Faux "News" 3: Falling Out Of Favor With Trumpsters

[47of74]

2 hours ago, AnywhereButHere said:

Watching Fox News half heartedly trying to shovel shit back into the horse is mildly entertaining. 

HA!  Bet the horse would just love that.  I've just had several ridiculous images pop into my head, all of which end with the horse saying fuck you.

Legal experts think the lawsuit has real teeth to it

Quote

"This is the definition of defamation."

That's what CNN senior legal analyst Laura Coates told Erin Burnett Thursday night when discussing Smartmatic's $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, three of the network's hosts (Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro), Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell.

"When you are making statements that are knowingly false, and you make them with malice, and you actually tarnish reputations and it has a financial consequence — that's why you have defamation lawsuits in the first place," Coates said, explaining the seriousness of the lawsuit.

Coates is not alone in believing Smartmatic's suit poses real threat to Fox. University of Georgia media law professor Jonathan Peters noted on Twitter that "libel law makes it difficult to prevail where the plaintiff is a public figure and/or where the speech involved a matter of public concern. In various ways, these will be key issues in litigation." But, Peters added that he believed the "smart money" is on Smartmatic.

 

Oh if people want to read the entire complaint you can find it here;

https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SMARTMATIC-fox.pdf

I'm working through it right now.

 

[JMarie]

On 2/5/2021 at 8:07 PM, onekidanddone said:

It is all about the Benjamins. All the times Louie Louie has spread hate and lies the Spox powers that be were perfectly fine to let him spread the bile. Once he became a financial liability ? 

I’m surprised he was number one. I thought it was Tucky. Speaking of Tuck, when are he, Laura and Sean going to be slapped with a lawsuit?

Dobbs was #1 on Fox Business, a separate channel. There's not a lot of selection over there. Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo (also named in the lawsuit), Stuart Varney, Neil Cavuto (was on Fox News eons ago), ex-MTV VJ Kennedy. No big names, and infomercials during overnight and weekend hours.

Edited February 7, 2021 by JMarie
spelling

[GreyhoundFan]

Bye, Lou, We won't miss you.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Aw, Lou's fee-fees were hurt: "Lou Dobbs is lashing out at Fox on Twitter for dropping his show"

Quote

Lou Dobbs is not taking his cancellation by Fox lying down.

On Friday night, Fox News Media management canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the most-watched show on Fox Business Network. No reason was given, though the network repeated a statement from October that it “regularly considers programming changes” and had been planning to “launch new formats as appropriate post-election.”

But Dobbs, 75, who is one of the network’s most outspoken allies of former president Donald Trump, has been on something of a tear ever since, retweeting dozens of tweets supporting him, including many that criticize Fox. He even boosted a tweet from a supporter suggesting that Fox News viewers “ditch Fox for @OANN,” the far-right network and would-be competitor to Fox News.

“FOX in a tailspin," radio host Mark Simone said in one of the tweets that was reposted by Dobbs. In another tweet that was shared by Dobbs, conservative Carmine Sabia wrote: “Fox News is desperate to be accepted by people who will not accept them. Cancelling @LouDobbs is not going to satisfy the blood lust of the rage mob.”

“Judging by his retweets, I would say he is furious with Fox, and he has every right to be,” Sabia told The Washington Post in a message.

It’s all the more surprising considering that Dobbs remains under contract with Fox even as his show has been dropped. The Los Angeles Times, which broke the story, reported that “he will in all likelihood not appear on the company’s networks again.”

Asked specifically on Monday whether Dobbs remains under contract, Fox News communications boss Irena Briganti told The Post in an email, “He has not been terminated.”

Dobbs’s cancellation has left many Fox staffers mystified, considering his show’s viewership, leaving many to speculate that it could be connected to Dobbs’s potential liability in a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed last week. The lawsuit accuses him and several Fox colleagues of spreading “disinformation” about election-technology company Smartmatic as part of an effort to keep then-President Trump’s hopes for a second term alive.

