Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

https://apnews.com/article/dominion-voting-newsmax-defamation-trump-2020-3b2366dfdae3a8432afe822bf14fe1ef

by throw0101a • 11 months ago

194 276 11 months ago

alistairSH8• 11 months ago

~1/3 of their annual revenue. Not nothing, but likely small enough that it’s just a cost of doing business and not a real deterrent. IMO.

kristjansson• 11 months ago

Agree that it should be more, but what sort of margins do you realize that 1/3 of _revenue_ seems small?

alistairSH8• 11 months ago

“Small enough” not “small”. Likely not enough to force a major change in the “morals” of the company.

whoiskevin• 11 months ago

I'd like to see something that takes 50% of their revenue for 5 to 10 years.

nemomarx• 11 months ago

Well it is only one year of revenue for an action they did across multiple years.

bradleybuda2• 11 months ago

This kind of comment comes up a lot On The Internet and it tells me that the commenter has never worked at a company that has lost a massive lawsuit. As someone who has worked at one of those companies, I can tell you that losing a suit like this will absolutely lead to huge operational changes to avoid it happening again.

Whether or not those changes actually change the "character" of the company is a different question (IMHO Newsmax is morally defunct and cannot be saved) but no company anywhere would just shrug something like this off as "the cost of doing business".

felixgallo• 11 months ago

This would be true if the source of funding were the standard kind of corporate funding. But there’s reason to believe that the backing money behind this corporation does not care in the slightest and regards this sort of poultry fine as merely the cost of doing its particular business, which is also not a standard type of corporate business.

alistairSH8• 11 months ago

Yeah, that’s fair. Settlements like this should include a complete change out of executive teams and BoD. Or something to try and fix the moral bankruptcy.

notatoad• 11 months ago

i think it's unclear whether newsmax is a "real" company or not. is there any indication that they're trying to make money, or are they trying to push their agenda? because they pretty clearly do have an agenda to push.

if they're a real company designed to make a profit, then sure, 1/3 of their annual revenue is plenty of incentive to make a real change, and could even be a company-ending event. If they're just a rich person's tool to influence public opinion, then whether or not $67m is a big enough number to make a dent depends on the pockets of their funders, not on the company's finances.

yibg5• 11 months ago

Taken in isolation this might be true, but these types of relatively small monetary damage don't seem to provide a good deterrent in general. Newsmax (as well as fox etc) is still airing provably false or at best misleading information and classifying it as "opinion". e.g. the other country pays the tariffs.

On a more society scale, if the damage from outright lies about an election costs on the order of 67m, what's to deter any of the billionaires from funding orgs like Newsmax to help win elections by spreading lies? It's a fraction of what Musk spent for 2024.

I don't have a good answer though that doesn't also have abuse potential the other way.

unrealhoang• 11 months ago

no company anywhere would just shrug something like this off as "the cost of doing business".

Fox News did, they lost 10 times as much money and is more successful than ever BECAUSE they did it, so for them it's just "the cost of doing business" or even an "investment".

ac29• 11 months ago

They've never turned a profit though, so this only adds to their financial problems.

gkoberger• 11 months ago

I imagine they likely have insurance for things like this. Or at least I would, if my business model was largely based on libel.

evan_2• 11 months ago

Who would underwrite that?

benjiro• 11 months ago

Annual revenue is not profit. This is the money earned without all the costs of running the business.

For instance, the total revenue was 171m in 2024. But the cost of revenue was 86m. Then you need to remove the operation expenses, that are 153m. So in 2024, the before taxes net income was a loss of 69 million.

In 2025 they are currently at -30m because it seems they cut in their Operating Expense. Explains some of the anchors leaving in 2024 (the impact of big cuts are often only felt the next year)

Here is a very important titbit:

Newsmax and Newsmax Broadcasting LLC agreed to pay Dominion and its affiliates over three installments, starting with $27 million that was paid on Friday. Newsmax will pay $20 million on January 15 and another $20 million on January 15, 2027.

