It should be common knowledge by now that Trump lost the 2020 election. It was not a close election. He decisively lost both the popular vote and the electoral college. In 2016, he won the electoral college while decisively losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. She could have easily spent four years claiming that she was cheated by an archaic institution (the electoral college), but she had two strong reasons to accept the result and remain silent: one, she has a deep knowledge of and respect for the Constitution; two, I suspect she was genuinely fearful that the impulsive fool who beat her would act on his oft-claimed desire to “lock her up” on Trumped-up charges.
A significant proportion of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump says so. More important, FOX “News” said so daily, incessantly. Despite the fact that Trump’s legal team lost more than 60 court cases, two of them in the US Supreme Court, FOX continued to put its spotlight on election deniers. In doing so, FOX undermined the public’s belief in our electoral system.
States conducted recounts and audits, even hand recounts. Arizona engaged an inexperienced firm to conduct its recount, and Biden gained more votes. None of the recounts uncovered fraud or changed the outcomes. Nonetheless FOX fueled doubts where there was no evidence of chicanery.
Dominion Voting Systems sued FOX for $1.6 billion for defaming it, for spreading lawyer Sidney Powell’s claims that Dominion machines had switched Trump votes to Biden votes, that Dominion was somehow connected to the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. The other voting machine company, Smartmatic, has also filed defamation lawsuits.
During the course of the lawsuit, Dominion was able to gain access to internal emails among the hosts and producers at FOX. The emails revealed that the FOX people knew they were broadcasting lies. They did it because they were fearful that their audience would go to farther-right networks that fed their fantasy that Trump was cheated.
The New York Times wrote about the FOX debacle today:
Two days after the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson was furious.
Fox News viewers were abandoning the network for Newsmax and One America News, two conservative rivals, after Fox declared that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Arizona, a crucial swing state.
In a text message with his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, Mr. Carlson appeared livid that viewers were turning against the network. The message was among those released last week as part of a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox. Dominion, an elections technology company, has sued Fox News for defamation.
A graphic shows a text exchange from Carlson to Pfeiffer.
Carlson to Pfeiffer
We worked really hard to build what we have … It enrages me.
At the same time, Mr. Carlson and his broadcasting colleagues expressed grave doubts about an unfounded narrative rapidly gaining momentum among their core audience: that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats through widespread voter fraud. The belief was promoted by then-President Trump and a coalition of lawyers, lawmakers and influencers, though they produced no evidence to support their assertions.
Many hosts, producers and executives privately expressed skepticism about those claims, even as they gave them significant airtime, according to private messages revealed last week by Dominion. What they said in those messages often differed significantly from what Fox hosts said in public, though they weren’t always contradictory.
Two days after the election, Mr. Pfeiffer said that voices on the right were “reckless demagogues,” according to a text message. Mr. Carlson replied that his show was “not going to follow them.”
A graphic shows a text exchange between Pfeiffer and Carlson.
Said privately on Nov. 5, 2020
Pfeiffer to Carlson
It’s a hard needle to thread, but I really think many on ‘our side’ are being reckless demagogues right now.
Carlson to Pfeiffer
Of course they are. We’re not going to follow them.
But he did follow them. The same day, on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Mr. Carlson expressed some doubts about the voter fraud assertions before insisting that at least some of the claims were “credible.”
A graphic of a text exchange, followed by a video clip of Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Said publicly on Nov. 5, 2020
Carlson: “Not all the claims are credible — some are. … Serious questions about the legitimacy of ballots remained unanswered.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Mr. Carlson was one of several Fox News hosts who repeatedly took a different tone when speaking to viewers on air than when they were talking privately.
The private conversations pose a serious legal threat to the nation’s most-watched cable news network. Dominion has obtained thousands of emails and text messages from Fox employees as part of its $1.6 billion suit. The messages, taken as a whole, are at the core of Dominion’s case.
Fox News has argued in court that the First Amendment protects its right to broadcast false claims if they are inherently newsworthy — and in this case that there was nothing more newsworthy at the time than a sitting president’s allegations of widespread voter fraud.
In a statement, the company said that “the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution” and protected by legal precedent. It added, “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.”
