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      Fox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition.

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      The Fox News newsroom in New York.Credit…Ryan Jenq for The New York TimesMEDIA EQUATIONFox Settled a Lawsuit Over Its Lies. But It Insisted on One Unusual Condition.Why did the network insist an agreement with the family of a murdered young man remain undisclosed until after the election?The Fox News newsroom in New York.Credit…Ryan Jenq for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 17, 2021Updated 9:19 p.m. ETOn Oct. 12, 2020, Fox News agreed to pay millions of dollars to the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member, implicitly acknowledging what saner minds knew long ago: that the network had repeatedly hyped a false claim that the young staff member, Seth Rich, was involved in leaking D.N.C. emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. (Russian intelligence officers, in fact, had hacked and leaked the emails.)Fox’s decision to settle with the Rich family came just before its marquee hosts, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity, were set to be questioned under oath in the case, a potentially embarrassing moment. And Fox paid so much that the network didn’t have to apologize for the May 2017 story on FoxNews.com.But there was one curious provision that Fox insisted on: The settlement had to be kept secret for a month — until after the Nov. 3 election. The exhausted plaintiffs agreed.Why did Fox care about keeping the Rich settlement secret for the final month of the Trump re-election campaign? Why was it important to the company, which calls itself a news organization, that one of the biggest lies of the Trump era remain unresolved for that period? Was Fox afraid that admitting it was wrong would incite the president’s wrath? Did network executives fear backlash from their increasingly radicalized audience, which has been gravitating to other conservative outlets?Fox News and its lawyer, Joe Terry, declined to answer that question when I asked last week. And two people close to the case, who shared details of the settlement with me, were puzzled by that provision, too.The unusual arrangement underscores how deeply entwined Fox has become in the Trump camp’s disinformation efforts and the dangerous paranoia they set off, culminating in the fatal attack on the Capitol 11 days ago. The network parroted lies from Trump and his more sinister allies for years, ultimately amplifying the president’s enormous deceptions about the election’s outcome, further radicalizing many of Mr. Trump’s supporters.The man arrested after rampaging through the Capitol with zip-tie handcuffs had proudly posted to Facebook a photograph with his shotgun and Fox Business on a giant screen in the background. The woman fatally shot as she pushed her way inside the House chamber had engaged Fox contributors dozens of times on Twitter, NPR reported.High profile Fox voices, with occasional exceptions, not only fed the baseless belief that the election had been stolen, but they helped frame Jan. 6 as a decisive day of reckoning, when their audience’s dreams of overturning the election could be realized. And the network’s role in fueling pro-Trump extremism is nothing new: Fox has long been the favorite channel of pro-Trump militants. The man who mailed pipe bombs to CNN in 2018 watched Fox News “religiously,” according to his lawyers’ sentencing memorandum, and believed Mr. Hannity’s claim that Democrats were “encouraging mob violence” against people like him.Eric G. Munchel, left, was arrested last Sunday by the F.B.I in connection with the storming of the Capitol.Credit…Win Mcnamee/Getty ImagesAnd yet, as we in the media reckon with our role in the present catastrophe, Fox often gets left out of the story. You can see why. Dog bites man is never news. Fox’s vitriol and distortions are simply viewed as part of the landscape now. The cable channel has been a Republican propaganda outlet for decades, and under President Trump’s thumb for years. So while the mainstream media loves to beat itself up — it’s a way, sometimes, of inflating our own importance — we have mostly sought less obvious angles in this winter’s self-examination. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan concluded last week that the mainstream press is “flawed and stuck for too long in outdated conventions,” but “has managed to do its job.” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan said the media had “failed” by normalizing Trump.I took my turn last week, writing about how a man I worked with at BuzzFeed played a role in the insurrection. One thoughtful reader, a former engineer at Corning, wrote to me to say she’d been reckoning with a similar sense of complicity. The engineer was on the team that developed the thin, bright glass that made possible the ubiquitous flat screen televisions that rewired politics and our minds. She’s now asking herself whether “this glass made it happen.”When I shared the engineer’s email with some others at the Times, one, Virginia Hughes, a Science editor and longtime colleague, responded: “Everyone wants to blame themselves except the people who actually deserve blame.”And so let me take a break from beating up well-intentioned journalists and even the social media platforms that greedily threw open Pandora’s box for profit.There’s only one multibillion-dollar media corporation that deliberately and aggressively propagated these untruths. That’s the Fox Corporation, and its chairman, Rupert Murdoch; his feckless son Lachlan, who is nominally C.E.O.; and the chief legal officer Viet Dinh, a kind of regent who mostly runs the company day-to-day.Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch at the Allen & Company media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2018.Credit…David Paul Morris/BloombergThese are the people ultimately responsible for helping to ensure that one particular and pernicious lie about a 27-year-old man’s death circulated for years. The elder Mr. Murdoch has long led Fox, to the extent anyone actually leads it, through a kind of malign negligence, and letting that lie persist seems just his final, lavish gift to Mr. Trump.The company paid handsomely for it, according to Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, who first reported on the settlement and has covered the case extensively.The Murdoch organization didn’t originate the lie, but it embraced it, and it served an obvious political purpose: deflecting suspicions of Russian involvement in helping the Trump campaign. That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.The story of Fox’s impact on the fracturing of American society and the notion of truth is too big to capture in a single column. But the story of its impact on one family is singular and devastating. Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron, reflected on it Friday from his home in Denver, where he’s a software engineer. Seth was his little brother, seven years younger and two inches shorter, but more at ease with people, more popular, better at soccer in high school.Mary Rich, the mother of Seth Rich, at a news conference on Aug. 1, 2016, several weeks after he was murdered in Washington, D.C.Credit…Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesSeth Rich was murdered in the early morning of Sunday, July 10, 2016, on a sidewalk in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Aaron was still wrestling with the shock, reeling from the worst week of his life, when a friend told him that something was happening on Reddit. A news story had mentioned that Seth was a staff member at the Democratic National Committee. While some of the top comments were simply condolences, the lower part of the page was full of unfounded speculation that the young D.N.C. employee — not the Russians — had been WikiLeaks’ source of the hacked emails. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks encouraged the speculation, but it remained low-level chatter about confusing theories for about 10 months. That’s when Fox claimed that an anonymous federal investigator had linked Seth Rich to the leak.The story took off. It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”“It fell apart within the general public within 24 hours,’’ Aaron Rich recalled, yet “Hannity pushed it for another week.” Finally, Aaron Rich said, he sent Mr. Hannity and his producer an email, and the barrage stopped, but he said he never received an apology from the Fox host.“He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”A Fox News spokeswoman, Irena Briganti, declined to comment on Mr. Rich’s request for an apology.Fox also pulled the story down a week after it was published, with an opaque statement that “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”The damage had been done. The story is still in wide circulation on the right, to the point where Mr. Rich was reluctant to share a photograph of himself and his brother for this story with The New York Times. Every time he has done that, he said, the photo — of the brothers at Aaron’s wedding, for instance — has been reused and tainted by conspiracy theorists.Seth and Aaron Rich at Aaron’s wedding on Oct. 25, 2015.Credit…Aaron RichAaron Rich, who with his brother grew up in Nebraska, said he hadn’t thought much about who beyond Fox’s talent was responsible for the lies about his brother. When I asked him about Rupert Murdoch, he wasn’t sure who he was — “I’m really bad at trivia things.” That’s the genius of the Murdochs’ management of the place: They collect the cash while evading responsibility and letting their hosts work primarily for Mr. Trump.Mr. Rich isn’t party to the settlement with his parents, and he declined to discuss its details. His parents said in a court filing that the barrage of conspiracy theories had damaged their mental health and cost his mother, Mary, her ability to work and to socialize.But he said he simply doesn’t understand why Fox couldn’t simply apologize for its damaging lie — not in May of 2017, not when it reached the settlement in October, and not when it finally made the settlement public after the election and wished his family “some measure of peace.”It reminds me of a well-known political figure now leaving the stage, one who has been strikingly allergic to apologizing, expressing any empathy or engaging in any soul searching about his role in mobilizing the ugliest of American impulses.“I was glad they stopped doing it,” Seth Rich’s brother said, a bit hopelessly. “But they never admitted they lit the fire.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      La historia de un radical: trabajé con uno de los asaltantes del Capitolio

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeVisual TimelineNotable ArrestsIncitement to Riot?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Media EquationLa historia de un radical: trabajé con uno de los asaltantes del CapitolioEn BuzzFeed, nos enfocábamos en realizar contenidos virales para las redes sociales. Un joven empleado aprendió esa noción y la aplicó a la extrema derecha.Simpatizantes del presidente Trump en el Capitolio, en Washington, D. C., el miércoles 6 de enero.Credit…Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA vía Shutterstock12 de enero de 2021 a las 05:00 ETRead in EnglishEncajaba tan bien como cualquier otro empleado en nuestro estudio de Los Ángeles, un lugar lleno de inadaptados ambiciosos con dones inusuales. Sabían cómo crear los videos que la gente quería ver en internet.Su verdadero nombre era Anthime Joseph Gionet, aunque prefería otros. Su valor para BuzzFeed era claro: hacía cualquier cosa por Vine, la plataforma de videos cortos que tuvo un breve auge cultural antes de ser aplastada por Instagram y Snapchat en 2017.Una vez se echó un galón de leche en la cara y el video atrajo millones de visitas, cuando la mayoría de las acrobacias inofensivas divertían a millones de espectadores estadounidenses en esa plataforma.En ese sentido, era natural que estuviera en BuzzFeed cuando llegó en la primavera de 2015, donde yo era el editor en jefe y me encargaba de supervisar el sitio web. Gionet fue contratado para manejar la cuenta de Vine de nuestra sección de videos, y su trabajo consistía principalmente en editar videos tontos y divertidos de hasta seis segundos que producían sus colegas. Al cabo de unos meses, también se hizo cargo de una cuenta de Twitter de BuzzFeed, en la que aprovechó su intuición sobre qué tipo de video compartiría la gente.En esos días, éramos mejores que nadie en la creación de contenido para las redes sociales, sobre todo listas, concursos y videos cortos, pero