In other words, they are not able to pay out the 67m in 2025, and are paying it off over 3 years. Given the negative income it has, combined with the now extra payments for then next 3 years...

They are going to be cutting even more staff, what will affect their ability to generate revenue. It may look like a good deal, only 1/3 of their revenue, a 3 year payment plan. But its more of a survival plan.

Why did Dominion accept this? Because its guaranteed money. Dominion is not out to destroy newsmax, no, Dominion wants cheese and a dead newsmax means no cheese. But the effect will be hard on the newsmax, do not underestimate this. Let alone internally...

Some people will see this as a newsmax win, because most people do not know the difference between revenue. And why payment plans are not good indicator. But in reality, the company was already on a bankruptcy route, and its not going to get better. So unless somebody Musk steps in with major $$$ to buyout and finance them for a long time, ...

phonon• 11 months ago

Well, Newsmax raised about $400 million this year in stock sales, so they can easily afford it.

UmGuys11• 11 months ago

They don't need to profit. They're funded by MAGAs to kill truth.

whatsupdog• 11 months ago

Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system. Everything else could be manipulated or hacked. And when there's trillions of dollars and world power on the line, it's just a matter of time when the "could be" turns to "would be".

lawlessone• 11 months ago

I wouldn't say it's 100% fool proof, but paper does require a lot more people to be "In" on it.

alistairSH8• 11 months ago

Paper ballots can be faked. Or lost. Or stuffed.

Anyways, haven’t most/all districts gone to paper ballots, the electronic part is just auto tabulation. They can be counted manually if necessary.

jeltz7• 11 months ago

What is the point then? Why introduce a machine where none is needed. In most countries all votes are counted twice by his d and the initial voubt finishes in a few hours.

thejazzman• 11 months ago

unpopular for many valid and party leaning ressons.

quink2• 11 months ago

Australian here. Electronic voting is a joke. And a not very funny one.

Volundr• 11 months ago

Unpopular opinion: Paper ballots with in person voting (with an ID) is the only 100% fool proof and verifiable voting system.

I don't know that it's that unpopular. I disagree with the 100% fool proof and verifiable claim though. I can think of lots of interesting ways of screwing with it, e.x. manipulating the chain of custody or tampering with the ballots to make errors likely.

Everything is a balance. Paper ballots aren't magically 100% secure, and in person voting comes with trade offs. Ex making it difficult for the military to vote, and making it such a big production for my highly disabled sister that she probably wouldn't bother.

I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns. That doesn't mean I disagree that in person isn't "more" secure.

jltsiren3• 11 months ago

I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns.

You can't trust the machines. You can't trust the election authorities. You can't trust the post office. Those are fundamental assumptions, not FUD or measured concerns.

Elections should be designed for bad situations, because the results don't matter that much when things are good. Maybe a civil war is likely, or maybe it just ended and people are trying to rebuild trust. In any case, people don't trust each other, and they don't trust the authorities, but they are still trying to have legitimate elections.

The goal is not 100% security, 100% correctness, or something equally silly. The goal is a system where either every major party has a justified belief that the elections were legitimate and fair, the reported results are mostly correct, and there was no substantial fraud. Or at least one party questions the results due to widespread fraud. You want to trust the results, even when you can't trust the people running the elections.

Many paper ballot systems have been designed under such assumptions. The system assumes that the people running the elections cannot be trusted, but they also can't trust each other. You can't trust the people, but you trust that the system will detect and report any attempts at large-scale fraud.

FridayoLeary3• 11 months ago

The counterargument is that mail in ballots help increase voter turnouts and that requiring id will turn people away. It's a weak argument because you shouldn't try to increase turnout by making voting less secure. Any other solution should be found instead.

kg• 11 months ago

If we really want to increase turnout, we can just make voting mandatory like other countries have.

