Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

This world is never going to change until it is learned that "We the People" run this Country and get back to the basics.

We need to take back our Country and run it the way we want it run or forever lose our right to have a say in anything.

The republicans have learned and practiced minority rule from the beginnings of this country's history. In fact, the Constitution was bent to acknowledge this fact!

A legal filing today in the case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox News Corporation provides a window into the role of disinformation and money in the movement to deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing FNC for defamation after FNC personalities repeatedly claimed that the company’s voting machines had corrupted the final tallies in the 2020 election. The filing today shows that those same personalities didn’t believe what they were telling their viewers, and suggests that they made those groundless accusations because they worried their viewers were abandoning them to go to channels that told them what they wanted to hear: that Trump had won the election.

The quotes in the filing are eye-popping:

On November 10, 2020, Trump advisor Steven Bannon wrote to FNC personality Maria Bartiromo: “71 million voters will never accept Biden. This process is to destroy his presidency before it even starts; IF it even starts…. We either close on Trumps [sic] victory or del[e]gitimize Biden…. THE PLAN.”

FNC’s internal fact checks on November 13 and November 20 called accusations of irregularities in the voting “Incorrect” and said there was “not evidence of widespread fraud.”

On November 15, Laura Ingraham wrote to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity: “Sidney Power is a bit nuts. Sorry, but she is.”

On November 16, Carlson wrote to his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, “Sidney Powell is lying.”

On November 19, FNC chair Rupert Murdoch wrote: “Really crazy stuff.”

Hannity later testified: “[T]hat whole narrative that Sidney was pushing. I did not believe it for one second.”

Fox Politics Editor Chris Stirewalt later testified, “[N]o reasonable person would have thought that,” when asked if it was true that Dominion rigged the election.

The filing claims that FNC peddled a false narrative of election fraud to its viewers because its pro-Trump audience had jumped ship after the network had been the first to call Arizona for Biden, and its ratings were plummeting as Trump loyalists jumped to Newsmax. “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company,” Carlson wrote to Suzanne Scott, chief executive officer of Fox News, on November 9. “Kills me to watch it.” On November 12, Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

They went to “war footing” to “protect the brand.” For example, when FNC reporter Jacqui Heinrich accurately fact checked a Trump tweet, correcting him by saying that “top election infrastructure officials” said that “[t]here is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” Carlson told Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the f*ck? I’m actually shocked…. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Heinrich deleted her tweet.

The filing says that not a single witness from FNC testified they believed any of the allegations they were making about Dominion. An FNC spokesperson today said, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”

Today, part of the report of the special purpose grand jury investigating possible criminal interference in the 2020 election in Georgia was released under court order. It explained that 26 Fulton County, Georgia, residents, three of whom were alternates, made up the grand jury, and 16 of them made up a quorum, enabling the jury to conduct business. Beginning on June 1, 2022, the grand jury heard testimony from or involving 75 witnesses, almost all of it in person and under oath. It also heard testimony from investigators and got digital and physical media.

The grand jury found “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2022 presidential election.” It also reported that “[a] majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it,” and it asked the district attorney to “seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling.”

Also today, in the wake of the inauspicious first hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on November 9, a bipartisan group of 28 former officials who were part of the Church Committee wrote an open letter to Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH). Republicans have claimed Jordan’s new subcommittee is a modern version of the 1975–1976 committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), that discovered illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens, CIA operations to assassinate foreign leaders, drug testing on government personnel, discrediting of civil rights and anti-war activists, and so on.

The letter’s authors reminded Jordan that while the chair of the committee had been a Democrat, its work had been carefully bipartisan, and its members investigated both Republican and Democratic administrations. They had rigorously reported facts in context, “resisting political temptations to assemble misleading mosaics from isolated tidbits.” They had also protected ongoing intelligence and law enforcement operations.

The committee’s 2,700 pages of exhaustive research were also bipartisan and resulted in the creation of Senate and House intelligence committees to provide congressional oversight of intelligence, as well as the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The former staffers of the Church Committee advised Jordan to follow the model he claimed, remaining objective, grounding the committee’s findings in relevant evidence and applicable laws.” They urged the subcommittee to “consider in good faith whether [Trump attorney general William] Barr and [John] Durham,” whom Barr appointed to discredit the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives, “themselves may have strayed into such weaponization.”

The Church Committee staffers warned Jordan that if he wanted to claim the mantle of that committee, he would need to move forward with the “same spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship.”

It ain't working like it's supposed to. If the representatives did the bidding of the constituents, we could do things like enact nationwide universal background checks. Initiatives that have wide popular support, but always die in Congress because the representatives are doing the bidding of the highest bidders.

Hi Bill - just wondering you were specifically referring to when you wrote:

Quote:

The republicans have learned and practiced minority rule from the beginnings of this country's history. In fact, the Constitution was bent to acknowledge this fact!

My knowledge American history isn't superlative, but I do know there was no Republican party when the US constitution was written, so it must be about an amendment, after 1854 - and I couldn't see one that fitted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Certain books are banned, ones that provide material support for terrorists, books on making pipe bombs for example.

Fox News feared losing viewers by airing truth about election, documents show

‘Everything at stake here,’ billionaire founder Rupert Murdoch wrote to a top executive in November 2020, part of a cache of internal communications revealed in a $1.6 billion defamation suit.

