Californi Democrat Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney sent a letter to major TV carriers, implying they help the “spread of misinformation” since they provide Newsmax, Fox News, and OANN.
“We are concerned about the role AT&T plays in disseminating misinformation to millions on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV subscribers, and we write to you today to request additional information about what actions AT&T is taking to address these issues,” they wrote in the letter to AT&T.
They sent the same letter to Roku, Comcast, Verizon, Amazon, Dish Network, Cox, Hulu, and others.
Eshoo and McNerney demanded the providers answer these questions by March 8:
1. What moral or ethical principles (including those related to journalistic integrity, violence, medical information, and public health) do you apply in deciding which channels to carry or when to take adverse actions against a channel?
2. Do you require, through contracts or otherwise, that the channels you carry abide by any content guidelines? If so, please provide a copy of the guidelines.
3. How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol? Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel.
4. What steps did you take prior to, on, and following the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks to monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans? Please describe each step that you took and when it was taken.
5. Have you taken any adverse actions against a channel, including Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN, for using your platform to disseminate disinformation related directly or indirectly to the November 3, 2020 elections, the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, or COVID-19 misinformation? If yes, please describe each action, when it was taken, and the parties involved.
6. Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate any disinformation? If yes, please describe each action and when it was taken.
7. Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV both now and beyond any contract renewal date? If so, why?
Newsmax responded:
“The House Democrats’ attack on free speech and basic First Amendment rights should send chills down the spines of all Americans. Newsmax reported fairly and accurately on allegations and claims made by both sides during the recent election contest. We did not see that same balanced coverage when CNN and MSNBC pushed for years the Russian collusion hoax, airing numerous claims and interviews with Democrat leaders that turned out to be patently false.”
Yes, where were these Democrats when MSNBC and CNN did nothing but push the Russian collusion hoax for four years? How come they allowed failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to whine about President Donald Trump stealing the election from her?
The Democrats complained that Newsmax called the Capitol Hill scene a “sort of romantic idea.”
Do you know who said that? Pepperidge Farms remembers who said that and how Newsmax hosts reacted to the scene:
The claim was made on Newsmax by a Touro College law professor and prominent liberal, Thane Rosenbaum, who was describing the rally before any violence or illegal activity had taken place at the Capitol.
In fact, Newsmax hosts began condemning the illegal activity that took place at the Capitol in real time, and did so repeatedly throughout the day.
Fox News responded:
In response to the allegations, Fox News Media said in a statement, “As the most watched cable news channel throughout 2020, FOX News Media provided millions of Americans with in-depth reporting, breaking news coverage and clear opinion. For individual members of Congress to highlight political speech they do not like and demand cable distributors engage in viewpoint discrimination sets a terrible precedent.”
The House Energy and Committee telecom subcommittee has a hearing on Wednesday to discuss “misinformation and disinformation hosted on cable and broadcast networks.”
They do not have any of the networks on their witness lists.
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Comments
I think that it’s a pretty damn good bet that this has been going on behind the scenes for quite a while.
It’s just that now a couple of moron congress critters didn’t get the memo that this sort of manipulation and outright violation of the Constitution has to be done on the QT.
Or alternatively, they just figured out that they can do anything they want and they’ll get away with it.
Do these knuckle draggers not realize what this is going to do? Conservative sources are not going away. The left has two hits coming one is a conservative economy will spring up or two the low IQ will have to once again learn to argue in the arena of ideas.
If they think they have “an angry and dangerous subculture” now, just wait until they censor our cable channels.
Squeeze, baby, squeeze.
Big Brother is concerned the proles are being exposed to ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. Big Brother is always watching out and fighting for you.
Meanwhile ICYMI – FACEBOOK has removed all official websites for the Country of Australia. And, that is not a joke. The Aussies stood up to Zuckerberg and he Deplatformed a sovereign government.
Then the Australian government should block Facebook and all it’s subsidiaries at their borders. And then when people start to bitch, moan, and complain that they can’t get to Facebook simply give them zuckerberg’s telephone number and tell them to discuss the matter with him.
Nevermind, the Australian government bowed to zuck’s demands and are going to water down their law that would have forced Facebook to actually pay for the content they steal.
So much for standing up against the social media conglomerates.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9290001/Facebook-news-ban-Australian-ministers-agree-water-new-laws.html
Google caved so that at least is a win for Canberra.
Now other sovereign countries need to kick Facebook out. It would be best if the first wave was 20 or more countries.
They already deplatformed the most powerful man in the free world. Hard to beat that. Australia is chump change.
Quality of journalism and information getting to people is a big issue but outright cancelation is problematic policy to say the least.
