How strong is Dominion’s defamation case against Fox News? Legal experts weigh in

[Daily Kos Morning Roundup]( A morning roundup of worthy pundit and news reads, brought to you by Daily Kos. [Click here to read the full web version.]( - [How strong is Dominion’s defamation case against Fox News? Legal experts weigh in]( How strong is Dominion’s defamation case against Fox News? Legal experts weigh in, Steven Battaglio, The Los Angeles Times Many 1st Amendment attorneys said Dominion has presented highly compelling evidence of malice by Fox News, which poses a significant threat to the network if it goes to trial, they said. “I do overall believe that this is one of the strongest plaintiff’s cases that I’ve ever seen,” said attorney Lee Levine, who litigated 1st Amendment matters for 40 years. “I have a hard time envisioning a scenario in which Fox wins before a jury.” Andrew Geronimo, director of the 1st Amendment Clinic at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, said he was taken aback by the evidence and believes Fox News is in an unenviable position as a defendant. Dominion’s motion cited numerous examples of Fox News insiders disputing the veracity of Trump’s claims in blunt terms. “Usually, making out actual malice is all about inferences to things, what should have been discovered and what might have been overlooked,” Geronimo said. “It’s not usually so stark as ‘this is BS.’ From a defense lawyer’s perspective, it gives me the cold sweats reading this.” - [Lori Lightfoot is out. She leaves behind a complex legacy.]( Lori Lightfoot is out. She leaves behind a complex legacy., Mariah Woelfel and Tessa Weinberg, WBEZ Chicago Lightfoot’s legacy includes major policy achievements, some of which the city has been working toward for decades. Because of Lightfoot, Chicago’s next mayor will oversee a long-promised casino, and the $200 million in annual revenue it’s set to bring in to help calm the city’s growing pension crisis. Lightfoot also forged a new way to make the decades-in-the-making extension of Chicago’s Red Line train financially viable. She created a new taxing district downtown, which will help bring needed transit access to the city’s far South Side. [...] Despite campaigning in 2019 on the need for an elected school board, Lightfoot fiercely fought the legislation that eventually created it, and continued even now to say she would fight against it at the state level. While she campaigned on the need for policing reform, when dealing with the civil unrest brought by the police murder of George Floyd, Lightfoot directed the city to raise its bridges to limit protesters’ movements near the Downtown area — a move activists decried. - [Bad news: Daily Kos revenue is down, and we might not be able to do all we do. Good news: You are a big part of the solution, and small donors have never let us down. Donate $5 TODAY.]( - ['Gone With the Wind': The Explosive Lost Scenes]( 'Gone With the Wind': The Explosive Lost Scenes, David Vincent Kimel, The Ankler At the Atlanta premiere of Gone With the Wind on December 15, 1939, the 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. was dressed as a slave. It was the second night of an official three-day holiday proclaimed by the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia. King’s choir was serenading a white audience, directed to croon spirituals to evoke an ambiance of moonlight and magnolias for the benefit of the movie’s famous producer, David O. Selznick. He was the son of a former studio head and the husband of Louis B. Mayer’s daughter Irene, inspiring the ancient joke in Hollywood that “the son-in-law also rises.” But he’d fought hard to carve out his own legacy, beginning with his addition of the eye-catching but meaningless “O” to his name, and culminating in his creation of an independent studio. By 1939, Selznick had established himself as one of Hollywood’s most notoriously ambitious and outspoken showmen. He’d gambled his entire studio on Gone With the Wind, banking on the popularity of a novel about a ruthless Southern belle during the Civil War that had swept America three years earlier, winning its first-time author Margaret Mitchell the Pulitzer Prize and soon becoming the bestselling work of fiction in the country, second only to the Bible in book sales. As Selznick watched King and the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir sing, and white Atlanta swirl around in giddy celebration of his epic movie, the producer harbored a shocking secret never revealed until today: a civil war that had roiled the production internally over the issue of slavery, with one group of screenwriters insisting on depicting the brutality of that institution, and another faction, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, trying to wash it away. Selznick’s struggles over the exclusion of the KKK and the n-word from the script and his negotiations with the NAACP and his Black cast are the stuff of legend. But the producer’s decision to entertain scenes showcasing the horrors of slavery before deciding to cut them has never been told (in addition to scenes of Rhett Butler’s suicidal ideation with a gun, and even a cross-dressing rioter). If not for Selznick’s choices to err on the side of white pacification, he could have altered the course of one of the most celebrated — and disgraced — movies ever made. [...] Undeniably, the movie represented historic achievements in storytelling, color cinematography, production design, acting, orchestration, multidimensional portrayals of female characters, costuming, and efforts to fight the censorship of the Hays Code. But it is equally true that the film had a destructive global influence on the entire world’s understanding of race relations. A French critic once hailed Gone With the Wind as “the Sistine Chapel of Movies,” while director John Ridley more recently summarized it as “a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of color.” As seen through the lens of lost scenes in a rediscovered script, it also is a stark reminder of the debates and discussions that continue to haunt American culture more than 80 years later. - [It's O.K. to be confused about this economy]( It's O.K. to be confused about this economy, John Cassidy, The New Yorker On Monday, the National Association for Business Economics released its latest survey of forty-eight professional forecasters, and the results were all over the place. Though the median prediction showed the inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (the broadest measure of what the economy produces) eking out a modest expansion of 0.3 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2023, the projections ranged from negative 1.3 per cent—a significant slump—to positive 1.9 per cent, which would represent a relatively healthy growth rate. Moreover, that wasn’t the only thing that the forecasters disagreed