In addition to comments made directly by Dobbs, the lawsuit focuses on comments made by Dobbs’s guests, including Trump-affiliated lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. “Mr. Dobbs did not try to stop Ms. Powell from spreading disinformation about Smartmatic,” the suit alleges. "He and others at Fox News had agreed to join Ms. Powell and Mr. Giuliani to spread the disinformation. So, Mr. Dobbs closed his shows as he started it: endorsing Ms. Powell’s claim that Smartmatic is to blame for ‘massive corruption across the country.’ ”

But the suit also names Fox hosts Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, both of whom are still with Fox and hosted their shows this past weekend as scheduled.

Beyond his activity on Twitter, Dobbs is more or less staying quiet, declining to comment when reached by The Post Friday night.

Political consultant Dick Morris, a former Fox News contributor who was dropped by the network eight years ago, said he spoke with Dobbs on Saturday. While the conversation was off-the-record, Morris said that Dobbs laughed after he told him, “Welcome to the Fox alumni association.”

Newsmax, a smaller, further-to-the-right cable channel that has been trying to win over Trump supporters frustrated by what they see as Fox’s insufficient support of the ex-president, took jabs at Fox about Dobbs’s cancellation.

“Fox News is just not the old Fox News that it once was,” Newsmax host Rob Finnerty said on air Monday. “Get this: The highest-rated host on Fox Business suddenly had his show cancelled on Friday after 10 years. . . . The problem? Well, Lou Dobbs is a Trump supporter."

And some of Dobbs’s fans on Facebook vowed to leave Fox over the decision.

“Fox was on the bubble for me. They are off my list now,” one supporter wrote on Facebook. “Time to turn off the channel,” wrote another.

 

[clueliss]

Maybe he should talk to Melissa Francis about getting dropped by Faux/Faux Business.  Because she worked without a contract for some time when the dumped her.  And funny how the dumping happened long about the time she filed a lawsuit due to unfair wages. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Yeah, it's always the Dems' fault....in Faux's eyes.

[GreyhoundFan]

Look, boys and girls, you can fuck up for decades and still get your own TV show:

[GreyhoundFan]

More WTAFery from Carlson:

 

[Alisamer]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

More WTAFery from Carlson:

 

So... wait. The former guy and his 3rd wife who is frequently seen slapping his hand away - a couple that seem to barely tolerate each other in public - are the real thing. Even though her valentines day tweet didn't reference the former guy at all. And that guy seems to forget that he has a son with her.

But the Bidens, who clearly seem to adore each other, are a PR sham.

Right. Sure.

Yet more evidence that Rs are living in opposite world.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Tucker Carlson’s ‘we could not find’ QAnon comment was worse than it appears"

Quote

The clip that quickly traveled across social media was bizarre, as is often the case with clips that travel quickly across social media. Here was Tucker Carlson, the brightest star in Fox News’s prime-time opinion lineup, seemingly denying that QAnon exists.

“So it’s worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information — this ‘disinformation,’ as we’ll call it,” Carlson says in the clip from his show on Tuesday night. “So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it.”

Stripped of context, it’s a nonsensical claim. There is probably not any actual individual who is “Q,” the anonymous source of various random allegations and cryptic comments that serve as the basis of the quasi-religious conspiracy theory QAnon. But there’s no question that the QAnon movement exists, that those edicts exist and that the effect has been poisonous to the American political conversation. “QAnon” isn’t a website, but the conspiracy theory is centered around online content and online communities.

Fox News maintains that Carlson wasn’t literally looking for QAnon but was, instead, saying that CNN and others in the media do more damage than QAnon — a far more toxic and ridiculous claim.

Carlson was making a joke about how the “disinformation” that the mainstream media laments doesn’t have a centralized source, while the media’s own disinformation does. But the root of the joke was deeply ironic, given that it sat squarely in a sweeping effort by Carlson to offer disinformation about one of his favorite targets of scorn: concern about systemic racism in the United States.

