THREAD
The latest filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation suit against Fox nails something critics have long argued for.
Fox is not a news organization. It's something else.
But what is this other thing? In this thread, I will try to answer that.
Next slide, please. 1/
The Dominion suit establishes that Fox stars (like Tucker Carlson) and executives (like CEO Suzanne Scott) were fearful and enraged when some of their own people blundered into delivering a true and accurate report about the 2020 election.
Think about that for a moment. When its own talent reported the facts truthfully, the result was an atmosphere of crisis in the company.
This is one way we know that Fox is not specifically a news organization.
There are others... 2/
Erik Wemple of the Washington Post shows how reponsible behavior by a wayward presenter, Neil Cavuto, was treated by company executives as a "brand threat."
If responsible journalism can be a threat to your brand, then it's not a news brand you have cultivated.
It's something different. 3/
Below is Brian Stelter with another story from Dominion's latest filing.
A truthtelling journalist at Fox was thought by Tucker Carlson to have committed a firing offense. Her crime: seeing no evidence for Trump's stolen election claims she said on Twitter "there is no evidence." 4/
Click through to see Jacqui Heinrich's "crime" and you will see what I mean.
https://twitter.com/jacquiheinrich/status/1327354119439470592?s=46&t=nr4aN_Oyhjkkw-TifvNatA
It is a very careful, limited statement. Mild pushback. But Tucker Carlson felt panic over it, and demanded her head.
This kind of behavior exposes a weakness for Fox.
Keepers of a resentment machine— for that is what Fox is — may suddenly find the resentment coming straight for them. 5/
“Dominion Voting AND top election infrastructure officials categorically deny this. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history... There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.””
"Sidney Powell is lying," said Tucker Carlson to his producer.
"Sidney Powell is a bit nuts," said Laura Ingraham to her colleagues.
But they did not share this view with their audience.
Defenders of Fox get a lot mileage out of describing its evening line-up as the "opinion side" of the operation.
But that's not accurate either. About Sidney Powell the prime time stars withheld their opinions. Meanwhile the bookers at Fox placed her on show after show. 6/
See: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/20/1158223099/fox-news-dominion-wackadoodle-election-fraud-claim
If Fox is not a news organization — to me it's not — and it is not "opinion," either (because the Dominion filing shows the hosts are frightened to share their opinions) then what is it, exactly?
Some common answers I receive:
It's entertainment, a lot like professional wrestling.
It's propaganda; what else do you need to know?
No, Jay, it's just ratings.
7/
When I use the term "Fox," I mean the commercial arm of a political movement that has taken control of the Republican Party.
The product is resentment news. By which I mean: Current ways to resent. New people to resent. "Here's something they call Critical Race Theory. You should resent it."
Success in a market like that makes for political power. That's the Fox I know. A kind of machine. 8/
By "machine" I mean to evoke both the steady manufacture of politicized grievance for fun and profit, and the kind of machine through which Richard Daley rose to power in the mid-twentieth century. A machine in the sense of the Cook County Democratic Machine.
Again: that's not a news organization. 9/
Dominion's filings describe a time when the audience took charge of the Fox resentment machine.
Power traded hands for a moment. Viewer backlash from the Fox newsroom's correct call in Arizona felt ruinous to the people at the top of the network.
Stars with their own shows and executives nominally in charge of Fox saw how weak their positions were.
Read Brian Stelter in the Atlantic about this: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-dominion-voting-lawsuit-2020-election-conspiracy/673111/
10/
I said it earlier: Confident keepers of a resentment machine can find the resentment coming straight at them.
The Republican party has to continually adapt to that. Fox has to accept that its powers are limited.
Meanwhile, the Fox audience can veto events that in the rest of the world unquestionably occurred. 11/
Though it is styled as one, Fox is not a news organization. And it's not opinion, either. It is something else: Power formation by means of resentment news.
But the formula doesn't always work. The crowd seethes back when the machine miscalculates, generating its own kind of power.
Reactionary is the right term for it. 13/
The power structure at Fox called it "respecting" the audience when they stoked its false and pathetic belief in a stolen election.
"Showing 'respect' to viewers by actively misinforming them," as Stelter put it, may stop them from raging at you.
But it is not the behavior of a news company. 15/
For more on the Dominion filing and what it says about Fox, see the actual document here: https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/redacted-documents-in-dominion-fox-news-case/dca5e3880422426f/full.pdf It has some redactions.
This thread: https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1626388079714922506
16/
Thanks. Worth reading.
Not nearly as dry as most legal documents:
E.g. "Later in the day, Ron checks in: How's it going [with] the kooks?"
Fox News hosts & ownership were worried about three things.
1. Stock prices
2. Ratings compared to CNN
3. Competition from Newsmax
None of these are "the news".
It reveals yet more links to major Republican donors & shareholders.
