Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Meanwhile, the Fox News Corporation’s troubles over the defamation lawsuit against it by Dominion Voting Systems have just gotten worse. Fox News producer Abby Grossberg has sued the company in New York and Delaware, saying company lawyers tried to coerce her into giving misleading testimony in the lawsuit to set up her and FNC personality Maria Bartiromo to take the blame for the airing of Trump’s conspiracy theories against Dominion.

As Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation battles to contain the Dominion lawsuit scandal that has engulfed its top executives and stars, another crisis is building in the wings that has the potential to cause further turbulence for the media empire.

Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Fox News has attracted only a fraction of the attention garnered by the legal action of Dominion Voting Systems. Yet both firms are suing Fox for defamation related to its coverage of Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie, and both pose a serious threat to Fox’s finances and reputation.

In fact, on paper Smartmatic’s suit appears to be the more dangerous. It’s demanding damages of $2.7bn, compared with Dominion’s $1.6bn.

So far, attempts by Fox lawyers to have the Smartmatic case dismissed have fallen on stony ground. Last week the New York state supreme court in Manhattan gave the green light for the case to proceed against Fox News, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former business anchor Lou Dobbs and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Smartmatic, a global election technology company headquartered in London, lodged its defamation suit in February 2021. “The Earth is round,” was the complaint’s striking opening sentence. “Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election … ”

The complaint goes on to argue that, contrary to these indisputable facts, Fox News broadcast a series of blatant lies in support of Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory. “Defendants did not want Biden to win the election. They wanted President Trump to win re-election … They also saw an opportunity to capitalize on President Trump’s popularity by inventing a story.”

To prop up that story, the lawsuit claims, Fox needed a villain. That villain was Smartmatic.

Smartmatic claims that more than 100 false statements were broadcast by Fox News hosts and guests. Smartmatic was falsely said to have been involved in 2020 election counts in six battleground states – in fact, it was present only at the count in Los Angeles county.

Fox broadcast that Smartmatic shared its technology with Dominion, when in fact the two companies had no communication and regarded each other as rivals. Smartmatic was in cahoots with foreign governments in a conspiracy to rig the vote for Biden, Giuliani said on Bartiromo’s show – a claim that the company disputes as false and defamatory.

Fox also described Smartmatic as having been founded in Venezuela at the behest of corrupt dictators. In fact, it was founded by Antonio Mugica and Roger Piñate in 2000 in Boca Raton, Florida, in the wake of the “hanging chad” fiasco, with the aim of using technology to restore people’s faith in election results.

The business has since grown around the world. The firm claims that it has lost clients as a result of what it calls Fox’s “disinformation campaign”.

Fox News has disputed Smartmatic’s multibillion estimate of its losses, calling it vastly inflated.

A spokesperson for the broadcaster told the Guardian: “Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs. There is nothing more newsworthy than covering the president of the US and his lawyers making allegations.”

Smartmatic has a very high bar to meet if it is to win the defamation suit at trial. New York state law has a rigorous approach to the first amendment of the US constitution which preserves press freedom.

Under it, plaintiffs have to be able to convince a jury that not only did the media outlet put out false information, it did so with “actual malice”. That means that it either knew it was peddling a lie and went ahead anyway, or showed a reckless disregard for the truth.

“New York is pretty protective of media rights,” said Roy Gutterman, a media law professor at Syracuse University who was a consultant early on in the Smartmatic case advising a non-party entity. “Every year I read a lot of cases from New York, and it’s hard to be successful in this state.”

Despite this tough challenge, so far the wind is in Smartmatic’s sails. David Cohen, the New York supreme court justice presiding over the litigation, has indicated that the company has a strong enough case to go to trial.

In last week’s ruling, Cohen found that “at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims” about Smartmatic. “Plaintiffs have pleaded facts sufficient to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice.”

I think he's got a lot of common sense.

Re: blatham (Post 7311304)
After reading what you said about TPM, I checked it out and trying for free for a week, I hope it's not too bad to get every month, I already have too many subscriptions

A Fox News producer who has worked with the hosts Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson filed lawsuits against the company in New York and Delaware on Monday, accusing Fox lawyers of coercing her into giving misleading testimony in the continuing legal battle around the network’s coverage of unfounded claims about election fraud.

The producer, Abby Grossberg, said Fox lawyers had tried to position her and Ms. Bartiromo to take the blame for Fox’s repeated airing of conspiracy theories about Dominion Voting Systems and its supposed role in manipulating the results of the 2020 presidential election. Dominion has filed a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox. Ms. Grossberg said the effort to place blame on her and Ms. Bartiromo was rooted in rampant misogyny and discrimination at the network.