But if a jury looks at the messages from Fox hosts, guests and executives and concludes that people inside the network knew what they were putting on the air was false, it could find Fox liable and reward Dominion with substantial financial damages.
On Nov. 7, 2020, Mr. Carlson told Mr. Pfeiffer that claims about manipulated software were “absurd.” Mr. Pfeiffer replied later that there was not enough evidence of fraud to swing the election.
A graphic of a text exchange between Pfeiffer and Carlson.
Said privately on Nov. 7, 2020
Carlson to Pfeiffer
The software shit is absurd.
Nov. 8, 2020
Pfeiffer to Carlson
I dont think there is evidence of voter fraud that swung the election.
But during his broadcast on Nov. 9, Mr. Carlson devoted time to various theories, suggesting there could be merit to claims about software manipulation. “We don’t know, we have to find out,” he said.
A video clip of Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Said publicly on Nov. 9, 2020
Carlson: “We don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged. … And you are not crazy for knowing it. You are right.”
Mr. Carlson also privately criticized Sidney Powell, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist who was gaining traction among the far right for her involvement in several lawsuits aimed at challenging the election results, the court filings show. Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, two hosts on Fox Business, a sister channel to Fox News that is also part of Dominion’s lawsuit, repeatedly invited Ms. Powell onto their shows as an expert on voter fraud claims.
A graphic of a text message from Carlson.
Said privately on Nov. 16, 2020
Carlson to Pfeiffer
Sidney Powell is lying
Mr. Pfeiffer told Mr. Carlson over text message that election fraud claims, like those being made by Ms. Powell, “need to be backed up.” He warned that President Biden faced being undermined if he was eventually inaugurated.
Mr. Carlson agreed, the filings show.
A graphic of a text message from Carlson.
Said privately on Nov. 18, 2020
Carlson to Pfeiffer
Yep. It’s bad.
The next day, Mr. Carlson eviscerated Ms. Powell in a brutal 10-minute monologue, dissecting her claims as unreliable and unproven. He said the show had repeatedly asked her for evidence and, “when we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
A video of Carlson from “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Said publicly on Nov. 19, 2020
Carlson: “She never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. Not one.”
In the same monologue, however, Mr. Carlson also gave some credence to Ms. Powell’s claims, saying that “we don’t dismiss anything anymore” and that he is “hopeful” she will come forward with evidence.
A video of Carlson from “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Said publicly on Nov. 19, 2020
Carlson: “We did not dismiss any of it. We don’t dismiss anything anymore.”
Viewers expressed outrage at Mr. Carlson for challenging a prominent Trump ally. And Mr. Trump’s associates quickly jumped to her defense.
Privately, Mr. Carlson continued to criticize Ms. Powell, calling her claims “shockingly reckless.” Mr. Pfeiffer and Mr. Carlson both privately called her a “nut.” Laura Ingraham, who is the host of a 10 p.m. show, and Raj Shah, a senior vice president at the Fox Corporation, the network’s corporate parent, were equally incredulous.
A graphic of several text messages from Raj Shah, Pfeiffer, Carlson and Ingraham.
Said privately on Nov. 22, 2020
Shah to Pfeiffer
so many people openly denying the obvious that Powell is clearly full of it.
Pfeiffer to Shah
She is a [expletive] nutcase.
Carlson to Ingraham
[Powell is] a nut, as you said at the outset. It totally wrecked my weekend. Wow… I had to try to make the WH disavow her, which they obviously should have done long before
Ingraham to Carlson
No serious lawyer could believe what they were saying.
Carlson to Ingraham
But they said nothing in public. Pretty disgusting.
The next day, Mr. Carlson appeared to soften his public stance, suggesting that some of the criticisms about voting machines had merit and concluding, “This is a real issue no matter who raises it.”
The article goes on to demonstrate that FOX hosts Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo continued to feature Powell on their shows and allow her to spread her deep belief that Dominion voting machines were rigged.
The private messages also showed that Ms. Powell was in direct communication with Ms. Bartiromo and Mr. Dobbs, and that she revealed one of the sources for her outrageous claims. The court filings showed that Ms. Powell forwarded an email about voter fraud to Ms. Bartiromo from the source, a woman who claimed, among other things, that “the Wind tells me I’m a ghost.”
