Fox News Preparing for Lawsuits Over Coronavirus Misinformation

One lawsuit has already been filed against Fox News for what amounts to consumer fraud for its lies and untruths during the first stages of the coronavirus pandemic when the network largely parroted or amplified the untruths coming out of the Trump/Pence regime, including claims that the whole matter was a Chinese hoax. It appears the network grasps the reality that more lawsuits will follow. The irony, of course, is that while desperately seeking to protect Donald Trump and bludgeon Democrats and parts of the news media that actually report facts as opposed to propaganda, Fox News endangered its own viewers who remain the most likely to disregard the seriousness of the pandemic and to ignore the safeguards recommended by medical experts.  The other irony is that purveyors of lies like Hannity claim they never said things that are documented on video.  They seemingly believe everyone is a stupid as their viewers. Fox News deserves to pay a very high price for the harm it has done to the nation.  Here are highlights from a piece in Vanity Fair:

Just over a week ago, former Fox Business host Trish Regan parted ways with the network, ostensibly because she called the coronavirus melee “yet another attempt to impeach...demonize, and destroy the president.” That the comments, which mirrored those of nearly every other Fox host at the time, would result in her termination seemed disproportionate, and last week a member of Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch’s front office told the Daily Beast that Regan represented “a sacrificial lamb”—a scapegoat for critics who lampooned the network for dangerously misinforming its viewers about a deadly pandemic. Regan’s ouster failed to achieve this goal, and according to new reports, Fox is now lawyering up, bracing for a litany of public-interest lawsuits and letters of condemnation for pedaling misinformation for weeks prior to coronavirus’s explosion in the U.S. 

The first such consumer-protection complaint came from the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics (WASHLITE) on Thursday, which named Murdoch,__ Fox News, AT&T, Comcast, and other related entities as defendants. Seeking nominal damage, the suit claims the “defendants acted in bad faith to willfully and maliciously disseminate false information denying and minimizing the danger posed by the spread of the novel Coronavirus, or COVID-19, which is now recognized as an international pandemic.” . . . . We believe it delayed and interfered with a prompt and adequate response to this coronavirus pandemic.”

Well past the olive branch phase, Fox is reportedly ready for whatever court battles come next. “The strategy is no settlements, even if it costs way more to fight the lawsuit and seek sanctions for ambulance-chasing lawyers,” an executive told the Daily Beast.  He recalled the Murdochs’ successful evasion of two lawsuits related to conspiratorial Fox coverage of the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, which were dismissed in 2018 . . . .

This time, however, might be very different from the Rich case. During a Sunday appearance on MSNBC, my colleague Gabriel Sherman said Fox insiders had expressed “real concern...that their early downplaying of the coronavirus actually exposes Fox News to potential legal action by viewers who maybe were misled and actually have died from this.” He went on to say that while the Murdochs are “privately taking coronavirus seriously”—Rupert Murdoch quietly cancelled his 89th birthday party on March 11—top hosts like Regan and Sean Hannity were actively “telling viewers that it’s a hoax...If it actually winds up being proved that people died because of it, this is a new terrain in terms of Fox being possibly held liable for their actions.”

A number of public opinion surveys suggest Fox succeeded in swaying the perception of coronavirus among its viewers. Despite COVID-19 deaths mounting to more than 10,000 in the U.S., and case numbers here surpassing 350,000, 79% of Fox News consumers who responded to a Pew Research survey last week believe the media “slightly or greatly exaggerated the risk of the pandemic.”

A mid-March poll conducted by Survey 160 and Gradient Metrics poll revealed that Americans who tune into Fox News are more likely to ignore Centers for Disease Control advisories to stay at home than both non-Fox-watching Republicans and Democrats.

A similar poll from YouGov and The Economist conducted in mid-March showed that, compared to consumers of other types of news media, Fox News viewers are the least likely to express concern about coronavirus.

“The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers—and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well,” states the letter, enumerating misleading coverage.

In an interview with Newsweek, Hannity himself fired back at the letter in an attempt to rewrite history.  . . . ...I never called it a ‘hoax,’” he said. . . . . On March 9, Hannity implied that media outlets covering the virus were doing so to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.” Two days later, he insisted that the seasonal flu is “much more dangerous” than COVID-19 and argued that “we’re all dying” anyway. 

 One can only hope that Fox News' history of outright lies finally catches up with it and that it suffers a serious financial reckoning.  As for its viewers, perhaps deaths among its  knuckle dragging viewers will cause some to wake up and change the channel. 