The new lawsuits, coupled with revelations from the Dominion legal fight, shed light on the rivalries and turf battles that raged at Fox News in the wake of the 2020 election, as network executives fought to hold on to viewers furious at the top-rated network for accurately reporting on President Donald J. Trump’s defeat in Arizona, a crucial swing state.

The lawsuits also include details about Ms. Grossberg’s work life at Fox and on Mr. Carlson’s show. Ms. Grossberg says she and other women endured frank and open sexism from co-workers and superiors at the network, which has been dogged for years by lawsuits and allegations about sexual harassment by Fox executives and stars.

The network’s disregard for women, Ms. Grossberg alleged, left her and Ms. Bartiromo understaffed — stretched too thin to properly vet the truthfulness of claims made against Dominion on the air. At times, Ms. Grossberg said, she was the only full-time employee dedicated solely to Ms. Bartiromo’s Sunday-morning show.

In her complaints, Ms. Grossberg accuses lawyers for Fox News of coaching her in “a coercive and intimidating manner” before her September deposition in the Dominion case. The lawyers, she said, gave her the impression that she had to avoid mentioning prominent male executives and on-air talent to protect them from any blame, while putting her own reputation at risk.

“That’s what the culture is there,” Ms. Grossberg said in an interview on Monday evening. “They don’t respect or value women.”

On Monday afternoon, Fox filed its own suit against Ms. Grossberg, seeking to enjoin her from filing claims that would shed light on her discussions with the company’s lawyers. A judge has not yet ruled on Fox’s suit. Later on Monday, according to her lawyer, Parisis G. Filippatos, Fox also placed Ms. Grossberg on forced administrative leave.

Ms. Grossberg’s lawsuits were filed in the Southern District of New York and in Superior Court in Delaware, where a pretrial hearing in the Dominion defamation lawsuit is scheduled for Tuesday.

In a statement, a Fox spokeswoman said: “Fox News Media engaged an independent outside counsel to immediately investigate the concerns raised by Ms. Grossberg, which were made following a critical performance review. We will vigorously defend these claims.”

According to the lawsuits filed by Ms. Grossberg, Fox superiors called Ms. Bartiromo a “crazy bitch” who was “menopausal” and asked Ms. Grossberg to cut the host out of coverage discussions.

Last year, she began working as a senior booking producer at “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” On her first full day, according to the lawsuit, Ms. Grossberg discovered that the show’s Manhattan work space was decorated with large pictures of Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, then the House speaker, wearing a plunging swimsuit.

The next day, Justin Wells, Mr. Carlson’s top producer, called Ms. Grossberg into his office, she said, to ask whether Ms. Bartiromo was having a sexual relationship with the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy.

Mr. Carlson’s staff joked about Jews and freely deployed a vulgar term for women, according to the complaint.

Later that fall, it said, before an appearance on the show by Tudor Dixon, the Republican candidate for Michigan governor, Mr. Carlson’s staff held a mock debate about whether they would prefer to have sex with Ms. Dixon or her Democratic opponent, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

After Ms. Grossberg complained about harassment from two male producers on the show, she was pulled into a meeting with human resources and told that she was not performing her duties, according to the complaint.

Some text exchanges between Ms. Grossberg and Ms. Bartiromo were released as part of court filings in the Dominion lawsuit. In one instance, Ms. Bartiromo asked Ms. Grossberg if she should have pushed Mr. Trump in an interview on whether he would peacefully transition from the presidency. Ms. Grossberg replied: “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition.”

During her deposition, Ms. Grossberg was asked if she cared whether claims made on Ms. Bartiromo’s show were true or false. According to the transcript, Ms. Grossberg answered: “No. Because we didn’t know if they were true or false at that time.” When asked if she felt it was important to correct a false claim made on the air, Ms. Grossberg answered: “No.”

In her lawsuits, Ms. Grossberg said she would have answered those questions differently but had been “coached by and intimidated by” Fox’s lawyers.

Ms. Grossberg claimed that Fox lawyers pressured her to downplay a text exchange between her and David Clark, then the senior vice president of weekend news, regarding a segment with Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for Mr. Trump. Mr. Clark texted: “There will be no ‘fact checking’ today.”

Ms. Grossberg said she had understood Mr. Clark to mean that Ms. Bartiromo was not to push back against Mr. Giuliani’s false claims of widespread election fraud. An updated version of the filing stated that Ms. Grossberg believed Mr. Clark to mean that no one, including him, would step in to fact check the show.

The Fox spokeswoman said Mr. Clark had been referring instead to a practice in which Fox shows sometimes criticized material that had aired elsewhere on the network.

Fox News host struggles to define woke: “It could be a feeling, it could be a sense”
Dana Perino: “You know it when you see it”

DANA PERINO (CO-HOST): One of the things about woke is -- Can you explain it to your mom? Think about that. And I remember when president Trump was running, and this was before he won in 2016, he used to get standing ovations initially when he would say, "Political correctness is ruining our country." And everybody that was clapping knew exactly what he meant, but it's sort of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography of you know it when you see it.

