Who’s Paying FOX’s $787.5 Million Settlement with Dominion? You Are!

Stephan: 

This is why the FOX disinformation network was willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Dominion as long as they didn’t have to publicly admit they were a disinformation propaganda network. You and I are paying most of this money,

Credit: The Intercept

FOX just agreed to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against it for $787.5 million. That sounds like a lot of money until you understand Fox’s principal source of revenue: tens of millions of people who rarely or never watch it but are forced to pay a lot of money for it anyway.

Understanding this requires a quick look at the economics of cable TV news.

Before cable, we got TV news from the news divisions of the entertainment channels CBS, NBC, and ABC. They put on a few hours of news at most per day, their 30-minute broadcasts each night plus maybe “Nightline” or something like that. Those shows had ads, but they generally didn’t cover the cost of production, so the ad revenue from the networks’ sitcoms and other shows had to subsidize the programming about reality.

Cable and satellite TV made possible the advent of 24-hour news channels, and while they made money from advertising, they also received what are called carriage fees from each subscriber. Cable or satellite providers — such as Comcast, Spectrum, DirecTV, or […]

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When the Culture Wars Come for the Public Library

Stephan: 

I have extremely strong views about public libraries and protecting them from political and ideological manipulation. Libraries have played a major role in my life, from the time I learned to read until today, and my wife would say the same, as would tens of millions of other Americans. In the 19th century Andrew Carnegie, himself an immigrant from Scotland, and then one of the richest men in America considered what he could do with his money to foster wellbeing in America. He settled on creating and funding public libraries. Today there are 2,509 Carnegie funded libraries in small towns and large cities all over the country. Now the MAGAts are attacking public libraries seeking to shape them to MAGAt ideology. It is a vile and disgusting effort and if you want to help your community, particularly if you live in a Red state, get involved and protect your local library.

Illustration by Emmanuel Polanco

Every public library is an exception. The world outside is costly and cordoned off, but here no one is charged, and no one is turned away. People browse for books and go online. They learn English, meet with friends, dawdle, nap, and play. For children, the public library is a place to build an inner life, unencumbered by grownups. Story time is an invitation to that experience. A librarian reads a book aloud to a huddle of kids seated cross-legged on the floor. It’s part early-literacy tool, part theatre, and looks basically the same wherever it happens. The public libraries in Flathead County, Montana, a region of mountainous beauty bordering Canada and Glacier National Park, offer seven story times per week, for babies on up. Three scattered branch locations—in Kalispell, Columbia Falls, and Bigfork—serve a population of a hundred and eleven thousand people, spread out over five thousand rugged square miles.

On a spring day in 2019, Ellie Newell, the youth-services librarian at the main branch, in a historic post office […]

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Nebraska Republican: Abortion Ban Needed to Ensure Dominance of White Population

Stephan: 

The thing about MAGAt politicians is that if you listen carefully, their hate, resentment, and racism is so strong that eventually one of them will tell you their real thinking. And here is the reason they are so committed to forcing women, particularly White women, to not be able to obtain an abortion, and why they increasingly support child labor for poor children, particularly immigrants and children of color.

The Nebraska State Capitol is pictured in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Credit: FOTOGUY22 / Istock / Getty

As lawmakers in the Nebraska legislature debated and advanced a near-total abortion ban last week, one Republican took to the floor and delivered an argument undergirded by a white supremacist conspiracy theory in support of the ban.

In a speech last Wednesday, Republican State Sen. Steve Erdman said that an abortion ban is necessary because there are too many of “those foreigners” and “refugees” in the state — coded language for non-white people.

“Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here,” he said, adding his untrue and racist claim about a lack of population growth among white people due to abortion. Video of his arguments was posted online by Heartland Signal.

Erdman also said that the absence of an abortion ban in the state, where the procedure is currently banned after 21 weeks and six days, is part of what’s fueling a labor shortage in the state, revealing what Republicans view as […]

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Fox’s Primetime Hosts Completely Ignored the Dominion Settlement

Stephan: 

As soon as I heard about the judgment against criminal Trump I immediately wondered how the Fox propaganda operation would treat the story and tuned into Fox. Except for a clip on an interview with Howard Kurtz who said a total of one sentence about Fox losing, there was not a word in the hour I watched while MSNBC, CNN, ABC, and BBC dedicated multiple segments to the case. If all someone watched was Fox and they didn’t happen to be looking at the Kurtz clip at the moment he said his single sentence they might not even know about the judgment or that Fox had lost. The largest settlement in American history and Fox hid it from their viewers. But the lies they tell, that led to the settlement, they spew out endlessly.


Fox propaganda personalities Bret Baier, Martha MacCallum, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity Credit: AFP

Fox  agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million in a last-minute settlement on Tuesday that spared the network the humiliation of a publicized defamation trial. If you get your news coverage from Fox’s prime-time stars, however, you’d have no idea it happened.

The outcome of the lawsuit was not mentioned once between the hours of 7 and 11 p.m. on Tuesday night — a block of time that includes network headliners Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity, all figures who were implicated in Dominion’s case against Fox.

Over the course of pretrial discovery, internal Fox News communications released to the public revealed the extent to which anchors and executives knew that the conspiracies about Dominion’s role in carrying out fraud in the 2020 election were false.

In text exchanges obtained by Dominion, Carlson, Hannity, and Ingraham mocked the claims being shopped out by Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, […]

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Details about multimillion-dollar stock holding concealed in abortion pill judge’s financial disclosures

Stephan: 

Matthew Kacsmaryk is obviously incompetent as a non-partisan judge knowledgeable in jurisprudence. But few if any seem to have realized he is also a minor-league Clarence Thomas. Here is the question I wonder about: Is it possible to be a Republican and an ethical person? It doesn’t seem to be given the news we see day after day. It is amazing to me that this corrupt creep may be able to affect the health and wellbeing of all the fertile women in America.

Judge Kacsmaryk vpx
 Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk Credit: Screen capture

The federal judge who issued a nationwide ruling blocking the approval of a common abortion medication redacted key information on his legally mandated financial disclosures, in what legal experts described as an unusual move that conceals the bulk of his personal fortune.

In his 2020 and 2021 annual disclosures, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk wrote that he held between $5 million and $25 million in “common stock” of a company – a significant majority of the judge’s personal wealth. The name of the company he held stock in is redacted, despite the fact that federal law only allows redactions of information that could “endanger” a judge or their family member.

CNN obtained a previous financial disclosure for Kacsmaryk – which is not available online – from 2017, when he was a judicial nominee.

On that unredacted form, Kacsmaryk reported owning about $2.9 million in stock in the Florida-based supermarket company Publix. It’s not clear whether that’s the same holding as the redacted stock, although Publix’s share price had significantly increased by 2020 and 2021 and the company […]

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