The Gathering Storm in America's South

Thankfully, over the last decade and especially since 2017 Virginia has effectively ceased to be a southern state and has embraced modernity and Democrat political control.  Thus, Virginia was the first state in the South to see a gubernatorial "stay home" order - Kentucky, North Carolina and Louisiana, also with Democrat governors followed suit.  Only much later did a few other states - e.g., Georgia and Florida - issue such orders although Florida's order exempts church gatherings from the restrictions.  Why the difference?  Simple: all the other states are "red states" with Republican governors eager to kiss Donald Trump's ass and beholden to Fox News and fearful of their knuckle dragging base.  We have yet to see the consequences of these failures to act as urged by medical experts.  A piece New York Times looks at Tennessee as a case study of the Republican failure to heed medical experts.  Note the governor's idiotic call for mayors and other local leaders to pray even as he ignored medical experts. Here are article excerpts:

NASHVILLE — On March 22, when Nashville’s mayor John Cooper closed nonessential businesses here, it was a terrible blow to companies and shops still reeling from the tornado that tore through Middle Tennessee on Super Tuesday. Small businesses struggle in the best of times, and a one-two punch like that — a natural disaster followed by a lethal pandemic — will almost certainly force some of them to close for good.

But it had to be done. Nashville’s courts and schools were already closed, but the crowds on Lower Broadway, the heart of Nashville’s tourist district, showed no sign of dissipating . . . Even after the Nashville Board of Health voted unanimously to shut the honky-tonks down, several bar owners said they would not comply unless ordered to do so by the governor of Tennessee.

Such orders have been slow in coming here, and in nearly every other state in the American South. Tennessee governor Bill Lee was slow to end the legislative session and send members of the Tennessee General Assembly home to their districts, slow to close public schools, slow to suspend church services, slow to shutter restaurants and gyms.

Many city charters in Tennessee prevent local leaders from issuing their own orders, and mayors begging for a statewide directive got none. . . . . On March 16Mr. Lee told local leaders around the state that mandates weren’t necessary to enforce social-distancing guidelines: “We’re not issuing orders, we’re issuing guidance and strong suggestions,” Mr. Lee said. “We don’t have to mandate people not do certain behavior because Tennesseans follow suggestions.”

As it turns out, they don’t. . . . where I expected to find a deserted parking lot, it was business as usual on a sunny spring Saturday. Nashville has received hundreds of reports of similar violations.

On March 30, when Mr. Lee issued an executive order shutting down nonessential businesses, he stopped short of requiring Tennesseans to stay home. “It is deeply important that we protect personal liberties,” he said, ignoring tens of thousands of health professionals who argued that nothing less than a stay-at-home order would save this state from disaster. And not just this state.

Fort Campbell, a U.S. Army base that straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border, restricted travel to Nashville. And Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, urged his citizens not to enter Tennessee . . . . If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that’s not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here.”

Kentucky, which not only elected a Democratic governor but also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, is an outlier in the South.

What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out.

Viruses are not partisan. Science itself is not partisan. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has become a partisan issue here in the South because our governors have followed the lead of both [Trump] the president, who spent crucial early weeks denying the severity of the crisis, and Fox News, which downplayed concerns about the pandemic as Democratic hysteria. That’s why every governor who has issued a deeply belated shelter-in-place order is a Republican.

In that March 16 conference call with mayors and county leaders around Tennessee, Mr. Lee offered some advice: “I want to encourage you to pray. . . . . I want you to know that you’re being prayed for as leaders in your community that you will have wisdom and discernment.”

I, too, pray for my fellow Tennesseans. I pray for the success of researchers racing for a vaccine. I pray for the safety of every medical team working to save lives. But I also pray for our leaders to lead, to put the safety of their citizens far, far above partisan pandering. And when the entire medical community — people who are putting their very lives on the line for us — are begging for help, the answer isn’t prayer alone. It’s also action.

 One can only hope Republican idiocy doesn't lead to tragedy, but if it does, I hope citizens will hold their foolish, partisan governors accountable. 

The Trump/Pence Regime’s Potemkin Economy

Despite Trump lies, U.S. Steel is not opening plants.

Canada has announced a new round of tariffs on American products in further retaliation for the ill-conceived Trump tariffs.  The Trump/Pence regime's response to growing evidence of harm to American jobs is to lire - the regime's main approach to anything and everything.  Trump even claimed that U.S. Steel would be opening six new plants - the announcement came as a surprise to the corporation which had had NO communications with Trump.  Yet, the lie is typical of what the white Christian extremist/nationalist base eats up and is too stupid to confirm independently. A column in the New York Times looks at Trump's "wake economy" which brings to mind the myth of "Potemkin villages" in Russia. The difference, of course, was no fool while the same cannot be said of Trump's base which is too happy to embrace lies.  One can only hope harsh reality hits this base very, very hard.  Here are column highlights:

According to legend, Grigory Potemkin, one of Catherine the Great’s ministers (and her lover), created a false impression of prosperity when the empress toured Ukraine. He supposedly did this by setting up fake villages, or possibly just facades, along her route, then dismantling them after she passed, and setting them up again further down the road.  

