You can't make this up: Newsmax Sues Fox (+ bonus)

Let me start with this headline:

read past the schadenfreude on Newsmax suing Fox for something hopeful.

The "conservative" media ecosystem is a brutal place. The cesspool of the right wing echo chamber is a hellscape, you've got the OG, Fox News, but the Trump I ascension created a slew of competitors. OANN, NewsMax, and many others, joined by an ecosystem of grifty podcasters and influence peddlers who have been battling for the hearts and minds of the MAGA-tariat. Lots of money, astroturf, and toxicity abound.

In the background like this, I had to say when I glanced at the notifications on my phone that Newsmax was suing Fox News for anticompetitive behaviors.

I gotta say that this is just glorious.

From the article:

“But for Fox’s anticompetitive behavior, Newsmax would have achieved greater pay TV distribution, seen its audience and ratings grow sooner, gained earlier ‘critical mass’ for major advertisers and become, overall, a more valuable media property,” lawyers for the Florida-based network argued in the lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

I am rarely caught without words, but this? I am just stunned.

I also learned that Newsmax was founded in 1998, but it was primarily a web-property until 2014, when they turned to a cable channel format. But they are experiencing what most niche cable channels go through, that they are a limited audience, boutique channel without any "juice" and the ability to dictate favorable terms.

Fox on the other hand is a big dog, and they are a juggernaut of the cable ecosystem, the top viewership of news channels (over MSNBC, CNN, and others), on a par with the draw of ESPN, and thus able to command a significant carriage fee, and Newsmax who get basically no carriage fee, really struggles to get viewers, and they have to rely on advertising.

And there are only so many gold bullion sellers, and prepper supply companies who have enough money to buy ad space.

Boo hoo.

But there might be a path to success. In the Dominion settlement, discovery unearthed internal comms in Fox that the execs greenlighted the most egregious cases of defamatory statements were concerned that the MAGA true believers were defecting to sites like Newsmax and OANN, and that they needed to amp up the bullshit to keep their viewer numbers up.

Newsmax cites internal communications from within Fox — obtained via defamation lawsuits filed by voting technology companies Dominion and Smartmatic — that showed Fox executives were concerned about ratings gains that Newsmax made after the 2020 election, when Fox faced backlash from pro-Trump viewers after it called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden.

But, that is thin gruel indeed.

Something Good - Lucian Truscott is a gem

I have been a subscriber to Lucian for quite some time, and I greatly enjoy his writing, so much so that I support him at the founder level. (do subscribe to him)

His post from last night, titled: "What can we do to save our country?" is a gem. And frankly, I have had the same thoughts. I am one tiny voice, yelling into the void, and I feel overwhelmed. We (my wife and I) support a lot of efforts monetarily, and with other actions, but it never seems enough.

Lucian does a fabulous job of putting it into perspective. He doesn't sugarcoat it:

This is where we get into the painful business of understanding who we are. We’re not the people who elected him, the 77 million of our fellow citizens, some of whom live on my street here in Milford, PA, others who live in your town or in your apartment building. They don’t want him to stop or be gone. They had a voice in the matter, and they exercised it at the ballot box last November. As Trump is fond of pointing out ad nauseum, he is doing what they elected him to do.

This is what I have been saying (and getting heat for), but because it pisses people off doesn't make it wrong. We (those of us in opposition) need to recognize that a LOT of our fellow citizens are A-OK with what Trump is doing. And that there are enough of "them" to elect a buffoon like Trump. They saw him in the first administration, and said "Hell yeah, gimme more of that."

If you refuse to believe that (like many of the people I joust with on Substack) then you aren't helping by just shit-posting memes.

Sorry, I know that hurts, and you don't want to believe it. That doesn't make it wrong.

Lucian then goes on:

This is where we get into the painful business of understanding who we are. We’re not the people who elected him, the 77 million of our fellow citizens, some of whom live on my street here in Milford, PA, others who live in your town or in your apartment building. They don’t want him to stop or be gone. They had a voice in the matter, and they exercised it at the ballot box last November. As Trump is fond of pointing out ad nauseum, he is doing what they elected him to do.

So, what advice does Lucian impart? First, that as time goes on, people from blue states do move to red states, shifting their demographics. He cites the case of Oklahoma where the chief superintendent, Ryan Walters, a cartoonishly performative MAGA chode, is requiring teachers moving there from California and New York to pass some fucked up Praeger U "loyalty" test to America First principals.

