How Fox's Dominion Lawsuit Threatens a Free Press

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

The corporate state is running a full-court press on free speech. Like whack-a-mole, for every victory for a free press, five new threats to it emerge from the woodwork.

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Social engineers are experts at playing this game, and they have the resources to make it happen.

By constantly introducing new threats, the advocates for free speech are kept perpetually on the defensive, frenetically putting out fires here and there but never confronting the power center that starts the fires head-on.

On the right side of things, we are (it seems at times, anyway) hopelessly outgunned and out-equipped.

While First Amendment activists are busy combatting the ultra-authoritarian RESTRICT Act that would shut down the internet free speech domain as we know it, the government’s Disinformation Governance Board, or whatever new censorship project the Deep State is piloting this week, it is simultaneously deploying a new project.

It’s death by a thousand cuts.

As explained in this segment by The Hill, if the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, which concerns itself with Fox News’ platforming of “election deniers,” were successful, it would set the precedent that not only are publishers legally liable for false claims they make, but that untrue, defamatory claims made by any guests on their platforms also places them in legal jeopardy.

Setting this precedent of liability for engaging with someone else’s speech from outside of the media organization would have the effect of media outlets self-censoring any sort of unpopular perspective unpopular out of fear of being sued into oblivion.

It’s hard to exaggerate how much damage this would do to the free exchange of ideas.

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The sickest aspect of all of this to consider is that the number-one cheerleader of censorship regimes like the Disinformation Governance Board and lawfare attacks like the Dominion lawsuit is the corporate media itself — ostensibly the only meaningful peaceful bulwark against government abuse of power available to the people.

Challenging government overreach — and abuses by any powerful actor — is literally the entire point of the media. Yet more and more, it’s taken for granted now that the reflexive corporate media position on any issue is the protection of the state against free inquiry by people — an exact inversion of its intended function.

We saw this dynamic play itself out in another recent melodrama concerning the intelligence leaker. Instead of reporting on the factual information disclosed in the leaks, the corporate media instead leaped into action to demonize the whistleblower as a domestic terrorist racist!

Screenshot from Salon

Sadder still is that the irony is totally lost on the liberal NPC hive mind, which sees nothing wrong at all with CNN outing the identity of the leaker in an attempt to smear him before the FBI released his name — reporting themselves, in the process, on an illegal leak.

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