Group items tagged

The case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the country. But legal scholars say it also has the potential to deliver a powerful verdict on the kind of pervasive and pernicious falsehoods — and the people who spread them — that are undermining the country’s faith in democracy.

“We’re litigating history in a way: What is historical truth?” said Lee Levine, a noted First Amendment lawyer

“Here you’re taking very recent current events and going through a process which, at the end, is potentially going to declare what the correct version of history is.”

several studies showing how Fox broke into an untapped market for a single conservative news source after years of FCC regulations which required equal time for political debate (the so-called "fairness doctrine" ended in 1987 under President Reagan.)

Barlett also surfaced studies which show that that the Fox Effect changed not only Americans' media diet, but their political behavior as well — boosting turnout for the GOP and pushing both Republicans and Democrats rightward in Congress

A 2007 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that the arrival of Fox had a "significant effect" on the presidential elections from 1996 to 2000: Republican candidates gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in towns that broadcast the channel. (The research also credited Fox with GOP gains in the Senate.)

The establishment of Fox News in the late 1990s forever changed both media and politics in America, transforming the formerly staid world of television news into the series of political shoutfests we know and love-hate today.

the question persists: Does watching Fox News actually change voters’ minds?

Comparing markets that had received Fox to those where it was not yet available, the study concluded that the presence of Fox News was good for a Republican gain of 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. It was a decidedly modest effect — but large enough to sway that super-close election.

During Mr. Obama’s first term, MSNBC underwent a metamorphosis from a CNN also-ran to the anti-Fox, and handily beat CNN in the ratings along the way. Now that it is known, at least to those who cannot get enough politics, as the nation’s liberal television network, the challenge in the next four years will be to capitalize on that identity.

MSNBC, a unit of NBCUniversal, has a long way to go to overtake the Fox News Channel, a unit of News Corporation: on most nights this year, Fox had two million more viewers than MSNBC. But the two channels, which skew toward an audience that is 55 or older, are on average separated by fewer than 300,000 viewers in the 25- to 54-year-old demographic that advertisers desire. On three nights in a row after the election last week, MSNBC — whose hosts reveled in Mr. Obama’s victory — had more viewers than Fox in that demographic.

MSNBC sees itself as the voice of Mr. Obama’s America.

In anticipation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s recent public testimony in the House’s impeachment inquiry, the Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a guest concocted an insulting fantasy on her show: the idea that Colonel Vindman might be a Ukrainian spy.

as a former Fox News opinion talk-show guest host and contributor for 14 years, it didn’t shock me.

First, we must talk about narratives. In my time at Fox News, narratives were weapons of mass emotional manipulation, what the Nobel laureate Robert J. Shiller defines in “Narrative Economics” as “contagious stories” — as he put it in a paper of the same name, “a simple story or easily expressed explanation of events that many people want to bring up in conversation or on news or social media because it can be used to stimulate the concerns or emotions of others, and/or because it appears to advance self-interest.”

the network spread false claims that the voting machine company was involved in voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

"Fox endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion,"

Fox News issued a statement Friday morning stating that it "is proud of our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court."

Old, white, wrinkled and angry, they are slipping from polite society in alarming numbers. We’re losing much of a generation.  They often sport hats or other clothing, some marking their status as veterans, Tea Partyers or “patriots” of some kind or another. They have yellow flags, bumper stickers and an unquenchable rage. They used to be the brave men and women who took on America’s challenges, tackling the ’60s, the Cold War and the Reagan years — but now many are terrified by the idea of slightly more affordable healthcare and a very moderate Democrat in the White House.

I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.

My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.

It has been suggested, here and elsewhere, that Fox News effectively became part of the Republican propaganda apparatus during the presidential campaign by giving pundit slots to many of the Republican candidates and relentlessly advocating for Mitt Romney once he won the nomination. Over many months, Fox lulled its conservative base with agitprop: that President Obama was a clear failure, that a majority of Americans saw Mr. Romney as a good alternative in hard times, and that polls showing otherwise were politically motivated and not to be believed. But on Tuesday night, the people in charge of Fox News were confronted with a stark choice after it became clear that Mr. Romney had fallen short: was Fox, first and foremost, a place for advocacy or a place for news?

Ailes made conservative news popular and profitable, but he was not the first to mingle partisanship with news. The twinned concepts of balance and bias were not his legacy but his inheritance. Long before Fox News, before Ailes and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, there was a conservative media complex in the United States refining a theory of liberal media bias.

The idea of “fair and balanced” partisan media has its roots in the 1940s and 1950s. Human Events, the right-wing newsweekly founded in 1944, was dedicated to publishing the “facts” other outlets overlooked.