ocasionalmente también hacíamos espectaculares transmisiones en vivo, la más famosa fue una en la que dos de mis colegas hicieron estallar una sandía llenándola de ligas una por una.Así que el lenguaje que escuché de Gionet, ahora de 33 años, en su “transmisión en vivo” el miércoles pasado me resultó familiar. “Tenemos más de 10.000 personas en vivo que nos observan. ¡Vamos!”, dijo con entusiasmo. “Presionen el botón de seguir. Les agradezco, chicos”.Gionet se encontraba dentro de la oficina del senador por Oregón Jeff Merkley, que estaba en ruinas, transmitiendo desde una de las pocas plataformas que aún no lo habían suspendido, junto con otros simpatizantes de Trump que jugaban con el auricular del teléfono y se subían a los muebles. Parecía una conclusión apropiada para su reciente carrera que algunos podrían considerar como troleo o bromas por internet, pero que probablemente se describe mejor como violencia performativa.Anthime Joseph Gionet en una escena de su transmisión en vivo, el miércoles pasado.Credit…LiveLeakDespués de ver a Gionet, llamé a algunos de mis antiguos colegas, que lo recordaron con una mezcla de perplejidad y repulsión. Era sensible y casi se mostraba desesperado por ser aceptado, dijeron. Una vez se molestó mucho cuando alguien se burló de su bigote grueso rubio y su corte de cabello en mullet. En ese entonces, dos de sus amigos más cercanos de la oficina tenían orígenes étnicos e identidades de género diferentes a la suya, y a veces se unían por un sentimiento de ser marginados. Uno de esos amigos lo recordaba como un personaje triste que no expresaba realmente sus opiniones políticas más allá de la cultura ampliamente adolescente e insensible de Vine, y me dijo que estaba obsesionado con su infancia solitaria en Alaska. Según tres de ellos, parecía que le faltaba algo, que estaba vacío por dentro.A medida que avanzaban las elecciones de 2016, empezó a coquetear con una personalidad política. Primero puso un retrato de Bernie Sanders en su escritorio, dijeron dos excolegas. Luego comenzó a usar gorras de MAGA en la oficina, lo que sorprendió a sus compañeros de trabajo más progresistas, aunque eran bastante apolíticos. En ese entonces algunas personas todavía pensaban que la extrema derecha podría ser “irónica”.Cuando, meses después, dejó BuzzFeed para trabajar como el “coordinador de las giras políticas” de Milo Yiannopoulos, un favorito de la “extrema derecha” racista y antisemita, sus colegas se impresionaron momentáneamente. Luego, revisaron la cuenta de Twitter de Gionet, donde sus declaraciones cada vez más viles le estaban consiguiendo retuits de figuras de la extrema derecha, y se dieron cuenta de que no deberían haberse sorprendido.Sin embargo, no está claro en qué es lo que cree Gionet, si es que cree algo. Y realmente, no estoy seguro de que me importe.Este no es un perfil compasivo de un joven que se ha equivocado. No puedo tener mucha compasión por un tipo que, antes de atacar su Capitolio, pasaba el rato disparando algún tipo de sustancia irritante embotellada (lo llamaba “espray de contenido”) a los ojos de gente inocente para obtener vistas en YouTube y gritándoles a los dependientes de las tiendas que le pedían que usara cubrebocas.Para mí, esta historia es sobre algo diferente, una especie de poder de las redes sociales que ayudamos a afinar en BuzzFeed y que puede ejercer una atracción gravitacional casi irresistible.Si no has tenido la experiencia de publicar algo en las redes sociales que se vuelve verdaderamente viral, es posible que no entiendas su profunda atracción emocional. De repente eres el centro de un universo digital y recibes más atención de más gente que nunca. A veces, el impulso de afirmación es vertiginoso y adictivo. Y, si tienes poco a lo que aferrarte, puedes perderte en todo eso.Incluso cuando buscábamos hacer que nuestro trabajo se difundiera en BuzzFeed, nos enfrentábamos a limitaciones; debíamos decir la verdad en nuestra división de noticias y apegarnos a un conjunto de valores claramente positivos en nuestra rama de entretenimiento. Sin embargo, Gionet finalmente rompió esos límites, pues parecía seguir las señales que encontraba en las redes sociales sin ningún escrúpulo. La única línea que atravesaba era su deseo de construir una audiencia. Apoyaba a Sanders antes de lanzar consignas antisemitas en Charlottesville, Virginia; luego se retractó de manera temporal de esas opiniones extremas y más tarde cometió delitos violentos para obtener vistas en YouTube. Consiguió una audiencia entre los negacionistas del coronavirus y más tarde, cuando aparentemente contrajo la enfermedad, publicó la captura de pantalla de su propia prueba positiva en Instagram con un emoticono de llanto. Semanas después, se unió al levantamiento a favor de Trump en el Capitolio.“Su política se ha guiado por las métricas de la plataforma”, reflexionó Andrew Gauthier, quien fue uno de los principales productores de video de BuzzFeed y quien más tarde trabajó para la campaña presidencial de Joe Biden. “Siempre piensas que el mal vendrá de la maldad del villano de las películas, y entonces piensas: ‘Ay, no, el mal puede empezar con chistes malos y un comportamiento nihilista que es alimentado por el refuerzo positivo en varias plataformas’”.Así que la historia de Gionet no es tan familiar como la de un joven solitario en su dormitorio que empieza a ver videos que envenenan su visión del mundo. Es la historia de un hombre que es recompensado por ser nacionalista blanco violento y que recibe la atención y la afirmación que aparentemente está desesperado por obtener.Pasamos mucho tiempo en BuzzFeed pensando en cómo optimizar nuestro contenido para una audiencia en línea; él se optimizó a sí mismo.Según un informe policial, cuando fue arrestado en Scottsdale, Arizona, el mes pasado por rociar una solución de gas lacrimógeno a un guardia, un oficial informó que Gionet le dijo que era una personalidad influyente y tenía muchos seguidores en las redes sociales. Fue puesto en libertad bajo palabra, dijo un portavoz de la policía de Scottsdale, y está a la espera de ser juzgado. Sin embargo, en el Capitolio, gritó “ACAF”, All Cops Are Friends (“Todos los policías son amigos”, aunque el significado original del acrónimo es menos amistoso).Su historia deja preguntándome qué responsabilidad tenemos quienes fuimos pioneros en el uso de las redes sociales para