If Ms. Bartiromo was deterred by the unusual email, it was not evident to Fox News viewers. Ms. Powell was interviewed on the show the next day….
Several Fox News hosts and producers were criticizing Ms. Powell, including John Fawcett, a producer on Mr. Dobbs’s show, who said he believed Ms. Powell was “doing LSD and cocaine and heroin and shrooms.”
A text message from Ingraham.
Said privately on Nov. 15, 2020
Ingraham to Hannity and Carlson
Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Sorry but she is.
But those criticisms never made it to air. Instead, when Ms. Powell appeared again on Mr. Dobbs’s show days later, she was hailed as a “great American” and “one of the country’s leading appellate attorneys.”
Although the producer of the Lou Dobbs show said derogatory things about Powell, Lou Dobbs brought her back as an expert on election security.
The next month, after Smartmatic, a competitor of Dominion Voting Systems, sent a letter to Fox News signaling that litigation was imminent, the network put together a video package of an election expert debunking the conspiracy theories that suggested the company’s technology allowed the presidential vote to be rigged. It aired on the programs hosted by Mr. Dobbs, Ms. Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.
On Feb. 5, 2021, one day after Smartmatic filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox, Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” At the time, Fox said it regularly reviewed its lineup. “Plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate postelection, including on Fox Business,” the network said.
Let’s see what the jury decides in Dominion’s and Smartmatic’s lawsuits against FOX and against specific individuals.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Profiles in LACK of courage”
Of course, I’m not the first person to use that phrase especially in connection with Trump, the current G.O.P. and their assorted hangers-on, enablers and buffoons.
See, for example, The Boston Globe, circa A.D. 2017:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/07/12/profiles-lack-courage/z2vi1SK4LvcmZGeLVUjWhJ/story.html
The year after year, lie after lie nature of this disaster is hobbling the nation.
This will drag on in the courts.
America needs a swift settlement. Agreement must include billboards strewing red state highways, full page ads in every SMALL market newspaper, on screen admission and apology, and on the Fox website with a picture of this fool and quotes:
“I lied. Fox News lied. The Election Count was fair. Trump LOST!”
That would be wonderful. A full public apology. “FOX lied, democracy died.”
FoxNews doesn’t have the kind of power to kill democracy.
How Alex Pfeiffer (formerly with the Daily Caller) fits into the reporting biz –
The College Fix site posted, “Where are they now?”, 8-25-2019. It is a list of the bios of students who were, “former campus reporters,” contributing to the site’s content. The site describes itself as launching and nurturing media careers. Alex Pfeiffer was one of those students listed. The College Fix advisory board includes people with association to AEI, the Federalist, Manhattan Institute (Koch), etc.
If you go to the site’s, “Where are they now,” page (the bios), you will find grads of Hillsdale, Notre Dame, Catholic University, Franciscan University, Liberty University, Georgetown, and a few from state universities and other privates.
The students went on to work at Fox, the Tablet (Catholic), The Lamp (Catholic), Daily Caller, a Fla. county Republican Party (exec. director), Club for Growth, Young Americans for Liberty (state chair), Reason, the Federalist, the right wing, The Hill, Washington Examiner, Wall Street Journal, Knights of Columbus (Digital Marketing Director), Epoch Times, Red Alert Politics, Blaze.
One of those “nurtured” by College Fix wrote, “Unshackled: Freeing America’s K-12 Education System.” The author taught at the University Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education. She dedicated her book to former students in honor of their “daily display of faith.”
p.s. And fox news broadcasts and billboards with the list of the over 1,000 arrested and charged for January 6 crimes.
One Thousand arrested. All following the brainwashing between election day and January 5!
pps.
And, lawsuits against the House Speaker for releasing public information (thousands of hours of tape) only to Fox News and no other outlets who now have to beg for it. If a public school district withheld documents or only sent them to one source, they’d get slammed on every local tv and media outlet.
(ok, that was the last one)
Caught in their own web of lies. Make them pay for the harm they knowingly have done. ________________________________
I commented on a previous posting today about how the Fox hosts have permanently destroyed their credibility by deliberately misinforming – lying to – their viewers in order to give those viewers what they wanted to hear, rather than giving them the truth regarding Trump’s bogus claims about the 2020 election.