Requiring ID is a problem given that a lot of people don't have easy access (or access at all) to legal ID, for various reasons, some as simple as cost. Having a license costs money on an ongoing basis and you need to have access to documents to prove your identity like a birth certificate, and some citizens don't have those through no fault of their own, like losing everything in a fire or even the relevant records agency itself burning down. Thankfully there are often fee waivers for hardship but there are certainly corner cases where saying 'if you want to vote you need ID' is basically a poll tax, something we rightfully banned in the US a long time ago.

bediger40006• 11 months ago

What, exactly is insecure about voting by mail? Are drop off ballot boxes also insecure? In the same or different ways?

litoE3• 11 months ago

I've never understood why elections are held on a Tuesday. Why aren't they held on a Sunday, which would eliminate the excuse of "I have to go to work"?

platevoltage32• 11 months ago

I'm supposed to believe that my mail in paper ballot in California was less secure than when I voted in PA by pushing a button on a screen with no paper trail, on a machine made by a company with political ties.

marstall• 11 months ago

The arguments pro and con are purely motivated by partisan concerns. its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id, therefore voter id laws supposedly favors republicans. that supposed fact is at the heart of the entire debate and as far as i know there is nothing more to it.

sugarpimpdorsey4• 11 months ago

its believed that more democratic voters are less likely to have an id

This notion that Democrats keep pushing - that a sizable portion of their voting base is too dumb to get an ID - when massive developing countries like India that are still struggling with basic things like sanitation have long ago solved this problem - is nothing short of embarrassing.

There are people in rural India that live in straw huts that have EPIC cards.

The solution, if this problem exists as they say, is to get everyone proper ID. Not "let's have just anyone vote and we'll trust their word". Universal PKI-backed national ID would be a program everyone should be behind but it would never see the light of day in the US, because maintaining a "disenfranchised" voting bloc is more valuable as a bargaining chip than the positive social contributions of such a program.

dehrmann• 11 months ago

That's the standard narrative, but it could work out in unexpected ways because of who has time to vote and the ability to get to polling places.

the_gastropod3• 11 months ago

There were literally Russian-sourced bomb threats at several major democratic strongholds' polling locations in the last presidential election. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/06/nx-s1-5181834/election-day-vo...

Voter ID and blocking mail-in / early voting are just a few examples of contemporary Republican voter suppression efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

baggy_trough11• 11 months ago

Count me as one who strongly opposes mail-in and early voting because I believe it violates the sanctity of the voting booth.

TacticalCoder• 11 months ago

You're downvoted but requiring voter ID should be 100% mandatory. There's a near 100% overlap between states not requiring voter ID and states where democrats won.

And that since many elections.

The correlation statistically makes absolutely zero sense.

The only logical explanation is that illegals do vote and that they do mainly vote for democrats.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF2• 11 months ago

There's a near 100% overlap between states not requiring voter ID and states where democrats won.

Interesting how there's a near 100% overlap of states which didn't implement this form of voter disenfranchisement and states where Democrats won. Thank you for informing me of that.

virgildotcodes• 11 months ago

How on Earth are we able to have a global digital financial system that is able to keep track of trillions in transactions per year but running a seasonal election with < 100 million participants through a digital system seems too hard?

dkiebd• 11 months ago

Those handling the financial system have an interest in it running right whilst those handling the election system have an interest in tampering with the results.

dmix• 11 months ago

Listing a few: Market incentives, general competency of the organizations running the systems, government procurement using the same set of bigcos who only care about getting the contract not about delivering quality after. Not that I have an opinion on paper ballots but I understand the concern for such a sensitive system.

peanut-walrus• 11 months ago

1. There is no requirement to make it impossible to determine which transactions someone has made, in fact, quite the opposite.

