Fox Lawyers Up
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Amid the mushrooming coronavirus crisis, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are girding for a pandemic of public-interest lawsuits over misinformation and conspiracy theories dispensed by certain Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network personalities such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Trish Regan.
According to a top Murdoch executive, the father-and-son media moguls are ready to go to war with potential plaintiffs such as the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics—aka WASHLITE—an activist non-profit that filed suit on Thursday against Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, and other defendants.
The 10-page complaint, first reported by The Times of San Diego and filed in the superior court of Washington state’s King County, seeks a judgment that the Murdoch-controlled outlets violated the state’s consumer protection laws by “falsely and deceptively disseminating ‘News’ via cable news contracts that the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19 was a ‘Hoax,’ and that the virus was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety.”
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Sorry, can't do. Those shows are just as much opinion as Rachel Or Lemon. If it was hard news, you'd have a leg to stand on.
“Cry havoc and let slip the DOGE of war!”
Those who cheered as J-6 American prisoners were locked in solitary for 18 months without trial, now suddenly fight tooth and nail for foreign terrorists’ "due process". — Buck Sexton
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The polling is blindingly clear linking political affiliation with level of concern about the virus.
Surely Fox’s overall attitude about it, at least up to mid-March, was a major contributor to that. As was Trump’s.
Only non-witches get due process.
- Cotton Mather, Salem Massachusetts, 1692
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The polling is blindingly clear linking political affiliation with level of concern about the virus.
Surely Fox’s overall attitude about it, at least up to mid-March, was a major contributor to that. As was Trump’s.
@jon-nyc said in Fox Lawyers Up:
The polling is blindingly clear linking political affiliation with level of concern about the virus.
Surely Fox’s overall attitude about it, at least up to mid-March, was a major contributor to that. As was Trump’s.
It wasn't Fox people telling everyone the virus was no big deal, it was Madcow and Morning Joe.
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Well, it was almost everybody in the beginning. Different outlets started taking it seriously at different times. Fox lagged overall, taking their lead from Trump who in mid-March was still treating this more like a PR crisis for his campaign than a public health crisis.
The only crowd that got it right very early seems to have been a subset of Silicon Valley, who were derided for it.
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Well, it was almost everybody in the beginning. Different outlets started taking it seriously at different times. Fox lagged overall, taking their lead from Trump who in mid-March was still treating this more like a PR crisis for his campaign than a public health crisis.
The only crowd that got it right very early seems to have been a subset of Silicon Valley, who were derided for it.
@jon-nyc said in Fox Lawyers Up:
Well, it was almost everybody in the beginning. Different outlets started taking it seriously at different times. Fox lagged overall, taking their lead from Trump who in mid-March was still treating this more like a PR crisis for his campaign than a public health crisis.
The only crowd that got it right very early seems to have been a subset of Silicon Valley, who were derided for it.
Bull shit.
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The polling is blindingly clear linking political affiliation with level of concern about the virus.
Surely Fox’s overall attitude about it, at least up to mid-March, was a major contributor to that. As was Trump’s.
@jon-nyc said in Fox Lawyers Up:
The polling is blindingly clear linking political affiliation with level of concern about the virus.
Surely Fox’s overall attitude about it, at least up to mid-March, was a major contributor to that. As was Trump’s.
Democrat places had the victims first and they had the concern first.
Red counties are still way behind blue counties in body count.
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But I don't constantly go back and point out who was right or wrong, and when it happened.
I understand that decent, informed people can disagree on viral spread, especially considering what we really knew, when we knew it. I also understand the woke environment politicians were dealing with at the time.
Doesn't anybody remember all the xenophobic labels plastered on Trump, when he started banning some Chinese flights? That was the world we were living in.
That world no longer exists.
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To be honest I heard about them mostly after the fact. I usually rely on Davis, my CNN connection, to tell me things but he must have been asleep at the switch that day.
Interesting and overlooked (though I think I had a thread about it when it happened in Italy) is that before the airlines acted their pilots did. Essentially refusing to board. This happened in China and it happened in Italy. The airline suspensions were a reaction to that. Trumps action followed.
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Sorry, can't do. Those shows are just as much opinion as Rachel Or Lemon. If it was hard news, you'd have a leg to stand on.
@Jolly said in Fox Lawyers Up:
Sorry, can't do. Those shows are just as much opinion as Rachel Or Lemon. If it was hard news, you'd have a leg to stand on.
I agree with Jolly. As wrong as it was, they were spouting an opinion. No better, no worse, than people on the other side.
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I don’t think ‘getting it wrong’ leads to any liability. It was the period of time between when they knew it was wrong and finally made the decision to change. Hence my point about discovery.
Other networks evolved on the issue. Fox (For the most part) did a top-down about-face, basically the day Trump did his first serious prime time speech about it.
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The Murdoch organization has done much worse in the past and got away with it, or at least survived to tell the tale. They closed a newspaper in the UK as an act of contrition, but it really meant nothing.