But I repeat: this pandering to audiences is not limited to Fox, and is in fact the norm these days for most news and opinion outlets – of all political persuasions – which depend on subscribers rather than advertisers to generate enough revenues for the outlets to survive. That dynamic is also true for non-profit blogs like this one. Let’s be honest here: the vast majority of this blog’s readers come here to have their existing opinions reinforced. If we judge by the most frequent commenters, readers here are infuriated by opinions that differ from those of this blog’s host. I read numerous publications across the political spectrum, and most of their reader comments are all the same way: they want confirmation of their beliefs, not challenges to those beliefs no matter how well-informed and articulate the dissenters are.
I am trying to understand your argument. You deem anyone who challenges a fact free “truth” as being “infuriated” for challenging it? And that – in your mind – makes us the same as Fox News viewers who don’t care about facts. Both sides are equal?
I think your comparing Diane Ravitch – who carefully weighs evidence and has changed her views when she sees that evidence does not support them – to Fox News and readers of this blog to Fox News viewers speaks for itself.
It also speaks for itself that you hold yourself above the fray. We can only strive to be as fair-minded and logical as you are, and no doubt we will never achieve your enviable ability to defend your views. Let’s be honest, who can really deny what you say about us when you offered up only your own brilliant opinion to defend it! And I assume you will now accuse me of being “furious” at you when I am merely making fun of you and holding you up for ridicule for my own amusement will go way over your head. I also feel sympathy for you for your own lack of insight into your motives, but I am not “infuriated”. Are you?
Let’s be honest here: you see yourself as a “well-informed and articulate dissenter”, and you will no doubt be very angry at me for not sharing your opinion of yourself.
Love your comments. Fyi, though, the US style is to place commas and periods before the closing quotation mark, regardless of whether they appear in the quoted text.
Fern: I occasionally notice typos too, but I console myself in the knowledge that the immediate response format of web commentary absolves the perpetrator of crimes against style of at least some of the sin.
I make mistakes frequently. Typos, autocorrect, bad proofreading on my part.
Twice I have unintentionally exchanged Tennessee and Kentucky. Senior moment.
Diane: when I began teaching math, it was still the day of the chalkboard. We worked problems together in class, of course, with me asking for the next logical step, math being what it is. I immediately began to have a problem of saying “x” and writing “8” on the chalkboard. I was way too young for a senior moment. I also noticed that I often exchanged student’s names when I was just getting to know them. The kids usually bore no Appearance similarity. I guess brain wiring is just a peculiar thing.
Roy,
I have four grandsons. Two of them have A names. Aidan and Asher. One is almost 30 and the other is 9. I frequently switch names, and they think it’s funny.
There may be “well informed and articulate” Republicans but, they are either ideologues or self-serving e.g. Sen. JD Vance and David Brooks. No Republican is honest. For example, in Palestine, Ohio, the GOP politicians don’t mention deregulation of the rail and chemical industries.
Chip Staley, check out the,”Where are they now?” page at the College Fix site which identifies Alex Pfeiffer and those of his ilk. You can deduce how Republican reporting differs from journalism.
Jefferson- in every age, in every country, the priest aligns with the despot.
Chip: come back to this site, and you will find degrees of difference and some logical shouting. The difference between this and Fox is that we argue over the implications of factual information. Fox is accused of falsifying factual info. Don’t sound the same to this ole country boy.
It’s the ol “everyone is doing it” excuse. As my mom used to say when she smelled some cockamamie scheme we wanted to attempt when we were kids, “If everyone is jumping off the cliff, I’m not gonna let you do it.”
Here’s something I just discovered thanks to Susan’s most recent email.
Science learned a long time ago that what we are thinking before we go to sleep influences the subconscious decisions our brain is making while we sleep, what memories to keep, what memories to delete. We are not consciously involved in this process.
In 2016, Fox changed Tucker Carlson’s misleading, hate-and-lie filled talk show from 1 AM to 8 PM, Hannity from 2 AM to 9 PM, and Ingram from 3 AM to 10 PM.
…be sure to read ALL the comments —- BRUTAL!