2. Transactions get rolled back all the time for various reasons.

3. The global digital financial system is a result of decades of evolution and millions of man-years of work.

normalaccess3• 11 months ago

Not a bug but a feature... The messier things get the more "Realpolitik" can happen (using it pejoratively).

eirikbakke• 11 months ago

If electronics is involved in the act of voting, the voter has no assurance that the ballot remains secret (even if you're a software engineer!). With paper/envelope/box, by contrast, the voter can see and understand the full process.

avs733• 11 months ago

Because this isn’t based on logic it’s based on feels and intuition.

bspammer• 11 months ago

Even if you ignore all technical problems - the problem with electronic voting is that it provides a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. Even if an election is run perfectly legitimately, bad actors can make credible-sounding claims around hackers editing votes, or voting machines being rigged.

Sabinus3• 11 months ago

Because of the incentives of the US voting system. Voting is not mandatory so parties are incentivised to mess with voting access to make it easier for their demographics to vote but not others. There's also a general distain for letting 'the wrong people' vote in America.

esafak• 11 months ago

Where there is a will, there is a way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899415

snickerbockers• 11 months ago

Im so old I can remember when this used to be a common left-wing opinion.

BTW, Dominion is actually diebold amalgamated with a couple other "voting" machine vendors into a single corporation.

CharlesW4• 11 months ago

Yep, it's disconcerting to see HN'ers demand that their federal government trump states' rights and issue mandatory centralized digital IDs.

bediger40006• 11 months ago

Human marked, human and machine readable both is good practice. Risk limiting audits after elections is good practice. CA, WA and CO at least do all this.

What does in person (with an ID) add to election security? That practice most certainly restricts voting unless there's a holiday for election day.

What keeps in person voting from being manipulated less than other good practice elections?

Why did in person voting become a big issue only just before and after 2020 election?

Why didn't anybody pay attention to what some states did after 2000 election?

jeltz7• 11 months ago

In person voting on election day makes replacing people's votes much harder. You only need to compromise a handful of people who guard the ballots othewise. The ratio of votes per staff guarding is much lower on election day in at least my country. Compromising enough people on election day would be ridiculous in my country.

normalaccess3• 11 months ago

100% Agree.

Let's get back to brass tacks and stop all the monkey business. Even if there is no tomfoolery goin on (and I believe there is) why not make it beyond doubt?

somat• 11 months ago

disagree, I think paper ballots are just as easily hacked(printers are cheap). I think that while technical mechanisms are nice and should be used, they should not be depended on to secure the election. The only real solution is to have a politically neutral well motivated uncorrupted election officer corps. and if this sounds hard, it is. Thus why people keep trying to turn to technical means to secure an election and are baffled when it lets them down.

Among it's many faults, I think this is one advantage of the weird US method of running elections at the county level. While it is probably easier to corrupt individual election corps, due to it's distributed nature it is harder to systematically corrupt all of them. This does mean that US elections are strangly inconsistent from county to county, but that is the price you pay for a distributed system.

As a counterpoint to the "electronic election transactions are impossible to secure" platform, look at the credit card processing systems, yes there is fraud, but compared to the volume of daily transactions it is insignificant. the point being, large scale trusted electronic transactions are possible.

tshaddox2• 11 months ago

Are you just talking about the part of election security that ensures that only eligible voters vote (and each only once)? Because paper ballots have little to do with many other aspects of election security.

jeffbee2• 11 months ago

It's unpopular because it's stupid and wrong, not because we are stupid and wrong.

preinheimer• 11 months ago

I don't think that in person voting with ID is a fool proof way to guarantee that only the people who "should be voting" get to vote.

I also think you disenfranchise too many people when you do that.

- People who work on oil rigs won't get to vote

- People who do shift work covering the hours the polls are open wont get to vote

- People who are of sound mind, but too unwell to travel to a polling location wont get to vote

- November is Red/blue king crab season in Alaska, guess those people don't get to vote

- Flight attendants & pilots might be away from home that day.

- People in the military might be on exercise that day, we're cutting them off (though I'll assume deployed service members will get to vote wherever they are)

- Long haul truckers are out of luck

- Anyone on vacation is missing their chance

- College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend?

platevoltage32• 11 months ago

--- College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend?

I personally couldn't care less as long as they only vote once.