ofrecer información. ¿Nosotros, junto con los creadores de esas plataformas, ayudamos a abrir la caja de Pandora?No trabajé directamente con Gionet. Pero, en 2012, contraté a un escritor llamado Benny Johnson que estaba cultivando una voz que mezclaba el conocimiento de las redes sociales y la política de derecha. En ese momento pensé, erróneamente, que su visión política era simplemente conservadora. Y lo imaginé prosperando, como lo han hecho los escritores conservadores durante generaciones en las principales salas de redacción, donde cultivaban el mismo interés de sus colegas en encontrar hechos compartidos.Tardé en darme cuenta de que sus intereses no eran periodísticos, ni siquiera ideológicos, sino estéticos, emocionados por las imágenes del poder puro. En la tradición de los propagandistas autoritarios, le asombraban los edificios neoclásicos, las armas y, más tarde, las multitudes de Donald Trump. Y, después de que lo despedimos por plagio en 2014, pasó a liderar la sección de contenido del ala juvenil de Trump, Turning Point USA, y presenta un programa en Newsmax. La semana pasada, animó los intentos de revocar las elecciones (aunque se retractó cuando comenzó la violencia y luego culpó a los izquierdistas por eso). También está vendiendo sus habilidades en la “narración política viral” en la que trabajamos juntos en BuzzFeed a una generación de nuevas figuras de derecha, como la representante Lauren Boebert, quien ha llamado la atención por jurar que lleva su pistola al Congreso. (Ni Gionet ni Johnson respondieron a las consultas por correo electrónico).Mientras refinábamos la nueva práctica de las redes sociales en BuzzFeed, tardamos en darnos cuenta de que la extrema derecha nos observaba de cerca y finalmente nos imitaba. Jonah Peretti, quien fundó The Huffington Post y BuzzFeed, se sorprendió cuando Steve Bannon, quien dirigía Breitbart, le recordó a un escritor que había tomado prestadas tácticas de Peretti para su estrategia en el periodo previo a las elecciones de 2016. Bannon me dijo antes de esas elecciones, en una entrevista en la Trump Tower, que estaba sorprendido de que no hubiéramos convertido a BuzzFeed en un bastión de apoyo para Bernie Sanders, como Breitbart lo hizo con Trump. Notó, quizá de manera correcta, que el tráfico de un medio de propaganda a favor de Sanders habría excedido enormemente lo que obtuvimos por nuestra cobertura justa de las primarias demócratas.“Algunas de las cosas innovadoras que hicimos desde el principio, en la comprensión de las redes sociales y los medios digitales, han sido tomadas por los grupos de extrema derecha, los grupos racistas, los grupos MAGA”, me dijo mi exjefe, Peretti, durante una entrevista la semana pasada. No obstante, Peretti, un eterno optimista, señaló que algunos de los mismos mecanismos sociales que Gionet aprovechó también fueron cruciales para los movimientos sociales progresistas de los últimos años, desde Black Lives Matter hasta #MeToo. “La historia no ha terminado y hay una oportunidad de luchar por un buen internet”, comentó. (Nota: no doy cobertura a BuzzFeed extensamente en esta columna, más allá de apoyarme en lo que aprendí durante mi tiempo allí, y The New York Times ha exigido que no lo haga hasta que me deshaga de mis opciones de compra de acciones en la empresa).Ya estoy escuchando lo que parecen ser dos explicaciones que compiten entre sí por lo que pasó en Washington la semana pasada: que la multitud abrumadoramente blanca, a veces abiertamente racista, encarnaba la vieja y profunda maldad estadounidense; o que las redes sociales transformaron las identidades vacías de algunos estadounidenses para convertirlas en algo radical.Sin embargo, la historia de Gionet muestra cómo esas explicaciones no entran en conflicto. Un hombre que sus colegas consideraban vacío y sin rumbo convirtió su identidad en una especie de espejo de ese viejo mal estadounidense, y se ha convertido en lo que muchos estadounidenses le dijeron que querían que fuera.En un momento de la transmisión en vivo de Gionet durante el asedio al Capitolio, una voz invisible fuera de cámara advierte que Trump “se molestaría mucho” con las payasadas de los alborotadores.“No, estará contento”, respondió Gionet. “Estamos luchando por Trump”.Ben Smith es el columnista de medios. Se unió al Times en 2020, después de ocho años como editor jefe fundador de BuzzFeed News. Antes de eso, cubrió política para Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York Observer y The New York Sun. Correo electrónico: ben.smith@nytimes.com @benytAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Punchbowl Arrives From Reporters Who Left Politico's Playbook

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      Electoral College Results

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      New York Post Editorial Blasts Trump’s Fraud Claims

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMurdoch’s New York Post Blasts President’s Fraud ClaimsWith a scathing front-page editorial, the Trump-friendly tabloid joined another of Rupert Murdoch’s papers, The Wall Street Journal, in attacking the president’s attempts to undo the election result.Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post put more distance between itself and President Trump with a blistering front-page editorial on Monday.Credit…New York PostDec. 28, 2020“Give it up, Mr. President — for your sake and the nation’s.”In a blunt editorial, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, a tabloid that promoted Donald J. Trump long before he went into politics, told the president to end his attempts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.The Monday front page showed a downcast president and the all-caps headline “Stop the Insanity.” The publication’s website also featured the editorial, written by The Post’s editorial board, at the top of the home page.“Mr. President, it’s time to end this dark charade,” began the editorial.It blasted Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the House and Senate try to disrupt the tallying of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6. It also ridiculed Sidney Powell, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who pushed conspiracy theories about a Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in the United States. And it said a suggestion by Michael T. Flynn, the former lieutenant general who served as Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, to impose martial law was “tantamount to treason.”