on. Estimates of inflation, labor-market indicators, and interest rates “are all widely diffused, likely reflecting a variety of opinions on the fate of the economy—ranging from recession to soft landing to robust growth,” the association’s president, Julia Coronado, of MacroPolicy Perspectives, said. The divided opinions among economists were also on display at a conference on monetary policy that the University of Chicago Booth School of Business hosted in New York, last Friday. A group of economists from academia and Wall Street, which included the former Federal Reserve governor Frederic Mishkin, presented a research paper that cast doubt on hopes the central bank will be able to bring inflation down to its target of two per cent without causing a recession of some kind. After examining prior periods of disinflation going back more than seventy years and running simulations on an economic model, the economists said their findings suggested that “the Fed will need to tighten policy significantly further to achieve its inflation objective by the end of 2025.” Virtually all economists agree on at least one thing: the further the Fed raises interest rates, the more likely it is that its inflation-fighting exercise will end in a full-on recession. By chance, the conference in Chicago coincided with the release of a monthly inflation report that Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed monitor closely: the index for personal-consumption expenditures (P.C.E.). After the annual rate of inflation declined steadily during the second half of 2022, the update for January showed it edging up a bit, to 5.4 per cent. This news added to concerns that inflation may be proving “stickier” than some analysts had hoped. But what is the real outlook for inflation? - [Enjoy the Daily Kos Recommended email with a cup of coffee from a Daily Kos mug. Click here to get yours now]( - [The ‘trust’ Fox News seeks from its viewers isn’t about truth]( The ‘trust’ Fox News seeks from its viewers isn’t about truth, Philip Bump, The Washington Post A few days after the 2020 election, Shah reached out to Fox News’s communications lead, Irena Briganti. Polling from the firm YouGov showed that Fox News was viewed increasingly negatively by its viewers. He had a recommendation: “Bold, clear and decisive action is needed for us to begin to regain the trust that we’re losing with our core audience.” Why was Fox News losing its audience’s trust? Certainly not because it was focused on misleading them about the election results. The network called the state of Arizona for Joe Biden far too early, but got lucky when the call paid off. It followed other networks in declaring Biden the president-elect on Nov. 7. It did not immediately engage in the sort of dishonest speculation about fraud or rigging that further-right networks like One America News and Newsmax immediately engaged in. And that was the problem. Fox News earns the trust of its audience not by conveying the truth but by bolstering the right’s agreed-upon falsehoods. Within the universe that is conservative media, there was a “truth” about the election results that quickly became consensus: Donald Trump won; the election was stolen; the Democrats and Biden are crooks. It was this “truth” from which Fox was deviating — and thus eroding the trust its viewers had given it. - [A Tale of Two Insurrections: Lessons for Disinformation Research From the Jan. 6 and 8 Attacks]( A Tale of Two Insurrections: Lessons for Disinformation Research From the Jan. 6 and 8 Attacks, Dean Jackson and João Guilherme Bastos dos Santos, Lawfare The first lesson is that social media has become central to the modern extremist landscape, often supplanting affiliation with formal organizations. Extremists can mobilize far more effectively on digital platforms than they can through formal organizations alone. While the Jan. 6 committee’s final report spotlighted the role of militias and extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, members of these groups represented a small minority of rioters at the Capitol. The presence of so many unaffiliated rioters in Washington suggests something that was also true for Brasilia: The spread of election disinformation and extremist rhetoric was a more effective motivator than membership in established groups with public leaders and logos. In Brazil, election-deniers set up camps in front of army bases across the country in the weeks leading up to Jan. 8; these eventually developed into what Brazil’s justice minister called “incubators of terrorism.” These camps were physical echo chambers: Like-minded individuals shared feverish, fantastic claims about current conspiracies, future plans, and even fictional events of the past, including stories of military intervention to prevent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s swearing-in ceremony. [...] A second lesson is that election integrity efforts cannot stop on voting day. The period between the election and inauguration day in the United States and Brazil is roughly the same; but unlike the United States, Brazil has a nationwide electronic voting system that allows it to tally the vote in hours. This much smaller gap between voting and the official result helped prevent a movement equivalent to Stop the Steal from gaining momentum in Brazil before Lula’s inauguration (though false claims of fraud still circulated). This suggests the United States might benefit from changes to its decentralized voting system. [...] The third lesson is that humans are at least as important as algorithms for spreading disinformation and mobilizing the attackers. While much of the debate over social media’s political impact revolves around the role of recommendation algorithms in radicalizing users, the conversation should not stop there. The riots in Washington, D.C., and Brasilia were the result of human organizers taking advantage of digital platform features in a variety of ways. Many relevant platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp have no distribution algorithms inside of group chats. ICYMI: Popular stories from the past week you won't want to miss: - [Trump-loving Republican said something awful enough that his peers actually voted to censure him]( - [Jimmy Kimmel got under Trump’s thin skin—so much so that officials tried to muzzle the host]( - [Ukraine Update: Russia's 'BTG' was always a joke, and now it's dead]( Want even more Daily Kos? Check out our podcasts: - [The Brief: A one-hour weekly political conversation hosted by Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld]( - [The Downballot: Daily Kos' podcast devoted to downballot elections. New episodes every Thursday]( Want to write your own stories? [Log in]( or [sign up]( to post articles and comments on Daily Kos, the nation's largest progressive community. 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