ethics in journalism – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Fox Agrees To Pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 Million Just After Jury Selection In Defamation Lawsuit

from the buying-its-way-out-of-even-more-expensive-trouble dept

With a ruling that basically said not only did Fox lie about Dominion, it did so despite being well aware of the truth, the Delaware court basically dared the alleged “news” agency to keep fighting Dominion’s defamation lawsuit.

The evidence Dominion had already obtained was damning, as the court pointed out in its denial of Fox New Network’s (FNN) motion to dismiss:

The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.

Fox appeared to have run afoul of the “actual malice” standard, which says reporters can’t be held liable for reporting things they believed to be true, even if it’s later proven these accusations were false. Fox got it backwards. Information obtained by Dominion during the lawsuit showed plenty of Fox anchors, executives, and producers knew what they were reporting about Dominion was false, but they were willing to continue doing so because doing otherwise meant ceding ground to “journalists” working for even further right-skewing networks like OAN and Newsmax.

Fox’s attorneys made things even worse by engaging in discovery violations. These violations were uncovered shortly before jury selection, leading the court to hit Fox with sanctions, including holding it financially responsible for a second set of depositions by Dominion, should it have chosen to go digging for more usable evidence. It also ordered the special master overseeing discovery to investigate Fox’s efforts during this case to see if it had engaged in any other violations.

All of this has apparently persuaded Fox to hand over an extremely large amount of its money to Dominion, as ABC reports.

“Truth matters. Lies have consequences,” said Justin Nelson, an attorney for Dominion Voting Systems, as he announced details of the company’s settlement with Fox News during a press conference following the court’s adjournment.

“Today’s settlement of $787,500,000 represents vindication and accountability,” Nelson said. “Today represents a ringing endorsement for truth and for democracy.”

That’s roughly half of the $1.6 billion Dominion listed as damages in its lawsuit when it filed it in 2021. The rest of Dominion’s litigation targets don’t have nearly this much money to spend on settlements, so it behooves them to start pitching lowball offers before courts start moving these lawsuits forward. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t have three-quarters of a billion to spend. Neither does truly ridiculous person Sidney Powell, who once was once advising Donald Trump. Newsmax and OAN might be grabbing marketshare by catering to people too far right to consider Fox News credible, but they don’t have the billions Fox has to play with.

This settlement occurred right after jury selection was finalized and right after the court issued an order holding Fox 100% financially responsible for any costs incurred by the special master during its investigation of Fox’s discovery violations.

Fox seems actually a bit contrite following this settlement, as one would expect when you’re paying out nearly a billion dollars, but it immediately followed that up with a second sentence that erases any of the contrition, by going right back to misrepresenting reality:

“We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems,” Fox News officials said in a statement after an agreement had been reached. “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”

At least Fox admits it said knowingly false things about Dominion. However, it’s ridiculous for it to claim it has a “commitment” to “journalistic standards,” considering it has spent years steadily shedding these standards as it sought to make inroads into a supposedly underserved demographic: white male right-wing crackpots.

Equally absurd is the judge’s comment regarding the lawyering:

_[Judge Eric] Davis commended both teams, saying, “I’ve been on the bench since 2010 … and I think this is the best lawyering I’ve had, ever._“

Really? The “best?” Because just days ago, Judge Davis was saying things like this to Fox’s legal reps in response to discovery violations:

To Fox attorney Matthew Carter, Davis said: “You have a credibility problem.”

As does Fox itself. It bought itself out of this lawsuit. And that’s good for Dominion, which earns itself some litigation firepower by convincing Fox to pay out nearly a billion dollars rather than roll the dice on an unpredictable jury trial. And while it would have extremely enjoyable to obtain even more details about Fox’s bizarre interpretation of “high journalistic standards,” it also makes sense for Dominion to utilize a massive cash infusion to repair the wounds to its reputation inflicted by Fox anchors who apparently knew the narrative they were pushing was false, but decided maintaining market share was preferable to being honest with viewers.

Filed Under: defamation, ethics in journalism, journalism, settlement
Companies: dominion, fox news

Game Review Site Says Square Enix Blacklisted Them To Punish Low Review Scores

from the that-should-work dept

As you may have heard, the past few years have seen a significant uptick in concern over video game journalism and the ethics surrounding it. While much of the consternation expressed appears to have journalistic ethics playing only in the periphery, there have indeed been stories that should concern anyone that looks to game reviews as a method for deciding on purchases. Like in other industries, some in the gaming industry have chosen legal backlash to combat reviews they don’t like, whereas companies like Nintendo have attempted to trade access to unreleased games to institutionalize positive coverage. Instances of game companies trading access for slanted reviews are certainly alarming, though they only represent the carrot part of that approach.

The other side of it is the stick, of course. For an example of that, we can look to Square Enix reportedly cutting off access to unreleased games for review to a Spanish website purely because the company doesn’t like its review scores.

AreaJugones, a website based in Spain that says it reaches around 700,000 people per month, said in a blog post last week that they heard about this decision from the publisher Koch Media. Koch handles PR and marketing for Square Enix in several European countries, including Spain. After posting their review of Final Fantasy XV last week, AreaJugones editor Juan Alberto Linares got a call from a Koch representative, who reportedly told him that Koch and Square would no longer send them review copies of their games.

“The PR told me that we had scored one point less than the current average of Metacritic and that this hurt their interests as a company,” Linares told me in an e-mail this weekend. “I could not believe what he was saying, so when he asked for more explanations, he told me that we also almost always scored his games with lower scores than the other Spanish magazines and other Metacritic media,” Linares said. “We started talking about scores given to other games of his brand and they insist that we score their games lower than the other media, and this is not really true. If we score lower under their games we hurt them, so we were erased from the list of media because we were going to continue hurting them.”

Now, let’s be clear: game companies don’t owe game review journalists early access to their games. This isn’t unethical in the same way as, say, requiring positive reviews or editorial control in order to get access in the first place. But it might actually be more insidious for the same reason. Where we can look at Nintendo’s YouTube affiliate program and recognize it for the shill-factory that it is, Square Enix’s move is more subtle. It relies both on the idea that the approved reviewers, those that tend to give out more positive marks for Square’s games, will impact the consumer market before the untainted reviews are in, as well as the chilling effect blacklists like this will have on other review sites that haven’t been targeted by the company yet. If you’re the editor of a game review site that has seen AreaJugones get blacklisted and one of your staff is about to post a less than groveling review of a Square Enix game, it might cause you to change the review score and/or article if you aren’t committed to the ethics of your craft. That’s a problem.

A problem, ultimately, for Square Enix, in fact. Because the ultimate effect that moves like this will have will be to condition the consuming public to distrust positive reviews of Square Enix games, and put more faith in reviews with scores that aren’t as good. After all, once the blacklisting process has been started, the only review a gamer will know for certain hasn’t been influenced by the game-maker will be the review that is negative.

It’s important to point out a couple of things as part of this. First, Kotaku asked Square Enix for comment and they chose not to comment on the story at all. There is no denial that any of this took place, in other words. Secondly, Metacritic suggests that AreaJugones does indeed tend to score games somewhat lower than its peers (although still higher than critics as a whole). But even if that suggests some kind of pernicious negativity within the site’s review scores, blacklisting them won’t ultimately accomplish anything positive for Square Enix.

Filed Under: ethics in journalism, reviews, video games
Companies: arejugones, koch media, square enix