In broad strokes, Carlson’s argument was one that itself could have come from a fervent QAnon adherent.

“Freelance thinking is what they hate most; it’s a threat to their monopoly,” he said of the media. “They can’t say that out loud, so instead they call it ‘disinformation.’ ” He asked viewers to imagine working as a mechanic when GM produced a car that can be easily repaired at home.

“You’d be upset,” he said. “That’s how CNN feels about the Internet. It’s exposing their scam. Naturally, they’re a little irrational about it.”

I’ve spoken to a number of QAnon adherents at Trump rallies, and this is their same line: They are doing their own research online and are no longer constrained by media gatekeepers. Of course, one role played by media gatekeepers is to point out and uproot the nonsense that has grown like weeds in the unfiltered Q universe.

The media will say that something you really want to believe isn’t true. Ignore the media and engage in a little “freelance thinking,” and you can believe it to be true to your heart’s content. This isn’t to say that the media should dictate what you believe, of course, but it does at least serve as something of an anchor to reality. QAnon adherents, however, often like to drift free.

Carlson endorses this idea that CNN and the Democratic Party are purveyors of disinformation who should be ignored for the same reason that Q makes the case: It builds loyalty to him and his politics. Chief among Carlson’s political beliefs is that concern about racial bias and white nationalism in the United States is either overblown or a point of leverage for attacking him and people like him. This was the focus of his effort to prove that CNN et al. have engaged in disinformation.

He cited a report in which self-identified liberals were more likely to significantly overstate the number of Black Americans killed by police or to overestimate how many Black Americans were killed by police relative to other racial groups. This was to Carlson an example of how disinformation — here, apparently about the nature of police shootings — can “hurt people” since, among other things, it “makes people stupid.”

So he went looking for the source of this “disinformation.” His riff:

“Public policy can change dramatically on the basis of things people think they know but don’t actually know, and we have seen that, a lot. Entire police departments got defunded. So it’s worth finding out where the public is getting all this false information — this ‘disinformation,’ as we’ll call it.”

"So we checked. We spent all day trying to locate the famous QAnon, which in the end we learned is not even a website. If it’s out there, we could not find it. Then we checked Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter feed because we have heard she traffics in misinformation, CNN told us. But nothing there. Next we called our many friends in the tightknit ‘intel community.’ Could Vladimir Putin be putting this stuff out there? The Proud Boys? Alex Jones? Who is lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other and certain to destroy our core institutions? "

“Well, none of the above, actually. It wasn’t Marjorie Taylor Greene. It was cable news. It was politicians talking on TV. They’re the ones spreading disinformation to Americans. Maybe they’re from QAnon.”

It’s an impressive feat as a cable-news host to make a lengthy joke about how cable news is a key source of disinformation and to apparently unwittingly splice into that joke at least two bits of your own disinformation. For example, Carlson asks who is “lying to America in ways that are certain to make us hate each other” shortly after “joking” that maybe Russian President Vladimir Putin is behind disinformation. Of course, Russia was demonstrably behind a years-long effort specifically focused on trying to make Americans hate each other, an effort manifested in social media posts meant to exacerbate existing societal tensions. Russia did almost exactly what Carlson is trying to laugh off as ludicrous. (And don’t even get us started on conspiracy-theory king Alex Jones.)

Carlson also suggests that “disinformation” like that (rather dubious) report about police killings led to “entire police departments being defunded.” That’s not true. Some cities cut some police funding after last summer’s protests. Most didn’t. Minneapolis, the epicenter of those protests, explored disbanding its department but decided not to. The mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., this week proposed replacing the police department with a different agency, but that hasn’t been implemented — if it even meets Carlson’s description.

Again, this subject is Carlson’s dogged focus. He’s desperate to cast issues of race as non-issues. To that end, the “defund” line was minor compared to where he took his complaints next.