People like Molly Jong-fast ridicule this, saying that no teachers are moving from blue states, but that is missing the point. These MAGA snowflakes are terrified that their "values" are being diluted. And that is good.

What I’m pointing out is that these are our ideas and convictions and values that they are so afraid of. The truly ridiculous thing about the Right’s attempts to win what we call the culture wars with ideological loyalty tests and book bans and economic blackmail is how 20^th Century their methods are. Do they really think if they ban “The Color Purple” from a library or forbid its teaching in a classroom that the book is not available to anyone who wants to read it with the click of a mouse?

And that makes total sense. Then, there's the assist that technology is unwittingly giving to this progress.

I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that Artificial Intelligence might not be such a bad thing, because the so-called “large language models” that currently power AI are stuffed to the gills with words and ideas and indeed the very language they have effectively stolen from Alice Walker and James Baldwin and Eugene V. Debs, for crying out loud, because he and his thoughts and values, if you will, are in the history books, and thus in the distribution networks of AI.

Indeed. A Google (or bing, or duck duck go) search away is a mountain of information that these rightwing fuckwads are trying to bury, to prevent their precious progeny from stumbling on.

It was like when I learned that JD Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" was a banned book in high school, I made sure to obtain a copy and read it. To this fucking day I can't understand why that gave my elders the vapors. Kids are not stupid, and unless you wrap them in cotton wadding, you can't prevent them from finding the truth. But the Fundamentalist Evangelicals do their best, and even then, many escape the insanity (c.f. Anna Wick)

Tech has an infectious strain of assholes, mostly at the founder level and they seem to be foiled by their own inventions. Meet:

Silicon Valley assholes like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have to know that they are fighting what the military calls a rear-guard action against the power of their own inventions. In taking over X, Musk has attempted to “democratize” – his word, not mine – his platform by allowing heretofore banned material to be published by those we would call bad actors. But really, all he’s doing is allowing Nazis and other scum sucking bottom feeders to compete with their so-called “ideas” against ours. I’ve seen at least two stories in the last month about the return to X by liberals who had abandoned the platform when Musk took over. That is undeniably a “good.” They’re in there swinging in the war of ideas, such as it is, again on X. I know that algorithms can be used to weight certain points of views over others. Musk can certainly do that on X if he wants to.

More people returning to Twitter (I still will deadname that fucker 'til I die) to joust with the MAGA cockwombles is a good thing (I just have neither the time nor the temperament for it).

Then there's the hard kernel of truth that even military flyovers can't truly silence:

I’ll use the press conference on the Capitol steps by Epstein victims as an example. What those nine women had to say publicly today is worth one thousand times as much as the 33,000 pages of so-called “Epstein files” that were dragged out of a kicking and screaming Trump DOJ last week. Posts lit up on X, on Bluesky, on Reddit, on Facebook – all over the internet today. Trump was sufficiently threatened by the testimony of the victims that he called the victims a “Democrat hoax.” One accuser, who was a central figure in the 2019 indictment, answered Trump’s charge with “This is not a hoax.” Trump was even accused of scheduling a fighter jet flyover of the Capitol to drown out the victims’ words during the press conference.

The net-net is, don't despair, yes, it is bleak, and there is no easy path out, but as Lucian says, all this will ultimately prove to foil the fuckers. It won't be quick, or easy, but it will happen.

But, as this last pull states, the threat is real, and it is harrowing, but the arc of history is wrong. What comes next will be different, but let's not let the assholes define it.

Many things we feared would happen have come to pass. The threat to this country is as real as a proverbial heart attack. He is even trying to intimidate the citizens of blue cities by putting armed National Guard soldiers on the streets. From what happened in Los Angeles and what we’ve seen in Washington D.C., it isn’t working. But that doesn’t mean he won’t keep it up, or that he won’t try something even worse. He is the one who asked General Mattis during the George Floyd protests, “can’t we just shoot them in the legs?” Anything, and I mean anything is possible with Trump.

So, if you want to know what I think we should do at this trying moment in the history of our nation, this is what I have to say. I don’t have a pad of prescriptions I can write with foolproof answers to how we can save our country. We already know some of the things we can do: stand up, show up, go to demonstrations, vote, spread your ideas to anyone who will listen and even those who don’t want to with post on social media.

Finally, we should all study how to go about standing in front of a tank. I intend to Google it. AI will be able to tell me everything I need to know about how to stop a tank in the street with my ideas and my body if or when that terrible choice becomes necessary.

Let's make some good trouble.