“You have tweeted that, as long as Republicans have ‘courage,’ they can overturn the results and give you four more years in office,” the Post editorial said.“In other words,” it continued, “you’re cheering for an undemocratic coup.”The Post helped make Mr. Trump a New York celebrity decades ago, and it was an early backer of his political ambitions, endorsing him in the Republican primary race ahead of the 2016 election.In January 2019, as Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign was underway, the paper brought back its former longtime editor in chief, Col Allan, an Australian tabloid wizard who was once seen wearing a Make America Great Again cap in the newsroom. Mr. Allan, in the role of newsroom adviser, helped shape the paper’s election coverage, and The Post’s editorial board gave Mr. Trump its endorsement in a front-page editorial on Oct. 26 headlined “Make America Great Again, Again.”Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 23, 2020, 8:59 a.m. ETExtension of federal jobless benefits may not prevent a brief lapse.Frustration rises at Britain’s ports over clearing a logjam of thousands of trucks.How the aid bill changes the food stamp program.Since Election Day, however, The Post’s tone has changed.In an interview with The New York Times shortly after Joseph R. Biden Jr. emerged as the winner of the presidential election, Mr. Allan said he was calling an end to his four-decade career at Murdoch papers in the United States and Australia. And on Nov. 7, The Post’s editorial board published some tough-love advice to Mr. Trump: “President Trump, your legacy is secure — stop the ‘stolen election’ rhetoric.”The conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, another paper controlled by Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp, has taken a similar line. “President Trump accomplished a great deal in four years, but as he leaves office he can’t seem to help reminding Americans why they denied him a second term,” began a Dec. 20 editorial headlined “Trump’s Bad Exit.”It concluded: “Mr. Trump doesn’t want to admit he lost, and he can duck the inauguration if he likes. But his sore loser routine is beginning to grate even on millions who voted for him.”Television personalities in the Murdoch media empire have also changed their tune.Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, of Fox Business, and Jeanine Pirro, of Fox News, seemed to back attempts by the president and his acolytes to undo the election results — until recently. This month, the programs hosted by the three anchors included three-minute segments intended to debunk on-air claims that the 2020 vote had been rigged. The segments ran after Antonio Mugica, the head of the election technology company Smartmatic, threatened legal action against media companies that had broadcast statements suggesting that the company had a role in the vote fraud.In its front-page attack on Monday, The Post’s editorial board, run by its longtime editor, Mark Q. Cunningham, appealed directly to Mr. Trump.“We understand, Mr. President, that you’re angry that you lost,” it said. “But to continue down this road is ruinous.”“Democrats will try to write you off as a one-term aberration and, frankly, you’re helping them do it,” the editorial continued. “The King Lear of Mar-a-Lago, ranting about the corruption of the world.”In conclusion, it said: “If you insist on spending your final days in office threatening to burn it all down, that will be how you are remembered. Not as a revolutionary, but as the anarchist holding the match.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing Media

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ‘Red Slime’ Lawsuit That Could Sink Right-Wing MediaVoting machine companies threaten “highly dangerous” cases against Fox, Newsmax and OAN, says Floyd Abrams.Last week, a lawyer for Antonio Mugica sent scathing letters to Fox, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name.Credit…Niklas Hallen/Getty ImagesDec. 20, 2020Updated 9:43 p.m. ETAntonio Mugica was in Boca Raton when an American presidential election really melted down in 2000, and he watched with shocked fascination as local government officials argued over hanging chads and butterfly ballots.It was so bad, so incompetent, that Mr. Mugica, a young Venezuelan software engineer, decided to shift the focus of his digital security company, Smartmatic, which had been working for banks. It would offer its services to what would obviously be a growth industry: electronic voting machines. He began building a global company that ultimately provided voting machinery and software for elections from Brazil to Belgium and his native Venezuela. He even acquired an American company, then called Sequoia.Last month, Mr. Mugica initially took it in stride when his company’s name started popping up in grief-addled Trump supporters’ wild conspiracy theories about the election.“Of course I was surprised, but at the same time, it was pretty clear that these people were trying to discredit the election and they were throwing out 25 conspiracy theories in parallel,” he told me in an interview last week from Barbados, where his company has an office. “I thought it was so absurd that it was not going to have legs.”But by Nov. 14, he knew he had a problem. That’s when Rudy Giuliani, serving as the president’s lawyer, suggested that one voting company, Dominion Voting Systems, had a sinister connection to vote counts in “Michigan, Arizona and Georgia and other states.” Mr. Giuliani declared on Twitter that the company “was a front for SMARTMATIC, who was really doing the computing. Look up SMARTMATIC and tweet me what you think?”Soon his company, and a competitor, Dominion — which sells its services to about 1,900 of the county governments that administer elections across America — were at the center of Mr. Giuliani’s and Sidney Powell’s theories, and on the tongues of commentators on Fox News and its farther-right rivals, Newsmax and One America News.“Sidney Powell is out there saying that states like Texas, they turned away from Dominion machines, because really there’s only one reason why you buy a Dominion machine and you buy this Smartmatic software, so you can easily change votes,” the Newsmax host Chris Salcedo said in one typical mash-up on Nov. 18. Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business reported on Nov. 15 that “one source says that the key point to understand is that the Smartmatic system has a backdoor.”The Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.Credit…Monica Schipper/Getty ImagesHere’s the thing: Smartmatic wasn’t even used in the contested states. The company, now a major global player with over 300 employees, pulled out of the United States in 2007 after a controversy over its founders’ Venezuelan roots, and its only involvement this November was with a contract to help Los Angeles County run its election.In an era of brazen political lies, Mr. Mugica has emerged as an unlikely figure with the power to put the genie back in the bottle. Last week, his lawyer sent scathing letters to the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and OAN demanding that they immediately, forcefully clear his company’s name — and that they retain documents for a planned defamation lawsuit. He has, legal experts say, an unusually strong case. And his new lawyer is J. Erik Connolly, who not coincidentally won the largest settlement in the history of American media defamation in 2017, at least $177 million, for a beef producer whose “lean finely textured beef” was described by ABC News as “pink slime.”Now, Mr. Connolly’s target is a kind of red slime, the stream of preposterous lies coming from the White House and Republican officials around the country.“We’ve gotten to this point where there’s so much falsity that is being spread on certain platforms, and you may need an occasion where you send a message, and that’s what punitive damages can do in a case like this,” Mr. Connolly said.Mr. Mugica isn’t the only potential plaintiff. Dominion Voting Systems has hired another high-powered libel lawyer, Tom Clare, who has threatened legal action against Ms. Powell and the Trump campaign. Mr. Clare said in an emailed statement that “we are moving forward on the basis that she will not retract those false statements and that it will be necessary for Dominion to take aggressive legal action, both against Ms. Powell and the many others who have enabled and amplified her campaign of defamation by spreading damaging falsehoods about Dominion.”These are legal threats any company, even a giant like Fox Corporation, would take seriously. And they could be fatal to the dream of a new “Trump TV,” a giant new media company in the president’s image, and perhaps contributing to his bottom line. Newsmax and OAN would each like to become that, and are both burning money to steal ratings from Fox, executives from both companies have acknowledged. They will need to raise significantly more money, or to sell quickly to investors, to build a Fox-style multibillion-dollar empire. But outstanding litigation with the potential of an enormous verdict will be enough to scare away most buyers.And so Newsmax and OAN appear likely to face the same fate as so many of President Trump’s sycophants, who have watched him lie with impunity and imitated him — only to find that he’s the only one who can really get away with it. Mr. Trump benefits from presidential immunity, but also he has an experienced fabulist’s sense of where the legal red lines are, something his allies often lack. Three of his close aides were convicted of lying, and Michael Cohen served more than a year in prison. (Trump pardoned Michael Flynn and commuted the sentence of Roger Stone.)OAN and Newsmax have been avidly hyping Mr. Trump’s bogus election claims. OAN has even been trying to get to Newsmax’s right, by continuing to reject Joe Biden’s status as president-elect. But their own roles in propagating that lie could destroy their businesses if Mr. Mugica sues.The letters written by lawyers for Smartmatic and Dominion are “extremely powerful,” said Floyd Abrams, one of the country’s most prominent First Amendment lawyers, in an email to The New York Times. “The repeated accusations against both companies are plainly defamatory and surely have done enormous reputational and financial harm to both.”Mr. Abrams noted that “truth is always a defense” and that, failing that, the networks may defend themselves by saying they didn’t know the charges were false, while Ms. Powell may say she was simply describing legal filings.“It is far too early to predict how the cases, if commenced, will end,” he said. “But it is not too early to say that they would be highly dangerous to those sued.”Lawyers said they expected that the right-wing networks, if sued, would argue that Smartmatic and Dominion should be considered “public figures” — which would require the companies to prove that its critics were malicious or wildly reckless, not just wrong.Mr. Connolly said he would argue that Smartmatic was not a public figure, a legal status whose exact meaning varies depending on whether Mr. Mugica files suit in Florida, New York or another state.“They have a very good case,” another First Amendment lawyer who isn’t connected to the litigation, the University of Florida professor Clay Calvert, said of Smartmatic. “If these statements are false and we are taking them as factual statements, that’s why we have defamation law.”Fox News and Fox Business, which have mentioned Dominion 792 times and Smartmatic 118 times between them, according to a search of the service TVEyes, appear to be taking the threat seriously. Over the weekend, they broadcast one of the strangest three-minute segments I’ve ever seen on television, with a disembodied and anonymous voice flatly asking a series of factual questions about Smartmatic of an expert on voting machines, Eddie Perez, who debunks a series of false claims. The segment, which appeared scripted to persuade a very literal-minded judge or jury that the network was being fair, aired over the weekend on the shows hosted by Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro and Maria Bartiromo, where Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell had made their most outlandish claims.Newsmax said in an emailed statement that the channel “has never made a claim of impropriety about Smartmatic, its ownership or software” and that the company was merely providing a “forum for public concerns and discussion.” An OAN spokeswoman didn’t respond to an inquiry.I’m reluctant to cheer on a defamation case against news organizations, even networks that appear to be amplifying dangerous lies. Companies and politicians often exploit libel law to threaten and silence journalists, and at the very least subject them to expensive and draining litigation.And defamation cases can also collide with subjects of genuine public interest, as in the most prominent case I’ve been involved in, when a businessman sued me and my colleagues at BuzzFeed News for publishing the Steele Dossier, while acknowledging that it was unverified. There, a judge ruled that the document was an official record that BuzzFeed was entitled to publish.In this controversy, even the voting companies’ worst critics find the coverage wildly distorted.