Share this page!

Josh Marshall Profile picture
Twitter logo
6 Feb, 8 tweets, 2 min read
As the Dominion/Smartmatic litigation moves forward one of the most fascinating veins of reporting will be on the culture of impunity at Fox. With Rudy, Lindell, Powell these are degenerate liars and sociopaths. Evil, crazy people do evil crazy things.
2/ But Fox is a huge and hugely profitable corporation. It may be a corrosive and destructive force in American life. But it’s not run by idiots. It is remarkable to me that the actions for which they are being sued weren’t yanked back by the corporations lawyers within ...
3/ days at the very latest. By any normal standard these claims never should have aired at all. But this went on for weeks and weeks. It was crystal clear these claims were nonsense. Unlike so many other Fox News victims, these companies had every incentive to sue ...
4/ they had a very strong case and they were sustaining clear and readily quantifiable damages. For any corporate legal department, certainly for a media legal department this is a DEFCON One situation. Red lights flashing. Now you may say Oh Fox is garbage, they do this kind ...
5/ of thing all the time. But actually they don’t. Not everything evil and wrong is actionable. Not everyone is in a position to sue. Not all destructive lying amounts to defamation. This had all the warning signs. It is almost unimaginable that some lawyer at Fox didn’t ...
6/ say hey this is a big risk, let’s reel this back. Were they overruled? Did no one pay attention? I can’t emphasize enough, this went on for weeks and weeks. They clearly thought they were invulnerable or perhaps the shots were being called by people who thought ...
7/ defending Trump was more important than the public company’s responsibility to its investors. No idea. But there’s a big story to tell. Maybe you think I’m exaggerating. Their situation isn’t that bad. Don’t bet on it. When you summarily cancel your channels highest rated ...
8/ show and announce the host will never appear on the air again that tells me you recognize a catastrophic if not existential legal situation.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Josh Marshall

Josh Marshall Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @joshtpm

Josh Marshall Profile picture
7 Feb
@HeerJeet This shld really be seen in the context of the larger absurdity of much of the legal academy in which amateurs freelance in fields they have no expertise in under the imprimatur of elite university distinction. We might call it the Law and Economics Grandiosity Problem.
@HeerJeet 2/ I shld anticipate the criticism that many law profs do important work outside narrow study of law. But those are the ones who actually seek to learn from and operate within the knowledge of other fields, even if they lack formal credentials (which are often overrated.)
@HeerJeet 3/ This problem doesn't affect all communities equally. Incidents is much higher on the right. But alas it crops up across the ideological spectrum. I was first introduced to it rather roughly. Not long after I started as an editor at The American Prospect I was assigned ...
Read 16 tweets
Josh Marshall Profile picture
6 Feb
The Supreme Court rightly put a very high bar on success in libel suits for public people and entities. You have to be wrong. And you have to have known you were wrong or have had a malicious indifference to whether you were right or wrong. It's very hard to mete that ...
2/ standard. And even in the cases I can think of where juries have found for plaintiffs often it's a generous (toward the plaintiffs) interpretation of malice. The Smartmatic/Dominion cases are the first case at scale that seems almost to try out the Sullivan standard.
3/ Fox and various other pro-Trump entities made numerous, repeated and HIGHLY damaging claims which certainly in the cases of the institutions and almost certainly with the individuals (with Lindell he may simply be crazy) they were false.
Read 11 tweets
Josh Marshall Profile picture
5 Feb
There’s an important lesson here. It is very credible that the White House denies Politicos claim that the Summers oped or Summers thinking is influencing their internal thinking because there’s basically nothing the White House has **done** to support that claim.
2/ Summers oped isn’t some big revelation or shift. (Indeed, as a separate matter the most interesting thing to me is how tepid his argument is.) with the knowledge of those views the WH has proposed a very large package, shown no inclination to meaningfully reduce ...
3/ the total package price, has said that inflation is basically a non-issue and that even in its own terms (which are not the primary terms of the argument) long term deficits will be lower with a big package now because a quicker return to growth etc.
Read 6 tweets
Josh Marshall Profile picture
4 Feb
This is my small contribution to Pandemic-era furniture design. Today is my beloved wife's birthday. A special birthday. She's a psychotherapist with a general practice, but specializing in grief. Like many therapists the pandemic has shifted her practice to virtual sessions.
2/ For many patients this means Zoom. She sits on a couch with an Ipad propped up at the right height to approximate an in-person session, usually stacking things on top of each other to get the right height. Countless therapists around the country are doing some version of this.
3/ I call this a custom therapizing bench. Basic mortise and tenon joinery. Made in Pine to keep it light weight for easy mobility. Designed to be the right height for comfortable viewing from a couch. Certainly it's not a radical design innovation. You could do something ...
Read 7 tweets
Josh Marshall Profile picture
4 Feb
Good thread. Read it. GOPs have rapidly moved on to mocking people who were afraid during the violent assault on the capitol they fomented. This amounts to the first step toward their explicit endorsement of the insurrection. Perception of threat is inherently subjective.
2/ But the only thing any Republican member of Congress - with the possible exception of Mitt Romney - should say to @AOC is “I’m sorry because I [enter name of elected] personally helped incite the insurrection.” As I said, perception of threat is inherently subjective.
3/ But I would guess that the vast majority of the violent Republican insurgents who stormed the capitol could identify at most a handful of Democratic members of Congress. Probably every last one could identify two: Nancy Pelosi and AOC. Pelosi as part of the line ...
Read 6 tweets
Josh Marshall Profile picture
30 Jan
AZ lawmakers who were in DC during the insurrection refuse public records request for emails/texts citing privacy and 5th Am right not to incriminate themselves. azcentral.com/story/news/pol…
2/ Lawmakers say "the threat of criminal prosecution gives rise to certain Constitutional rights that may overcome the duty to disclose otherwise public documents under Arizona’s public records law."
3/ "certain constitutional rights" 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @joshtpm has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @joshtpm!

Read all threads by @joshtpm