The disinformation, he said, was “cable news” and “politicians talking on TV,” a point he reinforced by showing clips meant to prove his point.

One clip showed Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) talking about Black people being killed by police. The next showed then-Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) talking about training police on issues of race. The segment ended with then-candidate Joe Biden talking about not needing to warn his children about how to behave around police.

“So not only are huge numbers of unarmed African Americans murdered every year because of their race,” Carlson said, after the clips played. “To deny that or question that fact is to effectively participate in those killings yourself. Denying this is denying them life, as Kamala Harris put it.”

This is just garbage. The quote from Harris (which Carlson likes enough to have played it multiple times in the past) had her saying that there should be “training for police officers on implicit racial bias and procedural justice. Because to deny it exists is to deny folks liberty, and, in many cases, life.”

She did not say that “huge numbers of unarmed African Americans” are “murdered every year because of their race” and that to “question that fact is to effectively participate in those killings yourself.” She said that police should be trained to recognize the ways in which implicit — that is, non-obvious — bias can lead to false incarcerations or fatal encounters with law enforcement.

What Carlson is engaged in here is disinformation. It is an attempt to falsely portray events to serve a narrative. His joke about how QAnon and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) weren’t sources of disinformation was true only insofar as he is looking only for sources of disinformation that might specifically lead to false perceptions about police shootings. But more broadly, his joke was in service to his own disinformation efforts about who can and cannot be trusted for reliable information.

As Fox News’s own lawyers said in response to a defamation lawsuit Carlson faced last year, Carlson himself is not such a reliable source. Viewers, they said, “arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism” about Carlson’s claims because they understand that he is exaggerating and engaged in “non-literal commentary.”

Except, of course, that many don’t. And except, of course, that Carlson himself in no way sees himself as anything other than a champion of his own reality.

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, a softball interview of a hardcore trumpster on Faux. What a surprise. /s

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because false culture wars are more important than news to Faux viewers:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Ok, so now they're blaming Obama. I guess Hillary's emails are next.

[fraurosena]

Good grief, they really are clutching at straws for lack of actual content, aren't they?

I really hope at some point something can be done about wilfully spreading lies and disinformation and purporting it to be news. At minimum, there should be warnings before and after each show, that says something like this:

This is an ENTERTAINMENT programme. It is not NOT NEWS, and NOTHING shown in this programme is based in actual FACT. Everything you are about to see is based on the personal views, opinions, speculation and fantasy of the production crew and presenters.

[Audrey2]

A Trump loving friend texted me outraged yesterday because President Biden's proclamation for Read Across America didn't mention Dr. Seuss (it is held on his birthday or the closest school day). I found his outrage disingenuous for 3 reasons:

1. Read Across America was first started in 1998 by the National Education Association (NEA) one of the largest teachers' unions in America. Talk to a Trumpublican just a short time and you will hear them spew their hatred for unions. How can they support a day started by a union?

2. Neither President Clinton nor President George W. Bush added Dr. Seuss's name to the proclamation. That tradition first started with President Obama. Aren't the "Cancel Culture" complainers the ones who want to cancel everything President Obama did, including President Obama himself? Then why should they complain about canceling a tradition he started?

3. The Dr. Seuss Foundation stopped supporting/lending its name to Read Across America in 2018. My understanding is that its support just wasn't renewed. I don't hear these yahoos complaining when "cancel culture" changes the name of their favorite sports venue because the naming rights are up and another company pays more for the naming rights.

I'm done ranting now.

[Cartmann99]

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Someone needs to put some Xanax in her wine:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Look who woke up to be stupid on Faux:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I don't know about you, but I don't give a flying fuck about Potato Head toys. I'm sick of the repugs using these stupid culture wars to distract from the fact that they are the cult of trump.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Shamity is always down for an idiotic conspiracy theory:

[clueliss]

It was a toss up as to where to post this.  But Faux is Faux so...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Jen smacks down doofus:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Faux, always right on top of the important news of the day. /s