Another black eye for Facebook today. The January 6 rioter who assaulted police officer Michael Fanone was sent into a manic fury by disinformation that he—
“He came here, fired up about a stolen election,” [Judge Amy Berman] Jackson said. “Where was he getting his information? Facebook, Twitter, just watching the news?”
Brennwald, after consulting with Sibick, said that his client’s response surprised him.
“I thought it might have been OANN or Newsmax, but it wasn’t,” Brennwald said. “It was Fox News.”
“Wow,” Jackson responded.
“He was literally watching Fox News and in a manic phase that day, over a period of days,” Brennwald added.
Burn Fox News to the ground and salt the earth around their rancid headquarters. Brand everyone who works there with a scarlet fox on their foreheads. Confiscate Rupert Murdoch's wealth to pay for BBB. Exile Tucker Carlson to Hungary.
I don't even care any more how we do it. Just get rid of this toxic, treasonous pile of shit in midtown Manhattan. Invite China to test their new hypersonic missile on 1211 Avenue of the Americas. Something. Anything.
Someone is going to take your hyperbole literally and accuse you of fomenting violence yourself.
Yeah, I cosign this. I don't disagree with you on an emotional level. The rhetoric is a problem, though.
Would you have preferred “Fox Delenda est”?
For the first time, I deeply regret the lack of a “like” button.
+I
Many more times than not I regret being unable to upvote your comments Mitch.
Thanks. That’s very kind of you to say.
Sigh. I made a bet with myself that the very fist comment would be hand wringing. My fellow lefties never disappoint.
Come on guy, you can lighten up, I know you can do it. Breeeeathe in. Breeeeathe out.
P.S. Fox News is almost single handedly destroying our democracy. Literally. Yet we powerless to say a word about it, because "freedom". How does one typically handle a threat like that?
This is where *I'm* looking for the "like" button.
Off topic, love the "Bob" Dobbs avatar.
> How does one typically handle a threat like that?
Usually the autocratic leader bans the media outlet and sends in the police to shut it down.
The rhetoric is perfect.
Fox, Trump et al spouted their nonsense to the Stop the Steal ready, willing, and able rioters. Kevin's little rant here reaches a few hundred of us who are 99% in agreement with the concept and totally unlikely to implement the specific suggestions. Meanwhile, though, it brings a smile to many of us on an otherwise dreary mid-week workday.
Short: Relax and enjoy it. It hurts nobody and it makes us smile.
But, it's all true. Really, can't we just send some middle eastern crazies over here to carpet bomb FOX News back into the stone age where they belone?
Yes comrade, the purity must be improved.
I really hope I am wrong but I don't think Fox News is going away any time.soon.
Did you know in some places they don't say the internet, they say Facebook?
Considering they are located in New York City, is there anything the city or state governments there can do? Do they make campaign contributions to local elected officials? That would be a good project for an investigative journalist to take on.
New York city and state governments, you say? Where is John Gotti when we need him?
As it happens, from that perspective of opposing Trump and Fox News, it’s just as well that Gotti’s burning in hell instead of running the streets of NYC.
Easy to forget that Donald Trump was considered an “associate” of the Gambino Family.
Kevin---don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Kevin,
I have waited to sign up for the new site. Been tempted many times, but this had me laughing my ass off. I had to sign up. Kudos!
You give me joy!
The main issue is that Fox gets away with it because, if sued, they insist they are not presenting news, it's entertainment. It's "satire". "No one would believe what they say."
Entertainment? Only for the crazies on the right. But, if you held a gun to their collective heads, they would say that everything they see on FOX is the "truth", and go out and act on it.
I think this focus on Fox News is misguided. Destroy Fox News in any form you imagine: their audience will still exists and will be served by a Fox like successor.....
There it is.
Yup, the good old "If you can't solve the problem for all time, just give up now" argument. Next we'll be telling doctors to quit treating patients because everybody dies in the end.
Fox News did not just spring into existence out of Newt Gingrich's fever dreams. It took a long time and a lot of money to build. Newsmax and OANN are nowhere near being able to step in and take its place.
*Eventually*, maybe one of them would rise to the level of Fox. But in the meantime, a lot of damage could be healed.
Only if you assume their "Fox-like successor" will very quickly gain a huge Fox-like rabid following. Fox News has had MANY years to establish its rabid audience base. A new Fox-like successor would likely not have the finances, the network, nor the crew to do the same damage.