Who has taken over marks account?!?!
Ambiguous.
@mailman
*Shock horror* I have a range of views on different subjects. Funny that.
Who took over mailman’s? Whomever did, forgot to say “fuck”.
:-{)}}}
Fair point
Concern trolls occasionally post semi-reasonable statements as part of their smokescreen.
Read on further down and you will find him back to form.
This is about intimidation more than actually doing anything. Do you think these news sources will hesitate next time something controversial comes up. I do. Particularly Fox.
So Fox turning hard Left is not saving them from the wrath of the Wokestapo. Wow – who wudda thunk it?
So when CNN, MSNBC and others were running incendiary lies about
Russia and Trump stealing an election, that didn’t support an ‘angry and dangerous subculture’?
Or when media in their nonstop over-the-top coverage portrayed Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and more recently George Floyd as innocent little choirboys whose deaths were solely due to the color of their skin, that had nothing to do with sparking the violence which followed in each case?
Their biggest fear is that more people will tune in to the alternatives and begin thinking for themselves.
Ah, but that’s not misinformation, it’s correct information. The proof is that it’s reported by reliable sources, i.e. CNN, MSNBC, etc. This is called “begging the question”, or “assuming that which you are trying to prove”.
You make an interesting point. The reliability of sources. It’s certainly the case that CNN , the NYT etc have reasonable journalism. Blindly assuming they are correct or incorrect everyone isn’t good either.
In the partisan atmosphere it’s harder and harder to sift through what might be shameful bias, misreporting or actual fact.
It becomes even worse when one side vehemently denies anything bad happened and blankly proclaims it all as lies and other such hyperbolic language. Dagwood’s comment about Russia is a classic one. The right appears to deny there involvement in the 2016 election entirely when there is copious amounts of information that they did genuinely interfere via the internet research agency. As I’ve mentioned to you previously how much of an impact is difficult to discern due to the way Facebook works but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that it didn’t have an impact. The way some on the left reported could have been better as could it have been on the right. Denying there was a problem is just as dishonest as exaggerating the impact.
Very funny. On what planet, in which universe, is this even close to the case?
Most of us remember when CNN was the Clinton News Network. And the NYT has been a junk newspaper since at least about 1990.
And still better than Fox news which is notorious for lying through its teeth. I’m not saying they are fantastic but reasonable and thus with room for improvement
Mark, since when has Fox had a reputation for lying through its teeth? As I hear it they were partisan but honest, unlike CNN, the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo etc. Fox’s reputation has however crashed and they’re reportedly barely any better than the others.
And since then, “authorized journalists” have been agitating for “justabloggers” to be deplatformed when it comes to being able to call themselves “press.”
Silly rabbit, you thought the first amendment was for everybody?
“Notorious” according to whom? Only according to CNN, MSNBC, the NYT, etc. Not according to anyone who actually cares about facts.
It certainly is notorious. Here in the UK it’s viewed as one step from fiction.
Recently it’s peddled the Dominion machines lie just as one minor example. Or how about the Seth rich conspiracy and the resultant payout.
Viewed by whom? I doubt the whole UK is as stupid or disingenuous as you seem to be.
No, it didn’t. It did report honestly on those who did, while other networks did their best to conceal those claims or lie about them.
a. How do you know it’s a lie, and b. how do you know how big the payout was?
Fox thought it had a lead and reported it; the lead fizzled, as have dozens or hundreds of stories by other networks and newspapers/i>, which you don’t seem to care about. Such as, just to pick the first three examples that came to my mind, out of so many: that Trump called US fallen soldiers “losers”; that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist; Ra<sup>th</sup>ergate. (I don’t think the <sup> tag works in LI comments, so I’m faking it.)
The lawsuit was frivolous, but biased judges on the appeals court allowed it to go forward and eventually it settled for an undisclosed amount, which could be large and could be tiny. Rumors of a multi-million settlement are just that, exactly like the rumors about Rich’s murder in the first place. Which remain entirely possible, just without any evidence; they’re unproven, not definitively false.
No, Mark, the Russia hoax was never about Russia buying a few ads on Facebook. Nobody ever gave a **** about that. It was never a scandal.
The Russian government has every right to put its views to the US voter by buying ads, or publishing its own, or just issuing a press release, which its lapdogs in the news industry would run without question so long as it wasn’t helpful to Republicans.
Your kidding me right, you do understand that it was a covert operation deliberately falsifying news to push an agenda. It was an attempt to subvert democracy some might consider that an act of war.
No, you are forgetting all the reporting touting the Steele Dossier. Built by the Dems and sold as news, but completely fabricated.
