The recent release of a pile of emails, text messages, and memos from within Fox News has raised the Dominion Voting System‘s defamation lawsuit to large public view. Here is a 52-minute discussion between Stewart and Anderson Jones that explores the facts revealed in the data dump, the boundaries and conditions that must be met to win a defamation suit and much more about the state of our politics, free speech, collusion to undermine the government, and more….. I continue to find Stewart smart, articulate, serious, and funny.
A deep issue here is the boundaries of First Amendment speech rights colliding with a political movement that wants to take over and destroy the government that proclaims these speech rights. In the end, we need to develop policies and laws that hold people and corporations accountable for knowingly uttering a persistent pattern of falsities. In our ancestral history people who lied and said crazy things were shamed and perhaps even shunned. In a society of our scale and interconnectedness, these tools from our tribal past are inadequate. We need formal mechanisms that insist that people who lie, cheat, and utter counterfactual nonsense are silenced and, as required, punished.
Find it here on YouTube:
Liar, Liar Network On Fire: The Legal Case Against Fox News
