My pillow headache

      "Mike, Mike! You're talking about machines. Uh. Newsmax has not been able to verify any of those kinds of allegations."

                  Newsmax anchor

Conservative media has a dilemma. What their audience wants to hear can get the media companies sued into bankruptcy.

Lawsuits might do what Congress won't.

 

Some of this blog's readers tune in regularly to Newsmax. Others barely know it. If you have a big cable package it is probably somewhere among the high-numbered channels. Newsmax.com is their website. 

Newsmax is eating into Fox's core audience. Fox had been the conservative voice of Trump and ethno-nationalistic outrage, but it attempts to be taken seriously as a news organization. That cost them. Trump lost an election and Trump insisted he had not. The Fox audience didn't want to hear straight news about election losses, and Fox could measure that resistance in real time. The audience members changed channels during news segments that described vote counts and losses in court; they tuned back when guests echoed Trump's claims. 

The Fox audience found Newsmax. It was Trump-friendly and Trump urged viewers to switch to them. Fox is now scrambling to reclaim its audience by cleaning house. It fired the people who reported the Arizona loss and the people who managed the Fox website. Their website had had a reportorial tone. Not anymore. It switched three weeks ago to a much more aggressively partisan tone. The changes are too late. There was a breach of trust. Newsmax got a toehold in the mental map of the Fox audience.

Dilemma for Newsmax. In theory, Mike Lindell, the "My Pillow" owner and spokesperson, is a perfect guest for Newsmax. Lindell is a known celebrity, a familiar face from his ads, and is now openly considering running for governor of Minnesota, making him a legitimate newsmaker. He is a die-hard Trump supporter, an invited visitor to the White House in Trump's last days in office, observed by telephoto lens to be carrying notes suggesting Trump declare martial law. He firmly and extravagantly asserts that Trump won in a landslide and that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. He calls Republican officeholders who defended the election crooks. More significant for conservative news media, he calls corrupt the software companies that created vote count software, Dominion and Smartmatic.

He had a timely topic, also perfect for Newsmax: Censorship. Lindell, too, has been banned by social media companies for spreading falsehoods. He had agreed to stay on the topic of censorship. He didn't.

Newsmax faces the same problem Rudy Giuliani faces--lawsuits for defamation. Dominion Software is suing Giuliani for $1.3 billion for defamatory comments that claimed their software switches votes. Newsmax had presented without objection guests who made that claim. There is no evidence of vote switching. Newsmax is not simply a "platform" where all speech, true or false, reasonable or crazy, is laid out for public inspection. Newsmax news anchors represent the company. It can be liable to pay damages if they present defamatory information they know to be untrue, and Dominion says the information is absolutely and provably untrue, and that damages are enormous.

Lindell began repeating claims of voter fraud implicating Dominion software. Newsmax immediately began to talk over him, then tried to shut him up, then shut him off. It all took place in two minutes. Newsmax lawyers had their anchors ready for this contingency, with disclaimer statements to protect themselves and the Network, which the anchor turned to franticly. Don't listen to him!  No, no! We disagree! 

Click here

Watch the clip. It is amazing. It seems almost like a Saturday Night Live skit, too madcap to be real, but we are seeing something very real and important: We are a seeing a mechanism at work for bringing discipline and responsibility to media companies. We are seeing them scramble to get back into the protection of presenting evidence-based truth. They don't want to be sued.

Today's post is a third in a series of posts about the power of media to endanger democracy by spreading ideas that are objectively false but which affirm comfortable prejudices within a narrow niche of people. There is no secret algorithm at work. It is plain-as-day narrowcasting. Newsmax knows what its audience wants to hear, and they deliver it up more reliably than did Fox, and are gaining audience because of it. 

Lawsuits are a blunt and haphazard tool for making news organizations careful about the facts, or quasi-facts, or outright falsehoods they publish. Not everyone who is defamed can afford to sue a news network, but some can, and Dominion is threatening it and can claim significant financial damage. 

The public may not demand a reality-based news, and in fact apparently it does not. The better TV business model appears to be find an audience that wants its prejudices reaffirmed, not challenged. Give the audience what it wants. But there is a risk. People injured by alternative-facts have recourse to the courts. Courts are supposed to make decisions based on law and a reality backed up by evidence. They are a place to get justice, not affirmation.