1. No, it was not. It was a few thousand dollars worth of ads, that hardly anyone saw.
2. In any case that is not what the Russia hoax was about. Nobody ever gave a **** about it. There was no scandal about it, not even an attempted scandal, Mueller wasn’t appointed to look into it, and nobody accused the Trump campaign of any connection to it.
“Deliberately falsifying news to push an agenda” describes the whole Clinton campaign. So why shouldn’t the Russians do the same?
@milhouse
So basically your saying it’s ok for a foreign power to interfere in an election.
You clearly don’t know the scale either
“The Internet Research Agency (IRA), based in Saint Petersburg, Russia and described as a troll farm, created thousands of social media accounts that purported to be Americans supporting radical political groups and planned or promoted events in support of Trump and against Clinton. They reached millions of social media users between 2013 and 2017. Fabricated articles and disinformation were spread from Russian government-controlled media, and promoted on social media. Additionally, computer hackers affiliated with the Russian military intelligence service (GRU) infiltrated information systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), and Clinton campaign officials, notably chairman John Podesta, and publicly released stolen files and emails through DCLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks during the election campaign. Several individuals connected to Russia contacted various Trump campaign associates, offering business opportunities to the Trump Organization and proferring damaging information on Clinton. Russian government officials have denied involvement in any of the hacks or leaks.”
They didn’t spend thousands they had thousands of accounts and those stories propagated because that how Facebook works. It’s reach was across the Facebook as a platform.
@antifundamentalist
No you make a reasonable point the steele dossier had a number of exaggerated and fanciful claims as it turned out but those aspects never made it into Mueller’s report. Many news outlets ran the story on the dossier but we’re careful to view it as unverified. In theory it should have been relatively solid given Steele’s background but that turned out onto be the case.
Buying ads just like anyone else is not “interference”, it’s “attempting to influence”. Of course it’s OK, why wouldn’t it be? If it’s OK for the US government to attempt to influence foreign elections, why wouldn’t it be OK for foreign governments to do the same? Don’t all humans have an equal right to express their opinions and attempt to influence others?
Trump wasn’t even a candidate until mid-2015, so they can’t have promoted anything for him before then. And 2017 was after the election, so anything done then can’t have influenced the election.
Who leaked Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails is still not known; the claim that it was Russia is without much evidence and is definitely not established fact. And the meta-claim that “17 US agencies” reached that conclusion is an outright lie.
But whoever did it did a good thing. Assuming it was Russia, breaking into the accounts was a crime, but we can safely assume that had nothing to do with the election; it’s Russian intelligence’s job to do that, and they would have done it for that reason alone. And of course that they tried the same with accounts on the Republican side. Leaking the email, however, was entirely a good thing. It better informed US voters. How can that be bad? Are you claiming voters shouldn’t have known the things that were revealed, and that Clinton was entitled to have the benefit of uninformed voters?!
The only actual “election interference” was a few thousand dollars worth of ads. Which was not only their right but can’t have had much of an effect.
Straight out of Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” playbook.
It’s different when Big Brother and his helpers do it.
Because they care about you. And they’re only looking out for you.
Californi Democrat Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney are genuine fascists that have an illegal, unConstitutional, anti-American policy.
They should be censured and removed from high public office. If they are lawyers, they should be disbarred.
They are pretending that the violent people at that protest were Trump supporters, and the video evidence shows the presence of ANTIFA, the violent wing of the Democrat Party.
The False and Exaggerated Claims Still Being Spread About the Capitol Riot Glen Greenwald
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-claims?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=email
“Insisting on factual accuracy does not make one an apologist for the protesters. False reporting is never justified, especially to inflate threat and fear levels.”
There is no evidence of the presence of anti fa other than one line individual.
How about all the people Michael Yon saw, dressed and behaving as a coordinated group and using the tactics he saw being used in Hong Kong, which he knows they studied?
That was pure supposition. Nor did any of those actually enter the building. On record so far are exclusively Trump supporters with one anti fa bloke. That’s it. That might change bit so far very little evidence to support the false flag view.
Capitol police caught on camera allowing, even escorting, agitators into the building? That’s “supposition” too, I guess.
You’re unreasonably selective in what you will consider evidence.
Lie.
https://banthis.tv/watch?id=6032f6e199bd34125b930243
Pay particular attention at 5:07 through 8:10 (or even through 13:15), and 16:11 (Nancy Pelosi’s son-in-law???)
When the “rioters” show up with guns instead of stupid horns on their head, then you should get concerned. I am not at all impressed with a “riot” with no guns in a country where the citizens are armed to the teeth.
