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A Court Ruled Rachel Maddow's Viewers Know She Offers Exaggeration and Opinion, Not Facts
"Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news," an Obama-appointed judge ruled.
by Glenn Greenwald
Jun 22, 2021


MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on her program that a court ruled is understood even by her own viewers to offer exaggeration and opinion, not facts

MSNBC's top-rated host Rachel Maddow devoted a segment in 2019 to accusing the right-wing cable outlet One America News (OAN) of being a paid propaganda outlet for the Kremlin. Discussing a Daily Beast article which noted that one OAN reporter was a "Russian national” who was simultaneously writing copy for the Russian-owned outlet Sputnik on a freelance contract, Maddow escalated the allegation greatly into a broad claim about OAN's real identity and purpose: “in this case,” she announced, “the most obsequiously pro-Trump right wing news outlet in America really literally is paid Russian propaganda."

In response, OAN sued Maddow, MSNBC, and its parent corporation Comcast, Inc. for defamation, alleging that it was demonstrably false that the network, in Maddow's words, “literally is paid Russian propaganda." In an oddly overlooked ruling, an Obama-appointed federal judge, Cynthia Bashant, dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that even Maddow's own audience understands that her show consists of exaggeration, hyperbole, and pure opinion, and therefore would not assume that such outlandish accusations are factually true even when she uses the language of certainty and truth when presenting them (“literally is paid Russian propaganda").

In concluding that Maddow's statement would be understood even by her own viewers as non-factual, the judge emphasized that what Maddow does in general is not present news but rather hyperbole and exploitation of actual news to serve her liberal activism:

On one hand, a viewer who watches news channels tunes in for facts and the goings-on of the world. MSNBC indeed produces news, but this point must be juxtaposed with the fact that Maddow made the allegedly defamatory statement on her own talk show news segment where she is invited and encouraged to share her opinions with her viewers. Maddow does not keep her political views a secret, and therefore, audiences could expect her to use subjective language that comports with her political opinions.

Thus, Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news. The point of Maddow’s show is for her to provide the news but also to offer her opinions as to that news. Therefore, the Court finds that the medium of the alleged defamatory statement makes it more likely that a reasonable viewer would not conclude that the contested statement implies an assertion of objective fact.

The judge's observations about the specific segment at issue — in which Maddow accused a competitor of being “literally paid Russian propaganda" — was even more damning. Maddow's own viewers, ruled the court, not only expect but desire that she will not provide the news in factual form but will exaggerate and even distort reality in order to shape her opinion-driven analysis (emphasis added):

Viewers expect her to do so, as it is indeed her show, and viewers watch the segment with the understanding that it will contain Maddow’s “personal and subjective views” about the news. See id. Thus, the Court finds that as a part of the totality of the circumstances, the broad context weighs in favor of a finding that the alleged defamatory statement is Maddow’s opinion and exaggeration of the Daily Beast article, and that reasonable viewers would not take the statement as factual. . . .

Here, Maddow had inserted her own colorful commentary into and throughout the segment, laughing, expressing her dismay (i.e., saying “I mean, what?”) and calling the segment a “sparkly story” and one we must “take in stride.” For her to exaggerate the facts and call OAN Russian propaganda was consistent with her tone up to that point, and the Court finds a reasonable viewer would not take the statement as factual given this context. The context of Maddow’s statement shows reasonable viewers would consider the contested statement to be her opinion. A reasonable viewer would not actually think OAN is paid Russian propaganda, instead, he or she would follow the facts of the Daily Beast article; that OAN and Sputnik share a reporter and both pay this reporter to write articles. Anything beyond this is Maddow’s opinion or her exaggeration of the facts.

In sum, ruled the court, Rachel Maddow is among those “speakers whose statements cannot reasonably be interpreted as allegations of fact.” Despite Maddow's use of the word "literally” to accuse OAN of being a "paid Russian propaganda” outlet, the court dismissed the lawsuit on the ground that, given Maddow's conduct and her audience's awareness of who she is and what she does, “the Court finds that the contested statement is an opinion that cannot serve as the basis for a defamation claim."

What makes this particularly notable and ironic is that a similar argument was made a year later by lawyers for Fox News when defending a segment that appeared on the program of its highest-rated program, Tucker Carlson Tonight. That was part of a lawsuit brought by the former model Karen McDougal, who claimed Carlson slandered her by saying she “extorted” former President Trump by demanding payments in exchange for her silence about an extramarital affair she claimed to have with him.