We should not make the perfect the enemy of the good. If you begin by saying that there’s too much horse manure in the stable to clean in a day and that’s why you can’t clean it, there will never be a day with less manure.
And this is exactly why the United States is so far behind in addressing global warming...
And in danger of becoming a right wing kleptocracy.
I thought your bitchass said we already were a rightwing kleptocracy.
Because of the Democrat Party.
Still, let's just destroy FOX News. That can't be a bad thing. Really.
Just another reminder that Fox's market cap is about $30B. The $1B Bloomberg spent on his failed campaign could have paid for 3% voting rights in Fox instead. Just another 20 multi-billonaire liberals kicking in the same amount and Fox could be broken apart with the sports stuff and local TV stations spun off to recoup some of the cost and then the news organization fixed and reorganized. Even if Fox lost some audience by toning down the fear and anger, it would probably keep more than enough to be profitable, particularly after the main stream advertisers came back. Yes I know a hostile takeover is more complicated than that but the point is there are ways to fix Fox that don't involve first amendment issues or military attacks.
That may be wishful thinking. A demand push on the share price could send the price sky high if the Murdoch family were not interested in selling. And BTW, how much of the voting stock is owned by the Murdoch family? The control you'd like to wrest away from them may be unattainable.
Still, for a billion dollars one can buy an awful lot of judges and politicians, many of them quite cheaply. If invested wisely at the local level, we could knock them off of nearly every cable system in America with enough left over to get rid of the “must carry” rule, reimpose the fairness doctrine, and strip Fox of every broadcast license.
Then we could go after the Murdoch family’s citizenship and personal wealth.
Class A shares in Fox have no voting rights. The Murdochs own 38.4% of the Class B shares, so any attempt to gain control would have to come from the other 61%.
Let's not forget that Murdoch's media empire has done the same thing to the electorate in the UK and Australia as well -- basically turned a third of them into slavering autocratic fascists clamoring for the death of democracy, ethnic cleansing, and a good ol' Führer.
To be fair, ethnic cleansing and white supremacism had a history in Australia long before Murdoch arrived on the scene.
As a dovetail to the FB part of the topic, I saw this good thread about why the FB Papers will likely having a chilling effect on internal studies for all the social media companies (and allowing outside researchers I'd assume), and why there's no movement on doing anything about those companies from either party
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1453039035451154439.html
That’s one perspective. But since there’s no instance of these kinds of internal retrospectives resulting in meaningful changes, the risk of chilling such internal studies is minimal.
A couple of cases come to mind, the one that Kevin mentioned yesterday with FB's "anger" button doing little for cash flow but inflaming anger so it was removed.
The other that I can think of right now was their GOTV studies almost 10 yrs ago that proved so effective they built out their own political consultation side business on top of their ad sales and we know how that went.
I wouldn't be surprised if they limited asking themselves hard question to study at the risk of future leaks of the answers. They already do it with external researchers
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/566332-facebook-suspends-accounts-of-nyu-researchers-whove-criticized-platform?rl=1 (ht ronp)
Kevin. Well I see were you are coming from.
May I ask you what will be your reaction when liberals will plot a soft coup after decades being rolled over by a minority that will benefit for ever from the distortion in representativeness of the Senate.
At some point it has to stop.
Democrats won't be planning a "soft coup", they will be getting out the vote in such huge numbers that they win back the House and Senate, along with many state legislatures. That's the big difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Lay off the brown acid & InfoWars, brah.
I feel your rage. However, I've reminded myself each time that even if the miscreant were taken out, more would spring up in their place, and probably be worse. So much for violence. It only works in the movies.
Here's a judge's ruling that may please Kevin Drum, although how compliance can be monitored or enforced, I don't know.
https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/fox-news/
There's probably no possibility of having cable providers separate Fox from automatic inclusion in networks provided for any basic package, which I believe is the situation now - but having once been hired in an interview at a Starbucks, then found myself working in a small office with Fox blaring & a coworker smirking over the video of the cops murdering Eric Garner over "loosies," I hope to never see or hear that #%&! again.
Should have said THE judge's comment on ordering the defendant to not view this televised misinformation, since the Daily Kos piece is about the same case.