ThunderSizzle• 11 months ago

Nearly everything you said is solved with the roll out of early voting for nearly a whole month or more prior to the actual election say.

Also, all rights come with responsibilities, and part of the responsibility of voting is registering to vote, getting your ID, and showing up to vote. We shouldn't bend society to let people who don't want bare minimum responsibility to participate in their right.

We have no problem putting serious restrictions on rights of people in other areas coinciding with responsibility.

platevoltage32• 11 months ago

Should ID's be free and easy to get, because if not, this would amount to a poll tax, which has been deemed unconstitutional.

We are also not required to have or carry ID to carry out any of our constitutionally protected rights.

We would need to set up a service where a representative from the government would come to your house on demand, verify your identity, and issue you a free ID whether you live in downtown DC, rural New Mexico, or somewhere in Puerto Rico. Otherwise this is a non-starter.

Ancapistani4• 11 months ago

We are also not required to have or carry ID to carry out any of our constitutionally protected rights.

Go buy a gun without ID, and tell me how it goes.

Nursie5• 11 months ago

Except it doesn’t matter whether it’s foolproof or verifiable.

The only thing that matters is seizing on a narrative and running with it, whipping up fear and discontent.

The solution is to heal the partisanship in US society that infects everything there, and acts like poison on public discourse and trust.

yibg5• 11 months ago

Is there evidence that in person voting is meaningfully more secure than other forms (like mail in voting) let alone 100% fool proof?

Even assuming it is, how do we solve the other issues it causes if it's the only way to vote? e.g.:

- How do US citizens that don't live or are not at the time of voting physically in the US vote? e.g. overseas military personnel.

- People that live in remote areas of the country without easy access to in person voting stations?

- Those with limited mobility and have a hard time physically getting to a voting station?

- Those with limited transportation options? e.g. don't have reliable access to a car.

- Those that do shift work and can't or can't afford to take the time off?

- The estimated millions of Americans that don't have a valid form of ID?

End of the day, even if in person voting with a valid ID is the only reliable way to vote, we also need to evaluate the marginal reduction in voting fraud against disenfranchising voters.

const_cast2• 11 months ago

Here's the fun part: we don't solve those problems. Those aren't even actual problems, that's the intended goal.

Disenfranchisement is not just a side effect, it's the main effect of this thought process.

evan_2• 11 months ago

Sounds good until a strongman recruits tens of thousands of masked thugs to patrol cities and beat up anyone who looks like they might vote for the opponent of said strongman.

duxup• 11 months ago

In Minnesota we have paper ballots, we run them through an optical scanner straight into a lockbox attached to the scanner. The scanner counts the votes, but there's a paper copy and they can audit the machine and ballot 1:1.

In theory you could just run it through the exact machine again and you'd get a good test for what is going on, and you have a physical copy to count / verify.

I think it is a good system, and about as close to digital as I want to get.

Some solid old school tech and some reasonably new.

nobody99995• 11 months ago

In Minnesota we have paper ballots, we run them through an optical scanner straight into a lockbox attached to the scanner. The scanner counts the votes, but there's a paper copy and they can audit the machine and ballot 1:1.

That's exactly how we do it in New York as well.

What's more, before I'm given that paper ballot, I need to provide my name and address, then provide a signature which is compared to the signature on file with the Board of Elections. If the signature doesn't match, I don't get to vote.

on_the_train• 11 months ago

Then you just throw away the ballots, mark them as invalid, fudge with the counting or the transmission of the counts. That's how we do it in my country.

