Do you know Fox News fought for the right to lie on the news?

Question

Fair and balanced? You decide.

"...In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States.

...During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply maintained that it was their right to do so...."

http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/11.html

To the troll below, snearing at ProjectCensored:

If it's good enough for Walter Cronkite, it's good enough for me.

And who the hell are you to sneer at people trying to get stories out that people should know about?

Are there no consequences to society for mass media news outlets to deliberately feed false information to citizens without legal consequence?

Answer 1

is this any worse/different from police being required to lie to be successfull in their jobs? Or the fact that the Supreme Court ruled that cops don't have to protect you?

Answer 2

Yes I always look to projectcensored.org for the facts about Fox...
Love, Rosie O'Donnell

Dork

Added later...

OK Apparently the distorted presentations of Projectcensored.org isn't as glaringly obvious to you as it is to most of us.

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/dork

An elementary method of determining whether a printed media (such as projectcensored.org) is fabriclating a story to decieve it's readers, is their use of quotation marks.
They are purporting to "report" a story...but all the substance is presented in their own words.
This is a court case, and they didn't find anything in the court filing of the case...the arguments in the case...or the verdict in the case that they could present in it's accurate form.

I don't know anything about this case, other than what you have presented...but I can extrapolate a "story" just like Projectcensored.org did.
It's more likely, the reporters of the story had an anti BGH agenda and they were using FOX as their vehicle to promote their agenda.
FOX, on their fair and balanced principles, did not choose to feed their audience the one-sided view presented by the reporters...but rather looked to additionally present the viewpoint of the makers of BGH.

The reporters were disgruntled because their onesided soapbox was removed, and hired attorneys to look for a reason to file suit.
The attorneys decided that some viewpoint of Monsanto could not be proven as fact...and so filed a lawsuit against FOX.
If we could read the text of the claim...I'm confident the wording does not match closely what has been presented by Projectcensored.org.

So do the test...look for the quotes in the link you gave us.
you'll see only small fragments of sentences... and no quotes about lying or distortion.

Projectcensored is a proud example of the freedom to print misinformation
To answer your question of consequenses for feeding false information...yes Projectcensorship risks being exposed by people like me.

Answer 3

just to function some data to this communicate, the newshounds Jane Akre and Steve Wilson worked for a fox associate in Tampa Florida, not for Fox information Channel. additionally, this incident got here approximately in 1997, 12 years in the past. At difficulty became into rBGH a manufactured from Monsanto Corp which will enhance bovine milk production. Akre and Wilson have been attempting to make a case that rBGH became into risky. to date that has not been shown and rBGH remains many times modern in dairy products. in certainty, products that say they are rBGH unfastened could via regulation comprise a disclaimer that it is not even scientifically conceivable to differentiate rBGH milk from non rBGH milk. severe-high quality attempt nonetheless. there are probable a number of of anti FNC human beings here at YA who would not have afflicted to do any study, purely as you curiously did not worry.

Answer 4

Freedom of the press is a large subject. We do not need a group of WHAT? stopping a news story, broadcast or whatever to determine truth of falseness. Come on take the thought to the next action.

Answer 5

LOL All news people, all people in fact tend to distort due to how they see things. Slanting news is not a Fox invention. It is done on all of the news networks. It's just that Fox slants right instead of left. The bigger fight was against censorship. The left definitely would like that until someone made them be accurate and told them what to report

Answer 6

You should seek help of the mental variety........now.