“They’ve been mining every paper I’ve ever written and any deposition I’ve ever given and it’s nonsense,” said Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa who has long argued that voting software isn’t as secure as its vendors claim. He said Ms. Powell’s cybersecurity expert, Navid Keshavarz-Nia, called him on Nov. 15, apparently seeing him as a potential ally, and spent an hour going point-by-point over claims that would wind up in a deposition. “He seemed sane, but every time I would ask him for evidence that would support one of these allegations he would squirm off to a different allegation,” Mr. Jones said.As the conversation wore on, he wondered, “Was someone trying to pull a ‘Borat’ on me?”But the allegations are no joke for Smartmatic and Dominion. Mr. Mugica said he had taken worried calls from governments and politicians all over the world, concerned that Mr. Trump’s poison will seep into their politics and turn a Smartmatic contract into a liability.“This potentially could destroy it all,” he said.Mr. Mugica wouldn’t say whether he has made up his mind to sue. Mr. Connolly said that he has “a lot of people watching a lot of videos right now,” and that he’s researching whether to file in New York, Florida or elsewhere. I asked Mr. Mugica if he’d settle for an apology.“Is the apology going to reverse the false belief of tens of millions of people who believe in these lies?” he asked. “Then I could be satisfied.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Myon Burrell Has Life Sentence Commuted by Minnesota

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      From Voter Fraud to Vaccine Lies: Misinformation Peddlers Shift Gears

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrom Voter Fraud to Vaccine Lies: Misinformation Peddlers Shift GearsElection-related falsehoods have subsided, but misleading claims about the coronavirus vaccines are surging — often spread by the same people.Sidney Powell, who was a member of President Trump’s legal team, on Capitol Hill last month. She has started posting inaccurate claims about the coronavirus vaccines online.Credit…Jonathan Ernst/ReutersDavey Alba and Dec. 16, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETSidney Powell, a lawyer who was part of President Trump’s legal team, spread a conspiracy theory last month about election fraud. For days, she claimed that she would “release the Kraken” by showing voluminous evidence that Mr. Trump had won the election by a landslide.But after her assertions were widely derided and failed to gain legal traction, Ms. Powell started talking about a new topic. On Dec. 4, she posted a link on Twitter with misinformation that said that the population would be split into the vaccinated and the unvaccinated and that “big government” could surveil those who were unvaccinated.“NO WAY #America,” Ms. Powell wrote in the tweet, which collected 22,600 shares and 51,000 likes. “This is more authoritarian communist control imported straight from #China.” She then tagged Mr. Trump and the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn — both of whom she had represented — and other prominent right-wing figures to highlight the post.Ms. Powell’s changing tune was part of a broader shift in online misinformation. As Mr. Trump’s challenges to the election’s results have been knocked down and the Electoral College has affirmed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win, voter fraud misinformation has subsided. Instead, peddlers of online falsehoods are ramping up lies about the Covid-19 vaccines, which were administered to Americans for the first time this week.Apart from Ms. Powell, others who have spread political misinformation such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia, as well as far-right websites like ZeroHedge, have begun pushing false vaccine narratives, researchers said. Their efforts have been amplified by a robust network of anti-vaccination activists like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on platforms including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.Among their misleading notions is the idea that the vaccines are delivered with a microchip or bar code to keep track of people, as well as a lie that the vaccines will hurt everyone’s health (the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have been proved to be more than 94 percent effective in trials, with minimal side effects). Falsehoods about Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist who supports vaccines, have also increased, with rumors that he is responsible for the coronavirus and that he stands to profit from a vaccine, according to data from media insights company Zignal Labs.The shift shows how political misinformation purveyors are hopping from topic to topic to maintain attention and influence, said Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation.It is “an easy pivot,” she said. “Disinformation about vaccines and the pandemic have long been staples of the pro-Trump disinformation playbook.”The change has been particularly evident over the last six weeks. Election misinformation peaked on Nov. 4 at 375,000 mentions across cable television, social media, print and online news outlets, according to an analysis by Zignal. By Dec. 3, that had fallen to 60,000 mentions. But coronavirus misinformation steadily increased over that period, rising to 46,100 mentions on Dec. 3, from 17,900 mentions on Nov. 8.NewsGuard, a start-up that fights false stories, said that of the 145 websites in its Election Misinformation Tracking Center, a database of sites that publish false election information, 60 percent of them have also published misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. That includes right-wing outlets such as Breitbart, Newsmax and One America News Network, which distributed inaccurate articles about the election and are now also running misleading articles about the vaccines.John Gregory, the deputy health editor for NewsGuard, said the shift was not to be taken lightly because false information about vaccines leads to real-world harm. In Britain in the early 2000s, he said, a baseless link between the measles vaccine and autism spooked people into not taking that vaccine. That led to deaths and serious permanent injuries, he said.