Corporate Media Is The Misinformation Problem

[Chip]

Are those named in the suit (Bartiromo, Dobbs, et al) personally liable for damages?

Or is it a corporate thing?

[TSherbs]

Are those named in the suit (Bartiromo, Dobbs, et al) personally liable for damages?

Or is it a corporate thing?

I don't know. But with Murdoch emphasising that it was the show hosts (and not the corporation or himself) making the decisions, I suppose that the finger-pointing will naturally start to go from the hosts to the producers behind the scenes. This all seems like legal jockeying for leverage and protection before the pressure to settle really sets in. But I don't know the legal finery of it. Everyone is scrambling to cover their butts, no doubt.

[Chip]

It's happening as we speak. A Fox News producer filed suit against her employer claiming that she was pressured to act against her own interests and sense of rightness, and is now being set up by the network as a scapegoat. I'll see if I can get a link to the atory.

[TSherbs]

It's happening as we speak. A Fox News producer filed suit against her employer claiming that she was pressured to act against her own interests and sense of rightness, and is now being set up by the network as a scapegoat. I'll see if I can get a link to the atory.

I linked it, above

[Chip]

‘It’s all about trolling’: how far-right influencers are shaping Republican narrative

With the old media order losing ground, a new cadre of extreme voices has emerged, precipitating a GOP shift to Maga populism

David Smith
26 Mar 2023

He has a platform that most politicians would envy. But Jack Posobiec is not to be found on America’s major TV networks or in its newspapers. He is among a cadre of online influencers who now shape the far right – and could help decide the Republican presidential primary race in 2024.

“Two operatives made the very same prediction, that Posobiec will matter as much to future GOP voters as Washington Post columnist George Will did to Republicans a generation ago,” political journalist David Weigel wrote in a Semafor newsletter last week. That observation prompted Alyssa Farah Griffin, a CNN political commentator and former White House official, to tweet in response: “We’re doomed.”

Such expectations speak volumes about the breakdown of the old media order, flawed as it was, and the rise of new and often extreme voices in the digital age. It also reflects a parallel shift in the Republican party from country club to “Make America great again” populism.

Will, 81, edited the conservative National Review magazine, won a Pulitzer prize for commentary in 1977, was described by the Wall Street Journal as “perhaps the most powerful journalist in America” and quit the Republican party over Donald Trump in 2016.

Posobiec, 38, gained prominence as a pro-Trump activist during the 2016 election. He promoted bogus conspiracy theories such as “Pizzagate”, which held that Democrats were running a child sex and torture ring beneath a pizzeria in Washington. He is a senior editor at the far-right news and commentary website Human Events. Posobiec has used Twitter – where his 2 million followers include representatives, senators and journalists – to promote Russian military intelligence operations, pushed false claims of election fraud and collaborated with white nationalists, Proud Boys and neo-Nazis, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit legal advocacy organisation. Yet it is Posobiec and others like him who are already helping to set the narrative for the Republican presidential primary. Posobiec’s recent online activity includes crude attacks on Antifa, the New York Times’s 1619 Project and transgender rights (“Genital Gestapo”) – ready-made talking points for candidates.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who belonged to the conservative Tea Party, recognises the changes of a fragmented media landscape. “Ten years ago, going on CNN and MSNBC, you had great influence,” he said. “Now not a lot of people watch any more. More people will listen to me if I go on somebody’s podcast or something. It’s a completely different world now where influencers have great say.”

But at what cost? Walsh added: “It has nothing to do with ideas. It has nothing to do with intellect. It’s all about trolling people, getting clicks and being outrageous. There’s a whole cast of characters that has sprung up over the last five to six years and they have great influence now. The Jack Posobiecs and all the rest of these guys are not fringe; they speak for a big chunk of the base.”

The growth of partisan echo chambers was evident in last year’s midterm elections as Republicans, in particular, snubbed the mainstream media in favour of rightwing outlets and often refused to debate their Democratic opponents. And earlier this month, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland, the former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon loomed large, drawing crowds as he opined loudly on Real America’s Voice, a channel that is popular with the base but little known outside it.