‘Fox’ and ‘News’ should not be used in the same sentence. Fox Network, if you must, but NOT news.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, citing the integrity of the paper, decided it will no longer publish the Dilbert cartoon. You can read about the views of the cartoon’s creator at Wikipedia -Scott Adams. Beyond Adams’ comments about race and vaccines, there’s this prior comment about why not to vote Democratic, “If you’re an undecided voter and male, you’re seeing a celebration that your role in society is permanently diminished.”
My takeaway-
When a person suggests society should pump up a demographic segment, above others, without tying it to earned accomplishments, it is an indicator that the person feels his kind are marginal and therefore threatened.
It’s tough for the conservative to give up his unmerited entitlements. Rejection of a level playing field is difficult to justify.
It would appear to Me that NYT has pretty much caught Fox without clothes. But who cares. Not the minions of Fox. They will justify any atrocity. But what about Hunter’s laptop? It’s the same thing. Right?
If you cannot see that Fox is fabricating news after 15 minutes watching, you are either being dishonest with yourself or you are unable to take on any mental challenge.
This Newsworthy how? I think what you may be missing is that those who view Fox know they are being lied to. They would not have it any other way.
Now to me more concerning was this WaPo headline about East Palestine yesterday .
“Toxic air pollutants in East Palestine could pose long-term risks, researchers say”
We think of WaPo as one of the Nations Papers of record . Its stories are covered in other papers and media. Most Americans never get past the headline on the way to the sports or gossip page.
Now for those of us who do, we come to this:
“It would take months, if not years, of exposure to the pollutants for serious health effects, said Weihsueh Chiu, one of the researchers”.
Followed by :
“EPA officials emphasized this point Friday. They stressed that the safety threshold the researchers used to analyze the data assumes constant exposure over a lifetime”
The train accident in East Palestine should have been avoidable if proper regulations were in place. The resultant Vinyl Chloride spill is an on going emergency. An emergency that will require clean up and years of monitoring the water supply in the immediate area at the expense of the Rail Road. But it is not a disaster . It could turn into a disaster if Chemicals leach into the water supply but as of now there have been no fatalities and no hospitalizations.
Now I expect Fox to lead off with man bites dog. When WaPo leads with this headline it undermines faith in the very agencies that we rely on to recommend and enforce regulation and then we wonder why we have riots against masks and vaccines. Probably 1/2 a million excess deaths since Covid Vaccines were available . That’s a ———- disaster. Excess deaths of 1000 people a year in the Appalachian range from the pollution of Mountain Top Removal that’s disaster, don’t look for a headline. And the EPA can’t do a damn thing about it .
Did you see how Jonathan Weisman at the NYT reported the East Palestine story and his tweet?
Jonathan Weisman@jonathanweisman
“In some sense, both sides are right, both sides are wrong and, in the bifurcated politics of this American moment, none of the arguments much matter.”
6:08 PM · Feb 23, 2023 ·1.5 Views
And this one:
“Democrats see East Palestine as action & consequences: Rail regulations were gutted, blame assigned. Republicans see a more operatic narrative, a forgotten town in a flyover state struggling against an uncaring mega-corporation and an unseeing government.”
As. Lofgren said both parties are the same but not in the same way. He said that in 2011 , when he was the first to leave the Republican cult. In the dozen years since they are on different planets . As he said when government doesn’t work the party that is inherently anti government wins. Undermining Government Agencies plays right into those who would eliminate those agencies. Which brings us back to Rail safety.
The “liberal “ media is complicit Federal and state authorities declare the air.and water is safe I no doubt that the water currently is. It may not stay that way. While it may be okay to urge caution and skepticism after Republican Christine Todd Whitman lied about 9/11 , why 20 days later does News footage on “liberal MSNBC keep showing a massive plume. The release and controlled burn lasted 4 hours
I agree with all your points, Joel.
Do you read New York Times Pitchbot on twitter? It is frightening how often a NYT reporter writes articles or tweets that sound like one of their parodies. As the above tweet by Jonathan Weisman did.
Today NYT Pitchbot wrote what will surely be a future article by a NYT reporter like Weisman:
“Is the earth flat? Some say it is, some say it isn’t. They’re both right, and yet both wrong. In the fog of our bifurcated politics, it’s hard to say one way or the other. ”
And the follow up tweet from a reader with a likely upcoming NYT story:
“Arguments over planet’s true shape inflame partisan passions
by Peter Baker”
NYC public school parent
Quite unusual for you, you had me rolling over laughing.