So the Democrats want to get you in an argument where you're having to define woke-is as if the Webster's dictionary is defining it, and it's not what it is. It could be a feeling, it could be a sense, and I wonder if Republicans or conservatives are going to have to define it more. She could be right. I don't know.

The inability to define "woke" is a feature, not a bug. "Woke" is very much meant to be a word that cannot be pinned to a definition. Its emptiness is what gives it so much power as a propaganda term. "Woke" is both everything and nothing. It can mean whatever you need it to mean, and you can deny that it means what it obviously means. The ephemerality of "woke" is what makes it so valuable. "Woke" morphs into being when a right-winger needs to feel outrage and evaporates into thin air should anyone try to ask a rational question about it.

Quote:

Fox News host struggles to define woke: “It could be a feeling, it could be a sense”
Dana Perino: “You know it when you see it”

DANA PERINO (CO-HOST): One of the things about woke is -- Can you explain it to your mom? Think about that. And I remember when president Trump was running, and this was before he won in 2016, he used to get standing ovations initially when he would say, "Political correctness is ruining our country." And everybody that was clapping knew exactly what he meant, but it's sort of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography of you know it when you see it.

So the Democrats want to get you in an argument where you're having to define woke-is as if the Webster's dictionary is defining it, and it's not what it is. It could be a feeling, it could be a sense, and I wonder if Republicans or conservatives are going to have to define it more. She could be right. I don't know.

Daniel Uhlfelder

@DWUhlfelderLaw
"Florida is where woke goes to die," DeSantis said after his reelection victory last month.

Last week, a federal judge asked his general counsel to define “woke.”

He answered woke is "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

When I hear conservatives trying to use the term I'm always reminded of clueless parents trying to appropriate the vocabulary of their teen children and sounding "L-7" as hell. It's almost embarrassing.

Fourscore and three years ago, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter—a self-titled “musicianer” who was heralded as a “Bad Nigger” who “makes good minstrel” by Life magazine—explained how he came to create one of the first racism* carols. Named after nine young Black men who had been falsely accused of raping two white women, “Scottsboro Boys” was a protest and a warning to Black people about the evil that awaited anyone who dared traverse the borders of Alabama. At the end of the song, he told the story of meeting two of the wrongly convicted men and—just before the recording faded into silence—the legendary singer coined a phrase that would become a clarion call to Black America until white people discovered it eight decades later. “I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go down through there,” Lead Belly said of Alabama. “Just stay woke. Keep your eyes open.

In 1940, a West Virginia activist conceded that his fellow strikers in the Negro United Coal Miners had been lulled to sleep with discriminatory practices, but promised they would “stay woke longer.” Long before White America became authorities on what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted, Black people reminded each other to “Dream, but stay woke.” Childish Gambino and Erykah Badu sang about staying woke. One of my best friends hosted “The Stay Woke Show.” Staying woke had nothing to do with progressive ideas or politics; it was about white people.

Then, white people found out about it.
<snip>

Last week, a federal judge asked his general counsel to define “woke.”

He answered woke is "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Staying woke had nothing to do with progressive ideas or politics; it was about white people.

Directly related to the post immediately above...

Quote:

The inability to define "woke" is a feature, not a bug. "Woke" is very much meant to be a word that cannot be pinned to a definition. Its emptiness is what gives it so much power as a propaganda term. "Woke" is both everything and nothing. It can mean whatever you need it to mean, and you can deny that it means what it obviously means. The ephemerality of "woke" is what makes it so valuable. "Woke" morphs into being when a right-winger needs to feel outrage and evaporates into thin air should anyone try to ask a rational question about it.

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But there is no agreed-upon definition of “woke” or a formal political organization or movement associated with it. Nor is there an exact definition of what constitutes being “canceled” or a victim of “cancel culture.” However, despite their vagueness, you now see conservative activists and Republican politicians constantly using these terms. That’s because that vagueness is a feature, not a bug. Casting a really wide range of ideas and policies as too woke and anyone who is critical of them as being canceled by out-of-control liberals is becoming an important strategy and tool on the right

...

Talking about identity and racial issues in vague terms like cancel culture and woke is particularly important right now for the GOP. In an increasingly diverse country across a number of dimensions (race, religion, sexual identity, etc.), Republicans need to make their cultural appeals to the party’s more conservative voters more subtext than text to avoid turning off too many Americans who wouldn’t want to vote for candidates or a party they perceive as bigoted.

Blatham, did you read the article b4 you tried to correct the wording of that sentence?

The phrase “stay woke” started and lived for half a century as a reference to staying vigilant about the harm that could come from white people.