Bannon’s War Room podcast was named the number one spreader of misinformation among political talkshows in a recent study by the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington. Yet its guests have included prominent Republicans in Congress such as Elise Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Leading online influencers appear united in their support for Trumpism, and rejection of the Republican establishment, but divided over the fate of the party nomination for 2024. Early shots have been fired in what could be a ferocious battle between them.

Trump sympathisers include Alex Bruesewitz, Mike Cernovich and Laura Loomer as well as a Twitter user known as “Catturd” and the former president’s own son, Don Jr. Among supporters of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida who is expected to run, are John Cardillo and Bill Mitchell. Another influencer, Chaya Raichik, has dined with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida (“He seems nice!”) but also disclosed that, when she was revealed to be behind a provocative Twitter account called Libs of Tik Tok, she received a call from DeSantis’s team offering her a guest house if she needed to go into hiding.

Other rightwing personalities such as Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens augment their social media presence with countless in-person appearances at conferences, on television and at university campuses. The “owning the libs” talking points that circulate in this ecosystem frequently work their way into the discourse of the conservative network Fox News.

David Litt, an author and former speechwriter for Barack Obama, said: “This is like research and development for Fox. If something gets enough traction with the online audience, then I wouldn’t be surprised if you start to see Fox hosts piggybacking on that once they think that’s where their audience is headed.”

Posobiec’s “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory had real world consequences when a man travelled to Washington and fired an assault rifle inside the relevant pizza restaurant, later receiving a four-year prison sentence. Litt said it was alarming that, despite such incidents, Republicans have welcomed far-right influencers into their “big tent” rather than condemning them.

“The threat of violence is out there and the flames are being fanned by a lot of these ‘influencers’. We wouldn’t have called David Duke an influencer back in the day. We would have been very clear about who he was and the danger that he posed to our democracy and to the society that the rest of us would like to continue to enjoy living in, regardless of which party is in charge.”

As for Will, who is approaching a half-century at the Washington Post, his column this week discussed freedom of speech and unauthorised immigration. It may not matter much to the Republican primary. Walsh, the ex-congressman, observed: “The base no longer knows who the fuck George Will is and that’s an absolute shame.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/26/jack-posobiec-digital-influencers-far-right-republicans-trolling?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other[/URL]

[TSherbs]

Good article. The landscape has been changing for decades.

The part on alt-right roots for some of these people reminded me of your question about dneal's avatar. I've always taken it to be a stylized green frog, a la Pepe the Frog. But maybe that's my projection from his having said that he chats at those sites. Maybe it's a green person in a lotus position at peace ✌️.

[Chip]

Is it Art?

[TSherbs]

I once saw an exhibit of a collection of paintings of corpses in various stages of dissection.

So, sure.

[dneal]

Good article. The landscape has been changing for decades.

The part on alt-right roots for some of these people reminded me of your question about dneal's avatar. I've always taken it to be a stylized green frog, a la Pepe the Frog. But maybe that's my projection from his having said that he chats at those sites. Maybe it's a green person in a lotus position at peace ✌️.

Speaking of misinformation, dneal doesn’t chat at Pepe the Frog (i.e.:4chan) sites.

It’s a headstock logo for Froggy Bottom guitars. There’s a whole thread about people’s avatars.

You woke morons sure do love your alt-right conspiracies.

"There's a Proud Boy behind every tree!!!"

[Chuck Naill]

Good on you for owning a Froggy Bottom @dneal.

[dneal]

Chuck - it’s a little L In Adirondack and mahogany. Designed from a re-top of an old Martin 1-17.

Michael Millard is now technically retired, having built guitars for over 50 years. Some amazing instruments have come out of a shed in Vermont. I’ve been fortunate enough to have owned 3.

michael-millard.jpg


I just have the L now, and a Thomas Rein 00. He’s a classical builder who dabbles in steel strings on occasion.

[Chuck Naill]

Chuck - it’s a little L In Adirondack and mahogany. Designed from a re-top of an old Martin 1-17.

Michael Millard is now technically retired, having built guitars for over 50 years. Some amazing instruments have come out of a shed in Vermont. I’ve been fortunate enough to have owned 3.

michael-millard.jpg


I just have the L now, and a Thomas Rein 00. He’s a classical builder who dabbles in steel strings on occasion.