“By Peter Baker”
As Dean Baker no relation said about Trump, possibly in 2016 . “As despicable as he is he isn’t wrong about everything ” The difference, we should hold the Press accountable Publication by Publication and article by article within those Publications. Not paint the entire institution with a broad brush. Which brings us back to Diane’s original post . The verdict is in . If you holler fire in a theater and people are killed and injured you are criminally liable. Murdoch et-al should be in a cold dark cell with all of the above entertainers.
Joel,
You might want to check the gratuitous condescending tone you frequently use when you respond to me. I have a thick skin and I always ignore it, but I think it’s a shame because you have good, intelligent comments to read, and your snide, gratuitous comments specifically directed to me detract from them. Are they necessary?
But I appreciate what you write very much. So if you feel it is necessary to add a little personal dig to me, carry on. I will just ignore them and continue to read your comments because I find your comments to be exceptionally informative. Even if I disagree, I always appreciate your well-reasoned presentation of why you believe what you do. Thank you.
Traitorousness seems to be quite lucrative in the United States today. That Aussie billionaire pays well.
We need a stronger FCC and stronger regulation of broadcasting. Outright lying to the public should not be sanctioned. But instead, since Reagan, we’ve allowed broadcasters to abuse their licenses. To have any kind of democracy, we must have an moderately well informed public. And, we must have a reasonably well educated public. People only know what they are “told,” starting in schools, then continuing through adulthood, as they participate in society.
Same as it ever was,
During the housing bubble that led to the ,2008 financial collapse , the people on Wallstreet were exchanging emails about what a bunch of suckers the people investing n their fraudulent derivative packages were.
While one might conclude these people are just dishonest, not dumb because they realize that they are doing, that’s not entirely correct. They exchanged the emails that hoisted them by their own petard. That was pretty dumb.
We are about to see an exponential explosion in false information from chatbots like ChatGPT which regularly output demonstrably false “facts” and in many cases literally just make stuff up out of whole cloth. Some of the stuff these bots output is so botshit crazy that people have called it “hallucination”.
that’s not to say the information is always false, but without actually knowing ahead of time or without verifying it’s impossible to tell when it isn’t and when it is (which sort of defeats the whole purpose of asking the bot). And the bots write so well and with such assurance that it’s very easy to be taken in by false answers that are not obviously hallucinations.
Of course, the bots are not really “lying” because that would require actually understanding of what they are writing, something that they are fundamentally incapable of doing.
Aware of all this, both Google and Microsoft are nonetheless moving at full speed to integrate their bots into their search engines.
Results so far were entirely predictable. Google’s bot engine output an incorrect very basic statement about the Webb telescope in a demonstration presumably to show how “great” Google’s new bot mediated search engine is. And Microsoft’s bot conjoined engine (basically Bing joined at the hip with ChatGPT) was hallucinating and talking back so much that Microsoft had to restrict it’s use.
In short, internet search with these brilliant AIs is about to become complete botshit.
I think I will stick with Duckduckgo, which also doesn’t save my search history.
I don’t think teachers will be able to accept the authenticity of anything written outside the classroom in the new age of AI. I assume some tech gurus are devising a program to determine whether an essay is AI.
I doubt most of them even care.
They are so enamoured with the Chatbots that they have produced that they don’t even seem to notice the BS these things output on a regular basis.
Many of them have essentially given up on developing a truly intelligent computer and instead settled for a version of artificial intelligence that harkens back to the Turing test definition, which basically means if it can fool a human into thinking it’s another human they are conversing with, it means the computer is intelligent.
Famed AI researcher Marvin Minsky once commented that the Turning test of intelligence was basically a joke because it is so easy to fool people.
It’s good to have the emails among the FOX on-air talkers, admitting that they never believed what they told the public. They think their viewers are stupid.
“You may find yourself. . . “
All those photos of Tucker Carlson makes for a very annoying article, by the way.
But it would be annoying no matter who was being quoted (just not AS annoying)
I hope this does not become the journalistic norm.
Eleven images of Tucker Carlson is more than I wish to see in eleven different articles, to say nothing of one.