ModernMech• 11 months ago

Why is anyone talking about voting methods when the President can call up a state and ask them to gerrymander 5 congressional seats? What's the fucking point in caring about the integrity of various voting mechanisms if they can just fix the outcome anyway? You don't need to scam the voting box, just win a majority in the legislature and then prevent the other side from ever winning again. Sidesteps the whole voting ID issue very cleanly.

yread• 11 months ago

Sure, give everyone a free ID, that's easy to pick up, let people vote over 2-3 days, one of them a public holiday and make sure there are enough polling stations everywhere (not just red districts)

siliconc0w• 11 months ago

It's pretty sad that is these sort of ticky-tacky lawsuits are really the only mechanism we seem have of holding these "news" networks responsible for brazen repeated lies that are hugely damaging to our society (like saying a election was stolen). And that wasn't even the problem, it's that their lies created damages for another corporation.

tyre• 11 months ago

“I find all of this so weird because of how it _elevates_ finance. [Various cases] imply that we are not entitled to be protected from pollution as _citizens_, or as _humans_. [Another] implies that we are not entitled to be told the truth _as citizens_. (Which: is true!) Rather, in each case, we are only entitled to be protected from lies _as shareholders_. The great harm of pollution, or of political dishonesty, is that it might lower the share prices of the companies we own.”

— Matt Levine

Here he is talking about shareholder lawsuits (securities fraud) being the primary mechanism of holding social responsibility.

LurkerAtTheGate• 11 months ago

I was thinking this opens them up to a shareholder suit for mismanagement, breach of duty, or possibly even fraud?

throw0101a• 11 months ago

Matt Levine

I was curios for the exact source, and the link is:

* https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-03-31/senato...

* https://archive.is/9WcxD

He referenced / quoted it recently:

* https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-04-01/is-...

* https://archive.is/B7yvw

ilovecurl• 11 months ago

During Dominion's case against Fox News around this same issue Fox News' own lawyers stated that they were not stating actual facts about the topics under discussion and instead were engaged in exaggeration and non-literal commentary. It's not news, it's infotainment.

lesuorac2• 11 months ago

Lawyers would tell you that water isn't wet it's just slick if it'd help them win their case.

I don't see any fix for the news cycle besides slowing it down. Even if enough happens to fill 24h in a day there isn't enough time to actually analyze it at all.

mapt5• 11 months ago

This is a general defense to try and moot the existence of defamation law, and a judge who isn't on the right-wing payroll is likely to take offense.

Fox settled with Dominion for $800M.

mapt5• 11 months ago

Hogan (Thiel) vs Gawker and Sandy Hook vs Alex Jones provided a blueprint to weaponize defamation law for political change in an environment where right-wing journalism has turned into a defamation pipeline and then a defamation -> moral-panic -> stochastic-terror cannon that would impress Gerald Bull. These are supposed journalistic institutions, and that used to mean something, legally and culturally speaking. Making them terrified of losing the public trust once again, using some type of fast-moving wrecking ball, is a necessary component of a future where we make it out of this.

So all we need now is an angry left-wing billionaire who can launch a thousand defamation lawsuits, or the most sympathetic group of parents of dead children in history.

The last great nightly news anchor was Dan Rather, who was fired symbolically because their organization merely neutrally reported the existence of a sketchy story about possible documents that turned out to be fabricated about George W Bush's military service.

pstuart2• 11 months ago

I remain convinced that Rather was set up by Karl Rove -- it fits in with his other dirty tricks.

jibal3• 11 months ago

The story wasn't sketchy. Rather's claims about GWB's service were correct and well documented ... it was only the Killian memo that was apparently inauthentic ... but it may well have been transcribed using later technology.

triceratops2• 11 months ago

Hogan (Thiel) vs Gawker and Sandy Hook vs Alex Jones provided a blueprint to weaponize defamation law for political change

Sandy Hook v Jones was not "political". It was deeply, profoundly personal.

The Gawker lawsuit was also about settling personal scores. Obviously Hogan wasn't as sympathetic of a plaintiff as the Sandy Hook parents. But it was more odious because Thiel wanted to punish Gawker simply for hurting his feelings, not lying about him.

So all we need now is an angry left-wing billionaire

Is there such a thing?