McDougal's lawsuit was dismissed in September, 2020, by Trump-appointed judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, based on arguments made by Fox's lawyers that were virtually identical to those made by MSNBC's lawyers when defending Maddow. In particular, the court accepted Fox's arguments that when Carlson used the word “extortion,” he meant it in a colloquial and dramatic sense, and that his viewers would have understood that he was not literally accusing her of a crime but rather offering his own subjective characterizations and opinions, particularly since viewers understand that Carlson offers political commentary:

Fox News first argues that, viewed in context, Mr. Carlson cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect. See Def. Br. at 12-15. Fox News cites to a litany of cases which hold that accusing a person of “extortion” or “blackmail” simply is “rhetorical hyperbole,” incapable of being defamatory. . . .

In particular, accusations of “extortion,” “blackmail,” and related crimes, such as the statements Mr. Carlson made here, are often construed as merely rhetorical hyperbole when they are not accompanied by additional specifics of the actions purportedly constituting the crime. . . . Such accusations of crimes also are unlikely to be defamatory when, as here, they are made in connection with debates on a matter of public or political importance. . . . The context in which the offending statements were made here make it abundantly clear that Mr. Carlson was not accusing Ms. McDougal of actually committing a crime. As a result, his statements are not actionable.

When discussing Carlson's show generally and how viewers understand it, the court used language extremely similar to that invoked to protect Maddow from defamation lawsuits: namely, that Fox viewers understand that Carlson is, in addition to presenting news, offering his own subjective analysis of it:

In light of this precedent and the context of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the Court finds that Mr. Carlson’s invocation of “extortion” against Ms. McDougal is nonactionable hyperbole, intended to frame the debate in the guest commentator segment that followed Mr. Carlson’s soliloquy. As Defendant notes, Mr. Carlson himself aims to “challenge[] political correctness and media bias.” Def. Br. at 14. This “general tenor” of the show should then inform a viewer that he is not “stating actual facts” about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.”

Fox News has convincingly argued that Mr. Carlson was motivated to speak about a timely political cause and that, in this context, it is clear that his charge of “extortion” should not be interpreted as an accusation of an actual crime. Plaintiff’s interpretation of Mr. Carlson’s accusations is strained and, the Court finds, not reasonable when the entire segment is viewed in context. It is true that Mr. Carlson added color to his unsubstantiated rhetorical claim of extortion when he narrated that Ms. McDougal “approached” Mr. Trump and threatened his career and family. See Am. Compl. ¶ 10. But this overheated rhetoric is precisely the kind of pitched commentary that one expects when tuning in to talk shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight, with pundits debating the latest political controversies.

This is worth noting because of how often, and how dishonestly, this court case regarding Carlson is cited to claim that even Fox itself admits that its host is a liar who cannot be trusted. This court ruling has become a very common argument used by liberals to claim that even Fox acknowledges that Carlson lies. Indeed, Maddow's own colleague Chris Hayes — whose MSNBC program is broadcast at the same time as Carlson's and routinely attracts less than 1/3 of the Fox host's audience — has repeatedly cited this court case to argue that even Fox admits Carlson is a liar, without bothering to note that his companies’ lawyers made exactly the same claims about his mentor, Rachel Maddow, to defend her from a defamation lawsuit:

Twitter avatar for @chrislhayes
Chris Hayes
@chrislhayes
Similar to Fox News’ defense in court of Tucker Carlson: these people are obviously bullshit artists who no one should trust.
Kyle Cheney @kyledcheney
JUST IN: Chief of staff MEADOWS tells a court that Trump didn't mean it when he said he was ordering the declassification of all Russia-probe documents.
Trump was just referring to his delegation of declassification authority to AG Barr, Meadows says. https://t.co/jBAjKXWEAc
October 20th 2020
568 Retweets2,106 Likes

This claim — even Fox admits that Carlson is a liar who cannot be believed! — has become such a common trope among liberals that it is impossible to count how many times I have heard it. And that is because the liberal sector of the corporate media blared this claim in headlines over and over after the lawsuit against Fox was dismissed.