Very nice, @dneal. I love red spruce also. Two of my fiddlers and one mandolin is topped with Smoky Mountain (1995) or West Virginia (1991) red spruce both sourced from John Arnold.

I have a 1990 John Arnold 12 fret he made me and a 2004 Martin GE that John greatly modified to put to pre war specs.

[dneal]

Very nice. John Arnold builds fine guitars, and posts frequently on the AGF.

[Chip]

Fox News Fires Producer Who Accused Network of Coercion

The producer, Abby Grossberg, has said the network pushed her to give a false deposition in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit.

Katie Robertson
March 27, 2023

Fox News Media has fired a producer who last week accused the network of discrimination and of coercing her into providing misleading testimony in a blockbuster defamation case, according to court documents filed on Monday.

Lawyers for the producer, Abby Grossberg, who had worked for the hosts Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson, said in the complaints that she was fired on Friday in retaliation for a pair of lawsuits she had filed against the company several days earlier. In those suits, Ms. Grossberg claimed that Fox lawyers had coached her to deflect blame from executives and male hosts in her deposition for Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox. Dominion says Fox’s coverage repeatedly aired false claims about the company’s election equipment in saying it contributed to widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Ms. Grossberg said in her suits, filed in New York and Delaware, that she and Ms. Bartiromo were being set up to take the fall for Fox’s actions because of the company’s culture of misogyny and discrimination at Fox. She claimed that she endured a toxic environment at Fox and that male producers had harassed her.

As part of the legal filings on Monday, Ms. Grossberg’s lawyers included her errata sheet, which witnesses use to correct mistakes in their depositions. Ms. Grossberg changed her answers to several questions from her deposition in the Dominion case. In one, about whether she trusted the producers at Fox whom she worked with, she changed her answer from “yes” to “no.” The producers, she said in her revised comments, are “activists, not journalists, and impose their political agendas on the programming.”

A Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement that the company’s lawyers had advised Ms. Grossberg that “while she was free to file whatever legal claims she wished,” she was not allowed to disclose privileged information about the Dominion case. “We were clear that if she violated our instructions, Fox would take appropriate action including termination.” The spokeswoman added that the company would continue to “vigorously defend” itself against Ms. Grossberg’s claims, “which are riddled with false allegations against Fox and our employees.”

Ms. Grossberg’s firing was reported earlier by Variety.

Parisis G. Filippatos, a lawyer for Ms. Grossberg, said in a statement: “The frivolous litigation tactics by Fox News punctuate its blatant disregard for the law, which is further underscored by the company’s recent retaliatory firing of Ms. Grossberg.”

The Dominion defamation case is scheduled for trial in April. Fox has denied any wrongdoing, and both parties have asked the judge to rule on the case in their favor before a trial, and are awaiting his decision.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/27/b...e=articleShare

[TSherbs]

that motherTucker is out at Fox

any more?

[Chip]

They told him when he arrived at the studio Monday. His head producer also got fired.

No prior notice. No chance to arrange a farewell appearance. Nada but the boot.

The lying cost Uncle Rupie a heap of money, with more to come. He's no doubt fuming and gobbling antacid tablets.

He can't exactly fire himself. So somebody had to get whacked.

[TSherbs]

yup, the Smartmatic suit is pending yet.

Maybe this is preparatory to actually suing some of these producers and on camera liars for their part of the liability in it all. Murdoch was quoted more than once, saying, basically, those people did it.

I guess we'll see.

[TSherbs]

I heard that the last thing motherTucker did on air at Fox was eat pizza.

[dneal]

I heard that the last thing motherTucker did on air at Fox was eat pizza.

The “conversation” you offer, for consideration.

[TSherbs]

I'm curious how many of those on-air persons named in the first suit are still working for Fox. I haven't found a list yet.

But this is an interesting article on the liability to shareholders that Fox is now apparently vulnerable to. And there are likely several more suits coming, perhaps even a battle between Fox and its insurance company (if Fox claims that they need to pay up on a policy of some kind):

https://time.com/6272910/dominion-se...ews-nightmare/