Kendall Stanley: Expensive 'reporting' for FOX News
So Rupert Murdoch et al will be coughing up $787.5 million dollars to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion voting system against FOX News. Good for them. Because what FOX News did to the voting machine company was a travesty.
Here Dominion is, going about its business of supplying voting machines, when FOX starts reporting that the company helped Hugo Chavez keep his job down in Venezuela decades ago by altering the election results, just as they did against Donald Trump in 2020.
That was true, proclaimed attorneys and Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Not that they ever proved it.
But Fox kept bringing them on as they “covered” the fraud in the election, and they also let their opinion talking heads trash the company, even when, according to emails between them and their producers, they knew what they were saying wasn’t true.
Why did FOX do that? As the old saying goes, it’s either about sex or money. In this case it was the money — FOX feared that if it didn’t keep feeding its viewers a constant stream of election fraud stories they would head to other, more far-right (if you can believe it) news sources such as Newsmax.
That started when FOX’s election night team declared Biden the winner in Arizona. Network executives went nuts as calls rolled in seeking retraction of the decision to claim Biden won the Arizona vote.
While it would have been wonderful to see Murdoch, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and others being grilled on the stand, we still have the judge’s words on the veracity of Fox’s stories — “it is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
Which pretty much cut off a complete line of defense for FOX’s lawyer.
Fox issued a statement following the settlement that said basically they would maintain their high journalistic standards. Well now would be a good time to start since you haven’t in the past.
We don’t need to cry for Murdoch and his companies. Although $787.5 million is decidedly a lot of money, the firm’s latest financial reports showed it with $4-4.5 billion in cash and cash assets.
Good guys with guns
For NRA members and Second Amendment aficionados nationwide, what happens when your “good guys with guns” shoot good people with no guns for no reason?
I speak here of the young black teen who showed up at the wrong house as he went to pick up his younger brothers and was shot twice. And the young woman who was killed when she and friends got lost and turned around in the wrong driveway. Or the teen shot when she got into the wrong car after cheerleading practice.
See any pattern here? Maybe if you have a gun you might feel it’s OK if you have to use it.
None of those who were shot were putting the shooters in any form of harm. Just existing in the wrong place at the wrong time seems to be the operating condition here.
Fear is a great motivator, according to Paul Waldman writing in The Washington Post.
“This has become the core of the gun industry’s marketing efforts in recent years: to convince potential buyers that sooner or later (probably sooner), they will be the victims of violent crime. The only question is whether they’ll be able to kill their attackers before they’re killed first.
“When the marketing isn’t talking about home invasions and street assaults, it focuses on what former gun industry insider Ryan Busse calls “fear-based tactical culture,” in which gun owners are encouraged to imagine themselves as paramilitary operatives facing down urban rioters. Gun owners are now significantly more likely to cite protection from crime as the reason they own guns than they were 20 years ago.”
Shoot first and ask questions later?
Just what we need are more “good guys” like that.
Still out there
You’d think, as you go through life seeing just a mask here and a mask there, that COVID-19 is no longer an issue to worry about. That is until your neighbor comes down with a mild case, probably lessened by the vaccinations he’s received.
His diagnosis came as a new booster was being promoted for those 65 years of age or immunocompromised.
It reminds us, once again, that we will probably never be rid of COVID as it continues to mutate and keep going with a life all its own.
No one likes booster shots but that seems to be what is in our future, except for all you vaccine deniers who can work the odds.
— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: Expensive 'reporting' for FOX News