-- You Literally Can't Believe the Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox's Lawyers, by David Folkenflik, 9/29/20, NPR

-- Fox News won a court case by 'persuasively' arguing that no 'reasonable viewer' takes Tucker Carlson seriously, by Sonam Sheth, 9/25/20, Washington Post

-- Judge Rules Tucker Carlson is Not a Credible Source of News, by Elliot Hannon, 9/25/20, The Slatest

-- Sidney Powell's Tucker Carlson-esque defense: 'Reasonable people' wouldn't take her wild voter-fraud claims as fact, Except lots of Trump supporters clearly did, by Aaron Blake, 3/23/21, The Washington Post

It is virtually impossible to find similar headlines about Maddow even though the judicial rationale justifying dismissal of the lawsuit against her was virtually identical to the one used in Carlson's case. Indeed, lawyers for MSNBC and Fox cited most of the same legal precedent to defend their stars and to insist that their statements could not be actionable as defamation because viewers understood it as opinion rather than fact.

I personally agree with the rationale cited in both cases: it becomes dangerous when defamation claims are used to punish or otherwise forbid the expression of political opinion. And of course it is the job of lawyers to mount every possible argument when defending a client, which is why both MSNBC and Fox's lawyers essentially insisted that viewers of these programs understand that they are not being presented with objective truth and neutral news but political and subjective commentary. That is what made these widespread attempts to weaponize the ruling in Carlson's case so preposterous.

Indeed, it was Maddow's statement — that OAN is "literally paid Russian propaganda”— that seems far more actionable than Carlson's obviously figurative assertion that McDougal was "extorting” Trump. Falsely accusing people of being paid Kremlin agents has a long and ugly history in the U.S., having destroyed reputations and careers, yet this smear has once again become utterly commonplace in Democratic Party politics (a protracted and ugly feud among liberal commentators was initiated earlier this month when The Young Turks’ Cenk Uygur baselessly and falsely claimed that journalist Aaron Maté was "paid by the Russians”).

But whatever else is true, those who want to claim that this court ruling proves Carlson is a lying propagandist who cannot be trusted have no way out of applying the same claim to Maddow. In both cases, it would be unfair and irrational to use these court rulings to suggest that, given that the arguments made were standard ones lawyers advance to defend a defamation defendant. Ironically, those most guilty of being unreliable liars and propagandists are those in the media and even Maddow's own MSNBC colleagues who repeatedly cite this court ruling to delegitimize Carlson without ever mentioning that Maddow’s lawyers successfully used the same arguments in her defense.

In Just 21 Days, Facebook Led New India User to Porn, Fake News
by Saritha Rai
Bloomberg
Sat, October 23, 2021, 4:36 PM·6 min read

(Bloomberg) -- In February 2019, Facebook Inc. set up a test account in India to determine how its own algorithms affect what people see in one of its fastest growing and most important overseas markets. The results stunned the company’s own staff.

Within three weeks, the new user’s feed turned into a maelstrom of fake news and incendiary images. There were graphic photos of beheadings, doctored images of India air strikes against Pakistan and jingoistic scenes of violence. One group for “things that make you laugh” included fake news of 300 terrorists who died in a bombing in Pakistan.

“I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past 3 weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” one staffer wrote, according to a 46-page research note that’s among the trove of documents released by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

The test proved telling because it was designed to focus exclusively on Facebook’s role in recommending content. The trial account used the profile of a 21-year-old woman living in the western India city of Jaipur and hailing from Hyderabad. The user only followed pages or groups recommended by Facebook or encountered through those recommendations. The experience was termed an “integrity nightmare,” by the author of the research note.

While Haugen’s disclosures have painted a damning picture of Facebook’s role in spreading harmful content in the U.S., the India experiment suggests that the company’s influence globally could be even worse. Most of the money Facebook spends on content moderation is focused on English-language media in countries like the U.S.

But the company’s growth largely comes from countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil, where it has struggled to hire people with the language skills to impose even basic oversight. The challenge is particularly acute in India, a country of 1.3 billion people with 22 official languages. Facebook has tended to outsource oversight for content on its platform to contractors from companies like Accenture.

"We’ve invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali,” a Facebook spokeswoman said. “As a result, we’ve reduced the amount of hate speech that people see by half this year. Today, it’s down to 0.05 percent. Hate speech against marginalized groups, including Muslims, is on the rise globally. So we are improving enforcement and are committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online."