“Misinformation creates fear and uncertainty around the vaccine and can reduce the number of people willing to take it,” said Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington evolutionary biologist who has been tracking the pandemic.Dr. Shira Doron, an epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, said the consequences of people not taking the Covid-19 vaccines because of misinformation would be catastrophic. The vaccines are “the key piece to ending the pandemic,” she said. “We are not getting there any other way.”Ms. Powell did not respond to a request for comment.To deal with vaccine misinformation, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media sites have expanded their policies to fact-check and demote such posts. Facebook and YouTube said they would remove false claims about the vaccines, while Twitter said it pointed people to credible public health sources.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 16, 2020, 9:57 a.m. ETThe latest: Domino’s will pay its hourly workers a bonus.LVMH takes a stake in WhistlePig, an American rye whiskey brand.U.S. retail sales decline more than expected in November.The flow of vaccine falsehoods began rising in recent weeks as it became clear that the coronavirus vaccines would soon be approved and available. Misinformation spreaders glommed onto interviews by health experts and began twisting them.On Dec. 3, for example, Dr. Kelly Moore, the associate director for immunization education at the nonprofit Immunization Action Coalition, said in an interview with CNN that when people receive the vaccine, “everyone will be issued a written card” that would “tell them what vaccine they had and when their next dose is due.”Dr. Moore was referring to a standard appointment reminder card that could also be used as a backup vaccine record. But skeptics quickly started saying online that the card was evidence that the U.S. government intended to surveil the population and limit the activities of people who were unvaccinated.That unfounded idea was further fueled by people like Ms. Powell and her Dec. 4 tweet. Her post pushed the narrative to 47,025 misinformation mentions that week, according to Zignal, making it the No. 1 vaccine misinformation story at the time.To give more credence to the idea, Ms. Powell also appended a link to an article from ZeroHedge, which claimed that immunity cards would “enable CDC to track Covid-19 vaxx status in database.” On Facebook, that article was liked and commented on 24,600 times, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool. It also reached up to one million people.ZeroHedge did not respond to a request for comment.In an interview, Dr. Moore said she could not believe how her words had been distorted to seem as if she was supporting surveillance and restrictions on unvaccinated members of the public. “In fact, I was simply describing an ordinary appointment reminder card,” she said. “This is an old-school practice that goes on around the world.”Angela Stanton-King, a Republican candidate for Congress in Georgia, in Atlanta last month.Credit…Megan Varner/Getty ImagesOther supporters of Mr. Trump who said the election had been stolen from him also began posting vaccine falsehoods. One was Angela Stanton-King, a former Republican candidate for Congress from Georgia and a former reality TV star. On Dec. 5, she tweeted that her father would be forced to take the coronavirus vaccine, even though in reality the government has not made it mandatory.“My 78 yr old father tested positive for COVID before Thanksgiving he was told to go home and quarantine with no prescribed medication,” Ms. Stanton-King wrote in her tweet, which was liked and shared 13,200 times. “He had zero symptoms and is perfectly fine. Help me understand why we need a mandatory vaccine for a virus that heals itself…”Ms. Stanton-King declined to comment.Anti-vaccination activists have also jumped in. When two people in Britain had an adverse reaction to Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine this month, Mr. Kennedy, a son of former Senator Robert F. Kennedy who campaigns against vaccines as chairman of the anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense, pushed the unproven notion on Facebook that ingredients in the vaccine led to the reactions. He stripped out context that such reactions are usually very rare and it is not yet known whether the vaccines caused them.His Facebook post was shared 556 times and reached nearly a million people, according to CrowdTangle data. In an email, Mr. Kennedy said the Food and Drug Administration should “require pre-screening” of vaccine recipients and “monitor allergic and autoimmune reactions,” without acknowledging that regulators have already said they would do so.Ms. Ryan, the disinformation researcher, said that as long as there were loopholes for misinformation to stay up on social media platforms, purveyors would continue pushing falsehoods about the news topic of the day. It could be QAnon today, the election tomorrow, Covid-19 vaccines after that, she said.“They need to stay relevant,” she said. “Without Trump, they’re going to need new hobbies.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Joe Biden’s Digital Team Tamed the MAGA Internet

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe ShiftHow Joe Biden’s Digital Team Tamed the MAGA InternetThe campaign’s empathetic digital strategy held up surprisingly well against President Trump’s passionate digital following.Joseph R. Biden Jr. with Brayden Harrington in February in Gilford, N.H. A video showing them meeting each other was viewed millions of times.Credit…Elizabeth Frantz for The New York TimesBy More