There probably isn’t much if any truth to the story — among other things, Catherine was too smart and tough-minded to be that easily deceived — but never mind: the legend has become a byword for the general idea of prettifying reality to please a tyrannical ruler.

And it seems highly relevant to some of the economic “news” coming out of the Trump administration the past few days. Just to be clear, the U.S. economy is still doing quite well overall, continuing the long expansion that began during Obama’s first term. . . . But Trump’s actual policy initiatives aren’t doing so well. His tax cut isn’t producing the promised surge in business investment, let alone the promised wage gains; all it has really done is lead to a lot of stock buybacks.

Reflecting this reality, the tax cut is becoming less popular over time. And the early phase of the trade war that was supposed to be “good, and easy to win” isn’t generating the kinds of headlines Trump wanted. Instead, we’re hearing about production shifting overseas to escape both U.S. tariffs on imported inputs and foreign retaliation against U.S. products. It’s really worth reading the submission by General Motors to the Commerce Department, . . . . In other words, “Don’t you understand global supply chains, you idiot?”

But meanwhile, how is the administration responding? By making stuff up. Now, making stuff up is actually standard operating procedure for these guys. We’re talking about an administration that’s taking children away from their parents and putting them in cages in response to a wave of violent immigrant crime that doesn’t, you know, actually exist. Trade policy itself is being driven by claims about the massive tariffs U.S. products face from, say, the European Union — tariffs that, like the immigrant crime wave, don’t actually exist.

But these are negative fictions, tales of wrongdoing by others. When it comes to Trump’s own economic policies, by contrast, it’s all puppies and rainbows — happy stories with no basis in reality.

Some of these come from Trump himself. For example, he declared that the head of U.S. Steel called him to say that the company was opening six new plants. It isn’t, and as far as we can tell the phone call never happened.

Meanwhile, reports say that the Council of Economic Advisers did an internal report concluding that Trump trade policy will cost jobs, not create them; Kevin Hassett, the chairman, pressed on these reports, said that he could neither confirm nor deny them; in other words, they’re true.

But the most Potemkinesque story of the past week was the declaration by Larry Kudlow, the administration’s top economic official, that the budget deficit is “coming down rapidly” as “those revenues come rolling in.”  Actually, the deficit is rising fast, mainly because of a plunge in corporate tax receipts — the direct result of the tax cut . . . .

Trump and company are making claims about the results of their policies that bear no relationship to reality. But reality has a well-known liberal bias. Will Trump’s habit of making things up, and his advisors’ willingness to celebrate imaginary policy triumphs, make any difference?

But who will tell him how things are really going? Given what we’ve seen the past few days, they’ll respond to plant closings and economic disruption with fantasies of triumph, while Trump will dismiss reports of problems as fake news. Reality will take a long time to break through, if it ever does. And by then the world trading system may be broken beyond repair.

Again, I wish every economic misfortune possible on states like Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin that should have know better than to embraces racism and lies.  They deserve immense economic pain. 

Why Does Gay Sex Scare Modern Muslims?

This blog has often noted that the raging homophobia in African nations reflects the ignorance of the populace as to true history of their own societies where homosexuality was accepted or at least tolerated.  A piece in The Daily Beast makes a similar case with Islam which in its so-called Golden Age was tolerant and strikingly different from the horrible thing it has become under Islamic fundamentalists.  The irony - as is the case with African nations such as Uganda - is that while fundamentalist seek to rebel from western values, homophobia was largely a British import.  It was Britain and the foul Christian missionaries that spread across the empire that brought homophobia to much of the world (American Christofascists now seek to maintain the bigotry as they lose power in America).  Here are article highlights:

LONDON — Half of British Muslims say being gay “should be outlawed.” Thus ran theheadline in London’s Sunday Times this week. Even more opposed gay marriage, while almost half thought it was unacceptable for a gay or lesbian to teach their children.

These findings from an ICM poll will be presented in a Channel 4 documentary, What British Muslims Really Think, airing this Wednesday. The show will portray the growing divergence between mainstream Britain and its Muslim communities.