The new user test account was created on Feb. 4, 2019 during a research team’s trip to India, according to the report. Facebook is a “pretty empty place” without friends, the researchers wrote, with only the company’s Watch and Live tabs suggesting things to look at.

“The quality of this content is... not ideal,” the report said. When the video service Watch doesn’t know what a user wants, “it seems to recommend a bunch of softcore porn,” followed by a frowning emoticon.

The experiment began to turn dark on Feb. 11, as the test user started to explore content recommended by Facebook, including posts that were popular across the social network. She began with benign sites, including the official page of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and BBC News India.

Then on Feb. 14, a terror attack in Pulwama in the politically sensitive Kashmir state killed 40 Indian security personnel and injured dozens more. The Indian government attributed the strike to a Pakistan terrorist group. Soon the tester’s feed turned into a barrage of anti-Pakistan hate speech, including images of a beheading and a graphic showing preparations to incinerate a group of Pakistanis.

There were also nationalist messages, exaggerated claims about India’s air strikes in Pakistan, fake photos of bomb explosions and a doctored photo that purported to show a newly-married army man killed in the attack who’d been preparing to return to his family.

Many of the hate-filled posts were in Hindi, the country’s national language, escaping the regular content moderation controls at the social network. In India, people use a dozen or more regional variations of Hindi alone. Many people use a blend of English and Indian languages, making it almost impossible for an algorithm to sift through the colloquial jumble. A human content moderator would need to speak several languages to sieve out toxic content.

“After 12 days, 12 planes attacked Pakistan,” one post exulted. Another, again in Hindi, claimed as “Hot News” the death of 300 terrorists in a bomb explosion in Pakistan. The name of the group sharing the news was “Laughing and things that make you laugh.” Some posts containing fake photos of a napalm bomb claimed to be India’s air attack on Pakistan reveled, “300 dogs died. Now say long live India, death to Pakistan.”

The report -- entitled “An Indian test user’s descent into a sea of polarizing, nationalist messages” -- makes clear how little control Facebook has in one of its most important markets. The Menlo Park, California-based technology giant has anointed India as a key growth market, and used it as a test bed for new products. Last year, Facebook spent nearly $6 billion on a partnership with Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in Asia, who leads the Reliance conglomerate. “This exploratory effort of one hypothetical test account inspired deeper, more rigorous analysis of our recommendation systems, and contributed to product changes to improve them,” the Facebook spokeswoman said. “Our work on curbing hate speech continues and we have further strengthened our hate classifiers, to include four Indian languages."

But the company has also repeatedly tangled with the Indian government over its practices there. New regulations require that Facebook and other social media companies identify individuals responsible for their online content -- making them accountable to the government. Facebook and Twitter Inc. have fought back against the rules. On Facebook’s WhatsApp platform, viral fake messages circulated about child kidnapping gangs, leading to dozens of lynchings across the country beginning in the summer of 2017, further enraging users, the courts and the government.

The Facebook report ends by acknowledging its own recommendations led the test user account to become “filled with polarizing and graphic content, hate speech and misinformation.” It sounded a hopeful note that the experience “can serve as a starting point for conversations around understanding and mitigating integrity harms” from its recommendations in markets beyond the U.S.

“Could we as a company have an extra responsibility for preventing integrity harms that result from recommended content?,” the tester asked.

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

"The Typhoid Mary of Disinformation": Nicolle Wallace. Nobody Spreads it More Relentlessly. From her days as Bush/Cheney propagandist, to her stint on The View, to her role as beloved-by-Democrats MSNBC host, Wallace has perfected the art of sociopathic lying.
by Glenn Greenwald
May 19, 2022


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MSN Fired Its Human Journalists and Replaced Them With AI That Publishes Fake News About Mermaids and Bigfoot
by Frank Landymore
Futurism
December 2, 2022

Earlier this month, we reported that the Microsoft-operated news site MSN had run a clearly bogus story claiming that Claire "Grimes" Boucher had publicly called out ex-boyfriend Elon Musk on Twitter for not paying child support. The tweet the story based its claims off was an obvious fabrication, but that didn't stop the Inquisitr from publishing it, or MSN from distributing it to a much wider audience.

It turns out that was only the tip of the iceberg in MSN's sloppy propagation of patently fake news.