By the early 1960s, Human Events arrived at this formulation of its mission: In reporting the news, Human Events is objective; it aims for accurate representation of the facts. But it is not impartial. It looks at events through eyes that are biased in favor of limited constitutional government, local self-government, private enterprise, and individual freedom.

NBC may get things wrong from time to time, but its executives see reporting the truth and educating the public as their goal. Fox News’ standard isn’t so much truth as it is conservative ideology. Anything that doesn't line up with what O'Reilly says can simply be dismissed as an attack from the far left, and as long as it doesn't hurt his standing among viewers, it matters little whether or not he is a liar.

Furthermore, a big chunk of Fox's base audience was demoralized by Trump's loss in November and disheartened by the pro-Trump riot last week. Fox's average viewership levels are about 20% lower than they were before the election, even though overall TV news viewership is elevated due to the current combination of crises.

But for the conservative media ecosystem, just what should be affirmed has suddenly become an existential question."

"Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information'

Humans will do figure eights to make facts suit their fictions.

Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Leon Festinger came up with cognitive dissonance theory, which can essentially be described as the very human desire to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Our brains, he realized, will go to baroque lengths — do magic tricks, even — to preserve the integrity of our worldview, even when the facts inconveniently club us over the head with a two-by-four.

these outlets were in an ongoing interaction with the mainstream media, one whose goal was to influence what that media produced.

It wasn’t just to inflame their own audiences, it was a political project aimed at “working the refs” — keeping journalists under pressure to alter what they reported and how they reported on it to make the news more friendly to the right.

it only works if those in the mainstream are aware of what’s being said on the right. You can’t pressure someone who is barely aware you exist.

In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.

The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’ Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.

“We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic,”

Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, to hold a forecasting tournament to see if competition could spur better predictions.

In the fall of 2011, the agency asked a series of short-term questions about foreign affairs, such as whether certain countries will leave the euro, whether North Korea will re-enter arms talks, or whether Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev would switch jobs. They hired a consulting firm to run an experimental control group against which the competitors could be benchmarked.

Tetlock and his wife, the decision scientist Barbara Mellers, helped form a Penn/Berkeley team, which bested the competition and surpassed the benchmarks by 60 percent in Year 1. How did they make such accurate predictions? In the first place, they identified better forecasters. It turns out you can give people tests that usefully measure how open-minded they are.

Sean Hannity used his Fox News show on Monday night to feed wild conspiracy theories that the protests erupting around the country weren’t a spontaneous display of anger against President Donald Trump. Instead, he implied they were “bankrolled” by shadowy figures.

to murder police on Monday. The chant went "we won't stop, we can't stop, 'til killer cops, are in cell blocks," according to C-SPAN footage. But WBFF cut the audio short and told viewers that the words were in fact "we won't stop, we can't stop, so kill a cop."

Jones called out the station several times for misrepresenting her words. "The interesting part that really gets to me is, where you guys edited it and stopped — like, how could that be a mistake?" she said. "Once you play that whole thing, you would know that's not something that's being said," she added. The interviewer apologized several times, and though Jones told the station she was grateful to come on, she also said she now fears for her reputation and her safety. Near the end of the interview she began to cry. "At the end of the day, people's lives are on the line," she said. "Now, even though we're doing this, I still don't feel safe because I still feel like the message is out there." "What if a crazed-out cop or a crazed-out supporter thinks I'm trying to get cops killed?" she later said, wiping tears from her face.

The Fox Business Network announced on Friday that it had parted ways with Trish Regan, the conservative news host who ignited controversy earlier this month when she dismissed the coronavirus pandemic as a conspiracy to throw President Trump out of office.

Regan faced fierce criticism earlier this month when she described the coronavirus to her viewers as an "impeachment scam."

"This is impeachment all over again," Regan said at the time, claiming Trump's critics were using the pandemic to spark panic and destabilize the economy to harm his chances of being re-elected.

This is watching the sausage of macroeconomics being made. It's not appetizing. Seemingly small choices in how to handle the data deliver dramatically different results. And it's not hard to see why: The Reinhart-Rogoff data set, according to Herndon-Ash-Pollin's analysis, contained just 110 "country-years" of debt/GDP over 90%, and 63 of those come from just three countries: Belgium, Greece, and the UK. This is a problem inherent to macroeconomics. It's not like an experiment that one can run multiple times, or observations that can be compared across millions of individuals or even hundreds of corporations. In the words attributed to economist Paul Samuelson, "We have but one sample of history." And it's just not a very big sample.

So what to do about it? One response is to dig for more data, and Reinhart and Rogoff have been doing that, going back to 1800 to examine episodes of public debt overhangs. Another is to have different people crunch it in different ways, which is what Herndon-Ash-Pollin did, or assemble different data sets, as several other scholars have done.

But the biggest challenge may be how to present it.