Look how Newsmax ratings took off after the 2020 election when Fox soft pedalled the lies about the election being stolen. The GOP base need their daily does of anger heroin. Fox may have created this market but now it exists and it isn't going anywhere. If you had a magic wand and made Fox disappear overnight Fox viewers would just tune into Newsmax, One America News or something else. Magic wand them all away and they'll get their daily dose of anger from somebody on youtube if they have to.
Fox isn't the problem anymore. They may be largely responsible for creating the problem but the problem has now been created and isn't going anywhere. This is a gigantic number of angry gullible people who can be monetised in various ways and there are hundreds of media outlets/people out there who would do just that if Fox disappeared. Things would just continue without missing a beat, in fact you'd have dozens of outlets pushing ever more extreme stuff to compete for eyeballs/clicks etc. At this point Fox is probably a force for moderation in the Trump/GOP base rather than pushing extremism. Think again Kevin/commenters.
The problem with Fox News is it's size. It is so big that in alters the thinking of a sizeable portion of US voters. If it disappeared, yes places like Newsmax and One America News would gain - but it's unlikely all of them combined will be anywhere near the size of Fox News. As a result, fewer Americans would be getting brainwashed each day by master propogandists.
This. Exactly.
If you don't live in middle America, you don't realize just how pervasive Fox News is out here. It's not just people watching at home. Doctor's offices, bars, car dealerships, anywhere you go, you're apt to walk in the door and get a faceful of poison TV. Not Newsmax, not OANN. It's just Fox, Fox, Fox.
If Fox went away, *some* home viewers would switch to Newsmax or OANN, sure. But not the small businesses, and not the less-committed mass of Republican voters. There is more to Fox than simply spewing poison--it's a big media organization, with tons of glitz and glamor to help the bad medicine go down. It would not be easily replaced.
Sometimes I think Kevin is just trolling us. Yesterday's theme was that the media reflects its society, and it's neither possible nor desirable to try to do anything about it. Fox certainly reflects a good chunk of American society, which had a voice in talkback radio long before Fox came on the scene.
So who’s watching the World Series tonight, enriching another arm of the Fox empire?
If you want to influence a business it seems step one would be not to give them your business.
If you've got a cable package, your business probably belongs to them whether you watch them or not.
If Joe Biden can murder a bunch of kids in Afghanistan and alleged terrorists in Syria, then why can't we get rid of Fox News? Talk about a terrorist organization!
And this is worth repeating in light of Mr. Drum's righteous rant.
"The young man stepped to the podium to ask Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk a question. “At this point, we're living under corporate and medical fascism. This is tyranny. When do we get to use the guns?” the man asked, to applause from the crowd. “No, and I’m not – that’s not a joke. I’m not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where’s the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”
Where is the line? It's a legitimate question.
Suddenly, dronestrikes became problematic again.
After four years when the only droning was Glemm Greenwald going on about how well Donald Trump, who Glemm does not support, was doing as president.
With respect Kevin - what`s new ?
Fox News?
OK.
Fox is successful. Why?
What did they "tap into" that makes people turn on and tune in?
I hate Fox News and I think it should be a continuous chyron at the bottom the screen when Lara, Tucker and Sean are on stating "This is NOT news this is opinion only".
But like Mitch McConell I have to grudgingly give them credit for playing the long game which ONLY a clear +4 Dem majority in the Senate could over come.
So again - what did the Murdoch's "see" that they could get people excited about.
Was it the female leads? All beauty queen types with skirts, dyed blond and heavily made up? The "All-American" look of the male personalities? Was it the news with a National Enquirer slant that hooks people?
Does MSNBC need to "dumb down" their after 7pm programming? Go for the more salacious look and news? Take a less intellectual attitude towards the news?
I'm curious as to what exactly Fox does that attracts so many people?
Kevin Drum is an outlier. He's a serious news junkie.
What makes Fox News "click" with viewers?
Make this go viral. I post it every chance I get.
https://unfoxmycablebox.com/
tl;dr: if you have cable, you're paying for FoxNews, even if you never watch--even if you've blocked it on your remote. Cable fees are their profit makers; ads wouldn't pay for Carlson's rugs.
And WTH are you doing with cable anyway? Streaming is vastly better in every way, as well as cheaper. (Any article or how-to that tries to include internet access as part of the streaming cost is either ignorant or in the tank for cable--like you wouldn't have internet anyway.)
And if you only watch local news and PBS, consider getting an antenna.
https://www.youtube.com/c/AntennaMan