Republicans voted in lock step against a Democratic bill providing a stronger defense against future Russian attacks…The X-Files this is not. The truth about Russia is out there, and it is staring every Republican right in the face.”
And the truth is that Russia essentially “elected” Trump.
The Senate Intelligence Committee (Volume V) report said it like this:
“the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election…Manafort’s presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign. Taken as a whole, Manafort’s highlevel access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat…Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process…While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”
Click to access report_volume5.pdf
After extensive research, Kathleen Hall Jamieson concluded that,
“you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome. I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all…the wide distribution” of the trolls’ disinformation…increases the likelihood [that it] changed the outcome.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/01/how-russia-helped-to-swing-the-election-for-trump
And, yeah, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google) and the mainstream media (The NY Times, The Post etc.) were complicit. But the main offenders were Trump, Republicans, and Fox…and Republican voters.
Republican votes come from conservative Catholics and Christians. Take away those votes and the Republican Party is diminished by a huge margin.
With an end to the political power of conservative Catholics and Christians, the threat to the rights of women and LGBTQ stops. When God talkers stop weaponizing religion against modernism and economic opportunity, the U.S. can have democracy.
Putin is orthodox Christian. The religious right was co-founded by Koch-funded Paul Weyrich who was conservative Catholic. The connections between authoritarian Russia (a largely White population) and American conservative religious like Doug Wead who was indicted in a case involving the funneling of a Russian’s money to Trump’s campaign, is part of a context. It’s detrimental to the nation to ignore that context.
There is information supporting a claim that Christian unification and political power was the goal of the alliance between right wing Catholics and protestant evangelicals. Ryan Girdusky’s interview with the Pat Buchanan which is posted at the Buchanan site is worth a read.
“And the truth is that Russia essentially “elected” Trump.”
Ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ad infinitum. Spit my hot cocoa on the screen upon reading that.
Read Volume V, linked above, Dwayne.
Read the New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer on Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s conclusions.
The spit all you want.
Duane E Swacker
So the constant targeted drip of negative news about Clinton and the DNC had no effect on voters ? What exactly was in those Clinton Emails, the DNC Emails or the Podesta Emails? It didn’t matter . The Podesta Emails generated a headline on the same day as the child rapist was bragging about grabbing P—– . Combined with Trumplandia pressuring Comey to reopen an investigation of EMAILS!!!!!!! She was toast. It portrayed Clinton as a dishonest slime. . But what if emails had not been in the news all summer and fall. Because of Russian hacking interference . Do you think anyone knew the difference or any of the content in any of the dumps.
Russian interference certainly could have swung a meager 77,000 votes across 3 states . Or more like convinced a portion of 700,000 who voted in 2012 in those states she was not worth standing on line at the polls for.
Comey finished off Hillary with his announcement that the FBI was reopening its investigation of her emails, ten days before the election. Then they cleared her. The damage was done. One theory is that the rogue FBI agent in the New York City office was about to open his own investigation (on behalf of Putin-Deripaska, who paid him handsomely), so Comey had to get out in front first.
Lost is the fact that no federal agency is supposed to do anything within a month of the election. Protocol. They have the power to swing the election. Why did Rudy Guiliani know in advance about Comey’s announcement?
I suspect that it was a lot more than one bad apple in the NY FBI .
“Doug Wead influenced Wash. for the Cause of Christ,” Strang Report.
Doug Wead was indicted but died before trial for funneling a Russian’s money to the Trump campaign. Jesse Benton who was indicted in the same case was sentenced this week after his conviction in November.