Yeeaaaah, maybe if I were the decision maker at AT&T, I would cut off half the population from their choice of news provider. But more likely not. Thanks for the advice California.
Remember waaaaaaaaaay back in the bad orange man times when any attack on media was an attack on our “Democracy”? Good times, good times indeed. Oh that’s right, OANN, NewsMax, et al, are guilty of wrongthink.
Ah, but they are not “media”. When we say “media” we don’t mean them, because they have cooties.
It almost looks like, in conjunction with everything else, that the Democrats are actively trying to set up another Civil War. Seems like they “want” a real insurrection. Question is, what does that get them? Ultimately, a Constitutional Convention, and there goes the Bill of Rights. Though I suppose by that time, it will me Moot anyway.
It certainly looks that way to us, but I think it more likely that they have no idea what they’re playing with.
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.”
George Orwell
It was comfortable for me to think that, but after the Time expose, my thinking has shifted radically. These people are quite talented and far-sighted, much like Bond villians.
“Seems like they “want” a real insurrection. Question is, what does that get them?”
“Some say China wants a weakened United States so that it will be easier to conquer. If China can get the people of the United States to wage war against each other, recognizing that the use of nuclear arms would be out of the question, they achieve the greatest Sun Tzu victory of not having to wage war at all, but to swoop in and commandeer the rubble left behind. Some say that internal communists are trying to manipulate the right into action, in order to secure a weaponless society that ensures that whoever survives will be subject to any and all draconian sanctions and even make white genocide feasible.”
Shred the letter and send it back with a note: “It was either your letter or the Bill of Rights, and we like the Bill of Rights.”
16… nay, 17, 18, 19 trimesters in the current cycle and in progress. So Pro-Choice.
“3. How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol? Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel.”
This implies guilt by association. Merely watching news coverage of the post-election scene makes one complicit with the events of January 6. Merely consuming news about something from the “wrong” sources of information is now cause to include the viewer in collective responsibility for events that take place without the viewer’s actual participation.
Discounted is consideration of the possibility that some people may have been motivated to violence by the obvious bias and untruthfulness of MSNBCBSCNN, which some people find agitating.
No, it doesn’t. They’re not accusing the viewers of anything. They’re accusing the channels of misinforming their viewers, so they want to know how many viewers were misinformed.
These politicians are a far cry from true liberals like the late Mario Cuomo (sadly, as is his son), who went out of his way to help save the conservative New York Post almost 30 years ago. The paper, one of the fiercest critics of the late governor, credited him with doing “as much as anyone but Rupert Murdoch” to help the oldest newspaper in America survive a disastrous bankruptcy, calling him “an honorable man of rare magnanimity”.
https://nypost.com/2015/01/03/remembering-the-posts-unlikely-savior-mario-cuomo/
The dark light of fascism always hovers over the GOP–but always lands on the Democrat party and its minions.
Hovers over? Smeared upon, more like it.
I’m curious how the Left would respond if Texas responded in similar fashion.
Assuming this is an effort by California to de facto ban non-Left media, how would the Left respond if Texas etc told providers they were required to provide a neutral carriage service or suffer crippling fines for every day they failed to provide such service. Something like a dollar a day per user (NOT limited to Texas) that the company refuses to provide constitutional service and instead operates as a propaganda outlet.
These Congressional letters appear to me to be a conspiracy to commit Civil Rights violations.
Perhaps Conservatives should also petition the media to stop carrying liberal obfuscations, lies, and unverified rumors. This crap works both ways.
President Trump has labeled the media as the “enemy of the people.” Just as the media have the power to hold the nation’s political leaders accountable, they also have a responsibility to do so objectively, without the taint of their biases and prejudices. When journalists choose to exercise their sacred duty to speak truth to power only when it suits them, they do enormous damage to the cause of liberty. When they twist the truth, omit certain facts, quoting fictitious and unverified sources, or recount events that may not even have happened, they abdicate their great responsibility to the nation, even as they continue to exercise their enormous power to influence both public opinion and government policy.
Feeding the public false information or political propaganda is every bit as insidious as the media being directly controlled by the government. Refusing to expose government misconduct, out of personal loyalty to the political leaders of the day, is even worse. The media is the enemy of the people because they willfully misinform the public and because they choose to hold accountable only those politicians with whom they have ideological differences. Those elected officials who pursue policies the media supports are never called out for abuses of power or criminal endeavors in which they engage. This deliberately selective investigation and reporting do as much damage to a free society as having no free press at all. One of the biggest lies of fake news – the lie of omission. You don’t know what you don’t know. Consider the old saying “with great power comes great responsibility.”