Chris Ruddy, owner of Newsmax has close ties to Scaife, founder of the odious Claremont Institute from which Eastman hails.
Major shareholders in Fox News are Vanguard, & other GOP donors.
They're the ones most invested in the Fox News "brand".
The usual Republican donors funding an American anti-democracy movement. Vanguard. Blackrock.
https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?symb=FOX&subView=institutional
It's come to my attention that Palantir has been contracted by the Biden Administration to set CDC policy. One has to wonder if they're the true architects of Biden The RIPer's Covid facing atrocities.
@noyes @StefLaw @jayrosen_nyu @CassandraZeroCovid
Palantir is attempting to privatize the NHS in the UK.
Think of the trove of blackmail & extortion opportunities available to black ops domestic espionage from access to medical records.
Palantir is very successful with the "covid is over" disinformation narrative in both the UK and the USA.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/06/nhs_england_palantir_contract_extention/
https://www.ft.com/content/a9228ce5-8662-474a-9b77-ca563cc5080a
@StefLaw Who is/are Sacks here?
@dredmorbius @StefLaw @jayrosen_nyu
David Sacks, member of the PayPal Mafia, shares many of Thiel & Musk's views towards democracy.
They invented the word "cabal" to describe these Republican billionaire donors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/02/the-apocalyptic-delusions-of-the-silicon-valley-elite
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/politics/republican-donors-rockbridge-network-trump.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/168125/david-sacks-elon-musk-peter-thiel
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/are-elon-musks-right-hand-men-twitter-s-lot-men-rcna55136
1/2
In case you missed it: The Dominion lawsuit against Fox (I do only one ICUMI each week, on Mondays, because I put a lot of work into my weekend blog posts) For this weekend's blog post, I wrote up the stuff I've been posting about the Dominion defamation case against Fox News Network. https://terikanefield.com/dominion-voting-machines-v-fox-news-and-more/ This should answer some of the questions I've been getting.
@jayrosen_nyu
But according to Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott herself: “Sean texted me—he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in NEWS. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.”
So now it's on record that "Fox News" in fact considers themselves "News," not entertainment. May they be held so accountable.
Quote: 'There are two very different types of respect; respect for a person as a human being, and respect for a person as an authority. But ... people often talk as if they were the same thing.
...
when someone in authority says “If you don’t respect me, I won’t respect you.” What they’re actually saying (and justifying) is “If you don’t respect me as an authority, I won’t respect you as a human being.”'
@Andrewhinton and Fox would be right to approach it like that. Their audience are baby boomers who think that, by virtue of being older, they deserve a very particular kind of respect: not one that should be extended to you and me, but one that demands their worldview is left unquestioned and unexamined. They are exactly the parents you're talking about.
No room for growth there. If you push them to think they'll hit you with their cane.
@jayrosen_nyu Dwight MacDonald pointed this out ... 70 years ago, in his "Theory of Mass Culture":
The upper classes, who begin by using it to make money from the crude tastes of the masses and to dominate them politically, end by finding their own culture attacked and even threatened with destruction by the instrument they have thoughtlessly employed. (The same irony may be observed in modern politics, where most swords seem to have two edges; thus Nazism began as a tool of the big bourgeoisie and the army Junkers but ended by using them as its tools.)
https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDonald_-_A_Theory_of_Mass_Culture.pdf
It's the old problem of grabbing the tiger by the tail.
#DwightMacdonald #MassCulture #media #FoxNews #RupertMurdoch #LachlanMurdoch
They cultivated an audience w/o critical thinking, able to reach any conclusion in spite of any set of facts.
When someone else whispers something they don't like....it's problematic to convince your audience they're wrong
Or if you just, like, lie all the time.
@jayrosen_nyu Is this what happened when most "news organizations" failed to properly report on Hunter Biden's laptop days before the election?
If it wasn't audience driven then what was it driven by?
What has prevented said "news organizations" from regularly airing it as news now?
@dangillmor @jayrosen_nyu If there ever was a reason to deny U.S. citizenship, it should've applied to Rupert Murdoch.
(Which is not to ignore the fact, that there have been more than enough white anti-constitutional, anti-democratic, anti-American individuals inside the borders of the United States even before Murdoch knocked on America's door to mislead, indoctrinate & incite the American people.)
#ShutFoxDown #Misinformation #Disinformation #Lies #ServingPutin
From a democratic point of view, Rupert Murdoch is one of the most dangerous men of humanity. Using his media empire he is promoting autocratic ideologies around the world, because democratic administrations he considers not to be "reliable" to guarantee furthermore his absurd corporate profits and those of his oligarch friends. He is a fascist.
‘Lachlan gets fired the day Rupert dies’: Murdoch biography stokes succession rumors https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/31/rupert-murdoch-successor-news-corp-paddy-manning-book?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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