FridayoLeary3• 11 months ago

Wouldn't that damage the right to free speech? Regulating what the media is and isn't allowed to say is a very slippery slope and it is open to abuse. If the government was responsible for this task what would prevent Trump and the republicans from hijacking it? It might be frustrating but free speech is one of the cornerstones of democracy and we are much better off with it then without it.

And that wasn't even the problem, it's that their lies created damages for another corporation

That's the first time i've ever seen anyone on HN sympathize with a billion dollar company:)

But that is exactly what the article was about! Dominion was libelled by Newsmax, so they was able to claim damages from them in a court of law. The law didn't allow them to get away with it. The First Amendment is working as inteneded. Some damage to society is tolerated to protect a much bigger and longer term benefit.

ceejayoz• 11 months ago

Wouldn't that damage the right to free speech?

We already ban defamation, fraud, the f-bomb and boobs on publicly available television channels, etc.

Dominion was libelled by Newsmax, so they was able to claim damages from them in a court of law. The law didn't allow them to get away with it.

Long, long after the damage was done, and it'll take equally long the next time they do the same thing. As the saying goes, if there's just a fine, the fine is just the cost of doing business.

platevoltage32• 11 months ago

We've watched media companies settle cases that they would have won on the merits in order to avoid the wrath of a vengeful authoritarian. We've already slipped down that slope.

thinkingtoilet2• 11 months ago

Lets say you have a competing business to mine. Am I allowed to go on TV and say "DO NOT USE FridayoLeary's BUSINESS! He is a known pedophile and I have proof!" I'll put up billboards in our home town and contact any vendors and clients you have and let them know this. Is that ok with you?

Things like libel and slander are not damaging to free speech. I don't know how it happened but it feels like American's fundamentally don't understand how our right to free speech works and what it is for.

mandeepj4• 11 months ago

holding these "news" networks responsible for brazen repeated lies that are hugely damaging to our society

But that moron in WH is still spreading lies about that election; he has no shame, no remorse, no nothing. On the contrary, he was successful in portraying himself a victim and win people’s sympathy. Even though he’s the one who called insurrection. There’s no accountability for him.

Look at South Korea, who indicted their politician who did same act. As well at Brazil, who’s rogue politician is in house arrest. But, fking only here, they are awarded with a 2nd term.

dimal3• 11 months ago

I had been worried about what would happen as the American republic goes down, whether other countries would follow suit. So those two examples are cause for hope.

As for the second term, we can’t forget that the Democrats basically threw the election. This election was a layup. An easy win. And they did absolutely everything wrong. I almost blame them as much as Trump for this mess.

UmGuys11• 11 months ago

Right. Shouldn't the judgement be against the main perpetrator? They're wrong too, but if they are isn't everyone else also doing slander and libel?

UmGuys11• 11 months ago

They are entertainment and should be treated that way. And what of the damage our federal government is doing to many corporations, universities, cities, and individuals? Should they have sue the government? It's all so absurd when people stop following the rules.

Ancapistani4• 11 months ago

I don't understand how it became the expectation that media report truth. That has _never_ been the case, since the founding of the country.

Media's role is to provide facts, sources, and synthesis. It's a starting point for discourse, not an immutable record.

If you expect _any_ media outlet to be 100% reliable and without bias, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

phendrenad2• 11 months ago

It's even worse than that: This was likely a one-off. Note that Newsmax is the only organization that's having to pay (at least, that I know of). That's because Newsmax probably wasn't very careful not to state things as fact that they didn't have solid evidence of. The news has been perfectly capable of fooling people but weaseling out at the last moment with a "according to an anonymous source" at the end (that's how CNN does it, anyway). Also note that the judge in this case left it up to the jury to decide if the accusations were done with malice, I.E. to harm Dominion as a company, and the jury apparently decided that yes, it did (or were big enough Newsmax dislikers to swing that way anyway). Different jury, different outcome.

Cadwhisker• 11 months ago

That fine needs an extra zero on the end. They'll shrug it off as the cost of doing business.

Newsmax agrees to pay $67M in defamation case over bogus 2020 election claims

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