Fox News gets okay to misinform public, court ruling. Courtesy of Broadcast Blues courtesy of The Corporation UPDATED:Many news agencies lie and distort facts, not many have the guts to admit it...in court...positioning the First Amendment as their defense!
The attorneys for Fox, owned by media baron Rupert Murdoch, successfully argued the First Amendment gives broadcasters the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves. We are pushing for a consumer protection solution that labels news content according to its adherence to ethical journalism standards that have been codified by the Society of Professional Journalists (Ethics: spj.org). A News Quality Rating System and Content Labeling approach, follows a tradition of consumer protection product labeling, that is very familiar to Americans. Appellate Court Rules Media Can Legally Lie. Fox News wins in court. FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media.
They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. December 1996, Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson, were hired by FOX as a part of the Fox “Investigators” team at WTVT in Tampa Bay, Florida.to investigat bovine growth hormone (BGH), a controversial substance manufactured by Monsanto Corporation. Fox executives and their attorneys wanted the reporters to use statements from Monsanto representatives that the reporters knew were false and to make other revisions to the story that were in direct conflict with the facts.
Fox editors then tried to force Akre and Wilson to continue to produce the distorted story. Akre and Wilson refused and threatened to report Fox's actions to the FCC, they were both fired. During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. FoxBGHsuit. GOP Connections. Can Activists Sue Fox News For Lying About Climate Change? Climate scientist Andrew Weaver is suing the conservative Canadian newspaper the National Post for libel . His beef: The paper published four articles that contain patently false information, with intent to damage his reputation in the eyes of the public.
The claims are varied, but here's one you can look up right now: was Andrew Weaver planning to leave the International Panel on Climate Change, where he's had a leadership position for some years? Weaver says no. (The full complaint is available at DeSmogBlog.) Canada's libel laws derive from the same Common Law as the U.K. , which has a looser standard than the United States' rather stringent test for what constitutes defamation. The suit raises the question: Are the courts a venue for dealing with climate change disinformation ? And that's a good thing. Photo credit: dutchlad Christopher Mims a Florida-based journalist who writes about the environment. Fox's Nazi fetish: Beck, O'Reilly, others repeatedly invoke Nazi imagery. Beck regularly invokes Nazis, Hitler, Goebbels, other Nazi imagery Beck: Obama advisers show "the kind of thinking that ... eventually led to the Holocaust.
" On his October 5 radio show, Beck said that statements by Obama advisers John Holdren, Ezekiel Emanuel and Cass Sunstein indicate "the kind of thinking that led to ... the extermination program that eventually led to the Holocaust. " Beck likened reporting about him to "what Goebbels did. " Complaining on the August 27 edition of his radio show that ABC reported a statement by Beck that blacks don't own Martin Luther King without also noting that he also said whites don't own Abraham Lincoln, Beck said : "You know what?
I'm gonna get a lot of heat for this, but stand in line. Beck equates children singing about Obama with "Hitler Youth. " Beck: Putting "the common good" first "exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany. " Beck: "frightening similarities" between Sunstein, Goebbels.
"God forbid, another 9/11.