By Sarah Ellison, Paul Farhi and Jeremy Barr
February 17, 2023 at 7:22 p.m. EST

In the weeks after the 2020 election, Fox News faced an existential crisis. The top-rated cable news network had alienated its Donald Trump-loving viewers with an accurate election night prediction for Joe Biden and was facing a terrifying ratings slide, not to mention the ire of a once-loyal president.

Concern came from the very top: “Everything at stake here,” Rupert Murdoch messaged Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott.

The billionaire founder was eager to see the Republican candidate prevail in the coming Senate runoff in Georgia — “helping any way we can,” he wrote. But he also advised Scott to keep an eye on the uptick in ratings for a smaller, more conservative channel whose election skepticism suddenly seemed to be resonating with pro-Trump viewers.

Newly released messages show Fox executives fretting that month over an uncomfortable revelation: that if they told their audience the truth about the election, it could destroy their business model.

“Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch wrote to Scott on Nov. 8, a day after most news organizations declared that Biden had won. “Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it.”

What Fox’s loyal viewers wanted to watch — and what Fox News was willing to do to keep them — emerged this week as a central question in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against the network by Dominion Voting Systems.

A stunning cache of internal correspondence and deposition testimony obtained by the software company and made public on Thursday in a Delaware court filing showed high-level Fox executives and on-air stars privately agonizing over the wild and false claims of a stolen election that Trump allies promoted on Fox airwaves in the weeks after the 2020 election. “Sidney Powell is lying,” prime-time star Tucker Carlson wrote to his producer about a Trump lawyer who had appeared on Fox and spewed baseless accusations. “There is NO evidence of fraud,” anchor Bret Baier wrote to one of his bosses.

The plaintiff’s lawyers argue that such messages prove Fox brass knew the claims that Dominion had “flipped” votes from Trump to Biden were untrue — but “spread and endorsed” them anyway.

But the Dominion filing also lends ammunition to their long-held argument: that Fox allowed the false claims to air because it was fearful of losing viewers to Newsmax, an ever more pro-Trump news channel.

“The texts and emails support [Dominion’s] claim that Fox was more concerned about its audience and market share than the truth concerning the 2020 presidential election,” said Timothy Zick, a professor at William & Mary Law School who specializes in the First Amendment and called the breadth of the internal communications “extraordinary.”

In a statement, a Fox spokesperson said: “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”

Some exchanges showed Fox executives raising an alarm when journalists attempted to counter false claims from the Trump team.

On a Nov. 9 broadcast, news anchor Neil Cavuto cut away from a live briefing by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, warning viewers that she was making unsubstantiated claims of fraud. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said on air. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show this.”

Executives took notice: Cavuto’s actions were communicated to senior leadership at parent company Fox Corp. as a “Brand Threat.”

Meanwhile, they kept a close eye on ratings.

“The Newsmax surge is a bit troubling — truly is an alternative universe when you watch, but it can’t be ignored,” one message from Fox News President Jay Wallace to his CEO read. “Trying to get everyone to comprehend we are on war footing.”

Later that month, Fox broadcast the entirety of a news conference featuring Powell and fellow Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani outlining their unsubstantiated case for election fraud — a performance that Murdoch dubbed “really crazy stuff,” in an email, “and damaging.”

But when Fox host Dana Perino speculated that such claims could draw a lawsuit from Dominion, Scott expressed concern in an email, saying on-air personalities couldn’t afford to “give the crazies an inch right now … they are looking for and blowing up all appearances of disrespect to the audience.”

In another message, Scott noted, “The audience feels like we crapped on [them] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us … We can fix this but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”

The ratings concerns turned out to be warranted. In January 2021, for the first time in 20 years, the cable network reported monthly ratings that fell behind both of its main cable news competitors, CNN and MSNBC.

As Trump refused to let up on his election fraud claims, Murdoch suggested that Fox might have the clout to push back. In early January 2021, he relayed in a message to Scott a suggestion that their three biggest prime-time stars — Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham — “should independently or together say something like ‘the election is over and Joe Biden won.’” Murdoch passed on the suggestion that such a move “would go a long way to stop the Trump myth that the election stolen.”

But such a coordinated announcement never came. In forwarding his email to her staff, Scott added, “we need to be careful about using the shows and p---ing off the viewers.”

Within Fox, the messages show, many worried that the network had been hurt by two key incidents: a debate in which some conservatives believed Fox anchor Chris Wallace lobbed unfair questions to Trump; and Fox’s election night prediction that Biden would win the hotly contested state of Arizona.

Hannity wrote to Carlson and Ingraham on Nov. 12 that the combination “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

“It’s vandalism,” Carlson responded.

In a message to a colleague, Scott complained that Bill Sammon, then the head of the network’s Washington bureau, did not understand “the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ.” In a separate message, to Fox Corp. executive chair and CEO Lachlan Murdoch, she wrote that: “Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief. It’s a question of trust — the AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”

“Yes,” Murdoch replied. “But needs constant rebuilding without any missteps.”

In another message, Ron Mitchell, the network executive in charge of prime-time programming and analytics, warned that Newsmax’s brand of “conspiratorial reporting might be exactly what the disgruntled [Fox News Channel] viewer is looking for.” As a result, he added, Fox should not “ever give viewers a reason to turn us off. Every topic and guest must perform.”

Mitchell continued: “‘No unforced errors’ in content — example: Abruptly turning away from a Trump campaign news conference.”