Poll after poll of British Muslims has revealed statistically significant levels of illiberal opinion. Polling methodology and data may contain errors, as some critics note, but this is only scientifically rectified by more data, not by defensive posturing. A 2009 poll by Gallup found that 0 percent of Britain’s Muslims believed homosexual acts to be morally acceptable. What previous polls have shown us time and again is more of the same. This latest ICM poll asked a slightly different question, about whether homosexual acts should be legal rather than viewed as morally acceptable. Despite half saying no, this time 18 percent did say being gay should remain legal. Progress? Well, if our baseline was zero, there could only ever be progress.

Such numbers ought to prompt an urgent conversation about why Europe is having trouble integrating its Muslim communities. And it is likely that the answer, in part, relates to rising neo-fundamentalist approaches to scripture among Muslims.

There was a time when it was not like this.

Traditionally, Islam was open to exploring beauty and sexuality, especially when Islamic culture flourished and Europe was in what were known as the Dark Ages. The Prophet Muhammad taught that “God is Beautiful, and loves Beauty.” The 11th century Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm wrote “The Ring of the Dove,” a treatise on the different stages of love, including some rather explicit real-life stories.

It is true that many early Muslim scholars condemned homosexuality, and cited scripture to justify their position. But the themes of love and sexuality have been debated and discussed by Muslim theologians and artists for centuries. The word “homosexuality” is not even used in the Quran. In fact, it did not exist in the Arabic language. The modern Muslim conclusion that homosexuality is “unnatural” is therefore not based on anything in scripture.

The chapter of al-Nur (Quran 24:31) specifically recognizes “men who are not in need of women.” As the context of the passage shows, these are men who are not attracted to women. They may have been gay or asexual, but, by definition, they were not heterosexual men. They are also not judged or condemned anywhere in the Quran. The Prophet’s own example shows that he accepted men living around him who were called “Mukhannath,” seen to be “acting like women.”

This subtle early recognition grew to a point where it was open within the courts of various caliphs in the Muslim Golden Age. Abu Nuwas (756-814) was one of the greatest classical Arab poets. He flourished during the start of the Abbasid era Golden Age (750-1258), based in Baghdad. 

As was normal during this period, sexual roles were only imagined in terms of active and passive participants, not as gay or straight sex, and what we would today describe as homosexuality was clear and present in this society.

Many other excellent classical Muslim poets wrote in homoerotic tones, including the Persian Ibn Dawud (868-909), Andalusian Ibn Quzman (1080-1160), and the Arab Sicilian Ibn Hamdis (1053-1133). Lovemaking manuals are also to be found, such as The Perfumed Garden (al-Rawd al-Atir fi Nuzhat al-Khatir) by the Tunisian Shaiykh Muhammad ibn Umar al-Nafwazi, between 1410 and 1434, and The Book of Respective Merits of Maids and Young Men (Kitab Mafaharat al-Jawari wa al-Ghilman) by the prolific al-Jahiz (777-869).  Later on still, Omar Khayyam (d. 1126) set the tone for sexuality in his Quartets(Ruba’iyyat), and Sa’di of Shiraz (1184-1291) graphically discusses his love of young men. 

But as prudish Victorian values spread from Europe to the Middle East through colonialism, and as 19th century neo-fundamentalist Wahhabism began to take hold in the Arabian peninsula, and as 20th century Islamism gained ground, spreading from Egypt around the globe, censorship, misogyny and homophobia began to spread among Muslims worldwide.

Despite this diverse history, homosexuality is forbidden today in almost every modern Muslim-majority country, while censorship, homophobia, and misogyny reach worryingly high levels.

Previous Orientalist assumptions that fetishized Eastern sexuality have given way to a new form of generalization that accepts as normal the overbearing religious conservativism that has swept across Muslim-majority societies.

For too long, populist demagogues, xenophobes and racists have been able to use coded language about intolerable Muslim intolerance to argue that Muslims have no place in Europe. We must begin to discuss these issues with courage and candor, rather than trying to pretend there is no problem, or shying away from the difficult conversation we all must have around the non-integration of Europe’s Muslims.

In this way, if we are able to bank the progress that has been made, admit to the progress that is yet to be made, and throw open the conversation for all to participate, perhaps, just perhaps, we will be able to pull the rug out from under the feet of populists who want us all to believe that the only good Muslim is a deported Muslim.

But the only way to achieve this is by owning the conversation, not fearing it, nor by ceding it to those who seek to use these depressing survey results for their altogether different aim.

Sadly, like conservative Christianity, much of Islam has come to celebrate and embrace ignorance as it tries to war against modernity and its own past (it wasn't until the 12th and 13th centuries that psychotic and mentally disturbed "Church fathers" began their war on same sex love).