Fox Corp Hit With Yet Another Lawsuit Over ‘Longstanding Practice of Allowing Conspiracy Theories’
Fox Corp Hit With Yet Another Lawsuit Over ‘Longstanding Practice of Allowing Conspiracy Theories’
Fox News parent company Fox Corporation found itself embroiled in yet another lawsuit on Tuesday related to Fox News' coverage of the 2020 election.
Shareholders accusing the board of failing their obligations to protect the company from liabilities- specifically… by allowing conspiracy theories they knew were false to be aired frequently.
Interesting take. This might actually have some bite to it
I'll remain skeptical for now that Fox faces any real consequences. I feel like this could just as easily go the route of "Fox didn't intend to loose money" and "companies make stupid decisions all the time" depending on how it gets argued. Probably end up just being a settlement either way, likely before discovery even starts.
Last time they chose to offload Tucker. (edit: and Bongino!)
Maybe more will be put in the airlock this time.
Agreed. Don’t hold your breath.
As much as I love seeing more lawsuits pile up against Fox, I just don't see any merit to these cases.
Both cases claim that fox has "a longstanding habit" of allowing conspiracy theories and inviting defamation lawsuits that would damage the company's value (affecting their investment).
If you are an investor, is it not your duty/responsibility to vet the investment before investing? If fox had a "longstanding" habit of it, then this means it's been going on a while, and that it was an obvious thing that everybody (including those investment/pension funds) knew about.
Companies take gambles all the time. Sometimes they pay out, and sometimes those gambles lose money. In this case, the gamble was paying out bigtime in the short run but they lost in the long run. That's business. It's the investor's responsibility to make the decision and all the facts of the case were available to anyone with the will to do their due diligence (I mean, everything they are complaining about was broadcast on public television, it's not like Fox was hiding anything).
This is a case of investor incompetence, imo.
A little of column A, a little of column B. I'd put a lot of weight into when the investments were made. The older the investment, the more valid the claim. It's not like Fox started out as the Trump channel - they originally sold scandal and outrage, not lies. No one can argue that they haven't gone off the deep end since COVID, but if you were invested before then you had to find an incident that you could explain was the uncrossable line in order to divest (without losing your investing job) and there wasn't one. It was little by little for years as the New Normal kept lowering the bar and the investors sat like the proverbial frogs in the pot. Looking back though, only Giuliani or Powell would now dare to say there wasn't a line crossed somewhere in there from scandal to bullshit. After March 18, 2019 if you weren't out you were screwed: not only did your investments lose a lot of value, you lost out on potential further gains had they stayed on the straight-and-narrow since Day 1.
I'd also say that investors couldn't know that the Smartmatic and Dominion lies were being knowingly told at the time. It's not like FOX was telling investors "You're money's safe with us, we sell lies". They lied with a straight face to everyone.
But what the hell. Let 'em fight it out in court.
Ok it seems the ones suing them are pension funds. Is it irony if the people most likely to fall for the Fox bullshit are the ones who are also being financially harmed by the spreading of the bullshit by Fox?
Conservative boomers and being easily manipulated by fear tactics, name a more dynamic duo.
Allowing us the wrong term. It's more like encouraging, pushing even.
Is that illegal?
It's extremely misleading. Even though Fox has been classified as "entertainment" for a number of years, that doesn't stop them from selling themselves as an actual news source. (Why people want to get pissed off for a couple hours a day as a form of entertainment is beyond me.)
Also, the conspiracy theories have caused actual harm to people. COVID-19/vaccine conspiracies probably being at the top of that list.
A conspiracy theory is only fun when you know it's just a conspiracy theory. The problem is, is that they are catering to an audience that doesn't know the difference. For example, stories of government coverups of UFOs were fun as a kid. Fox telling you that all "the gays are coming for your kids" is dangerous.
As a publicly held company, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their share holders. Fox News, as its name suggests, sells itself to share holders as a news organization. When they repeatedly present easily fact checked conspiracy theories as news, they open themselves up to lawsuits that damage the value of the organization and therefor cost the shareholders money.
Fox News is being sued for violating their fiduciary duty to their shareholders by failing to do basic due diligence in making sure that their reporting is honest and accurate, something every other major news organization does. News organizations do this because failing to due so can lead to lawsuits that can cost millions of dollars. Fox allowed and even encouraged, I believe, on air personalities to repeatedly make false claims about Dominion Voting Systems. That action led to Fox being sued for $2.7 billion. Fox recently settled that suit for $787.5 million. That is a huge hit to their shareholders. Fox also promoted the same falsehoods against another company, Smartmatic. Smartmatic is also suing Fox for $2.7 billion dollars and their is little reason to think that suit will end any better for Fox News than the Dominion suit did.
Not criminally illegal, but it is something that can be sued over.
I'm all for Fox being held accountable to face consequences of their reckless actions.....
However, Fox has always been this way. Any investor who had done due diligence would know of their shady reputation. If you knowingly invest in a shady company, you can't really get pissed later about their shady actions. If you lost money, that's on you. If they had made money they wouldn't complain so it's kinda hypocritical on top of everything else.
Fox might always have been terrible. But there's still some rules on how the board should behave. Your post ignores that and is a bit too heavy on the victim blaming IMO.
There's no victim blaming if there's not a victim and there's no victim if adults are responsible for their own decisions and performed due diligence to educate themselves about the company before investing. So Fox having always been terrible is at the core of the issue here. They have always promoted crazy-ass conspiracy theories and it has always been profitable for them up until now, in fact I believe they were the highest rated cable "news" network for many years. If they followed a formula that always worked, they had no reason (arguably) to believe it wouldn't continue to work. In fact by changing a proven profitable formula you could argue they weren't performing their duties to continue to produce returns on investment.
But I'm not sure I can continue to have this conversation because if you're going to start using short-cut terms like "victim-blaming without making arguments to back yourself up, there's no discussion to be had.
The obvious rebuttal is that Fox hasn't until recently been paying hundreds of millions of dollars for defamation.
You said it yourself though, "recently" and the title of this is "longstanding practice" so it's not really a valid rebuttal in this case.
So people aren't allowed to think and have ideas about things? You must follow the party line or else? What a joke.
So people aren't allowed to think and have ideas about things?
How's that related to the topic of a company knowingly spreading false conspiracy theories?