Take its affinity for Exemplore, a hokey paranormal and conspiracy news site that peddles tales of cryptids, signs of Atlantis, and magical crystals. Here are a few recent — and clearly preposterous — Exemplore articles that MSN has syndicated to its vast readership:

-"Fishermen Catch Mermaid Creature in Their Nets"

-"Woman Films Bigfoot Jumping Out of a Tree in California"

-"Party Stops as Giant UFO Flies Directly Over It"

-"Mars Rover Appears to Catch 'Dark Beast' Roaming the Surface of Mars"

-"Someone Swears They Caught a Biblically Accurate Angel Floating in the Sky Over LA"

Needless to say, if any of these stories were remotely credible, they'd have completely upended the scientific establishment. Instead, the source material for each of these sensational headlines is invariably a grainy and unconvincing video that does nothing to convince us that mermaids, bigfoot, angels, or aliens are real.

While Exemplore's headlines on MSN are blatantly ridiculous, others, like the Grimes story, are more insidious in their plausibility. A cursory examination of the MSN comments section under Grimes-Musk affair shows that many readers were easily fooled.

Futurism reached out to MSN for comment regarding both the Grimes story and the many Exemplore stories and received no response. After we published this story, MSN deleted all the hoax articles — but without a retraction note or anything else documenting the removal.

Is it Exemplore's right to run clickbait garbage? Sure, and maybe its readers have fun suspending their disbelief, like the readers of supermarket tabloids in decades past. Believing in bigfoot isn't exactly harmful, although it probably does indicate a weaker-than-average grasp on reality.

But there's no excuse for MSN, a media giant with the extraordinary resources of Microsoft behind it, to be amplifying — and monetizing — this ridiculous and inaccurate content. Its audience is vast, with the analytics service Similarweb estimating that it attracts nearly a billion readers per month.

Furthermore, MSN wields enormous SEO power that pushes its content to the top of search results, oftentimes superseding the original publication. If by happenstance a reader Googles something that resembles one of MSN's many fake headlines, a search engine will return MSN's republication of a story while sometimes omitting the original, lending it undue credibility.

Many in that immense audience will see lazy and false stories by Exemplore, the Inquisitr and other bottom-tier publishers alongside other legitimate outlets syndicated by MSN, like Bloomberg, The New York Times, and The Daily Beast. The effect, inevitably, undermines the good work done by hardworking and ethical publishers, rewards the nonsense published by low quality content farms, and undermines the public's faith in science and tech journalism.

As such, MSN's seemingly nonexistent editorial standards illustrate the perils of the contemporary media industry. In particular, recent years have seen Microsoft embrace an increasingly callous and cynical strategy toward the site: in 2020, for instance, it gutted MSN by firing dozens of workers, including journalists, editors, and other production staff, vowing to replace them with automated systems instead.

"I spend all my time reading about how automation and AI is going to take all our jobs, and here I am," one fired MSN staffer told The Guardian at the time. "AI has taken my job."

That anonymous staffer imparted a prescient warning: that though the human team had employed close editorial guidelines to vet the material that appeared on MSN's site, the new automated system would likely struggle to bring the same level of nuance and skepticism.

MSN makes lofty promises that there's still "human oversight" over the stories it syndicates, but given the desultory deluge of fake nonsense it appears to run constantly, it seems very unlikely that the site's remaining skeleton crew is accomplishing much at all.

And with its dwindling human staff, fewer still are left to hear readers' concerns, effectively erecting a brick wall that imposes a worrying opacity. Requests for comments go unanswered, and MSN publishes more bogus stories all the time.

Microsoft's end goal, it seems, was to automate its news distribution system, while cutting costs in the process. To that end, Microsoft may have been successful, but in the process has poisoned the well of a news reading public.

That would be worrying at any widely read news aggregator. But MSN isn't just popular; it's the default source of news for many Windows users. Open a new tab on Microsoft's Edge browser and it lands you on an MSN hub. And if you still use Internet Explorer for some reason, MSN is the default home page of that, too. Hell, even the Windows Start Menu will show you its articles. It's even hooked into competitors' systems, picking up untold new pageviews on Google News.

In sum? It's yet another cautionary tale about the growing corporate hunger to offload decision making to flawed AI systems that eliminate important jobs, exercise poor judgment with little oversight, and generally make society worse for the humans still living in it.