No no no you have to report the lies
News boss was furious that staff were fact-checking Trump. Facts??! What have facts got to do with reporting the news?!!??
The top executive at Fox News was furious one of the network’s reporters was fact-checking Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election, writing in a December 2020 email that it was “bad for business”.
We get it from all directions now. The Financial Times tells Joan Smith to put a lie in her review, Fox News tells staff not to fact-check Trump’s lies.
Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News, was responding in early December 2020 to an on-air fact-check by Eric Shawn, one of the network’s anchors. “This has to stop now,” she wrote to Meade Cooper, another Fox executive. “This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding [sic] what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”
The audience is furious. Does Scott understand the difference between fiction and news? Does she understand that the audience’s dislike of the plot of a movie fiction is not the same as the audience’s dislike of facts reported on the news? Does she get that the criteria are different?
The message is part of a tranche of internal communications obtained by the voting equipment company Dominion in its $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox. Dominion displayed a copy of the message a court hearing last week as its lawyers argued that Fox knowingly aired false statements about Dominion because it was concerned about losing viewers to rival networks such as Newsmax and One America News (OAN). The Guardian obtained a copy of the message and the slideshow that was presented in court.
I look forward to Dominion’s mopping the floor with Fox News.
Interesting that the Guardian is writing about Fox’s aversion to facts concerning Trump, while scrupulously avoiding the facts when reporting on women’s rights vs. trans “rights.” The presence of Owen Jones on the payroll likely burned out all their irony meters.
Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author
Carpe Jugulum [Granny Weatherwax, Rev. Mightily Oats] (1998)
One of my favourite books in my favourite series; I’ve read it several times (ditto Monstrous Regiment).
Dammit, missed a forward slash in a closing tag. Sigh.
One of the things that always made it difficult for (incorrigibly pedantic) me to get behind talk of objectification is that people are objects. People are things. As a kid, I would get bent out of shape when someone said that s noun was a person, place, or thing, because persons and places are things.
It took reading Kant to allow myself to insert a “mere” before “object”, after the second formulation of the categorical imperative. Never treat humanity as mere means. People are not merely things, not mere objects.
I still feel the urge to give an, “Um, actually,” whenever I see the unqualified forms, though.
I’m merely human.