The Business of Misinformation

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]The point is that Fox on a daily, hourly basis engages in proTrump propaganda.

[00:00:06]You don't have to spend five minutes watching it to figure out that that's true.

[00:00:10]>> Hey, if you don't read the Hake Take on a regular basis, which you can get in your email for free over at Sabrina Hake, h a ke.substack.com.

[00:00:22]Uh, you're missing something. Uh, Sabrina is a federal trial attorney, 20 plus years experience specializing in first and 14th amendment defense and contributor to numerous law journals and publications including the Chicago Tribune. And as I mentioned, it's called the Hake, H A K E Take, uh, which you can find over on Substack. And Sabrina, welcome to the program. Welcome back to the program.

[00:00:44]>> Thanks. Always great to be here.

[00:00:46]>> I It's great having you with us. I was astonished uh impressed, blown away by your article, Fox News isn't engaging in protected political speech. It's engaging in consumer fraud. Please explain.

[00:01:00]>> Okay. Well, you know, I'm fairly obsessed with the fairness doctrine and getting us back to something like that.

[00:01:06]But so every time a poll comes out, people, my readers, your readers, a lot of people comment not on Trump's low approval rating, but how in the heck do 38% of the country still support him?

[00:01:19]Yeah.

[00:01:20]>> How do they do they not realize what's really going on? Do they not know what he's doing to NATO? What he's done to your pocketbook? H how can they not understand what's happening? And that 38% of support that he still has correlates exactly with the percentage of people who watch Fox News. 38%. And they don't diversify their intake.

[00:01:40]Unlike other media consumers, Fox News viewers consume Fox News exclusively.

[00:01:46]And I don't mean to pick on Fox, but they are the biggest offender here.

[00:01:48]There are others that are similar. The left is not immune. The point is that Fox on a daily, hourly basis engages in proTrump propaganda. you don't have to spend five minutes watching it to figure out that that's true. So, I've been a First Amendment lawyer for a long time.

[00:02:04]I've litigated First Amendment cases.

[00:02:06]Sounds loftier than it is. It's because I've defended a municipality for some years. And um I know a little bit about what the First Amendment protects and what it doesn't. False statements under First Amendment law are protected unless they hurt someone. If somebody is profiting from false statement and somebody is being hurt financially from false statements, that usually comes under the fraud exception to the first amendment protection. So the the Supreme Court uh cases, you know, Citizens United, that dastardly case where they elevated corporate interests over the interests of a common man, reaffirmed that political speech is the most highly protected form of speech in the nation.

[00:02:46]And it should be. The whole reason for our first amendment was to protect the free exchange of ideas. However, uh false statements are such as they are are are protectable. But then after the Citizens United case came out, there's a case that came out called the United States versus Alvarez. Alvarez was a character. He went around lying about everything. Alvarez was on some city board. uh he he made public and private statements claiming that he had won the Congressional Medal Medal of Honor.

[00:03:19]About 2007, I think it was, Congress passed an act that made it illegal, the Stolen Valor Act. And under the Stolen Valor Act, you could be criminally prosecuted for claiming you had medals of honor you did not have. The Alvarez decision struck down that law. And that's the law that I want to talk that's the uh whole thing I want to talk about because they said look if you're just lying it's just a lie. The the be the best way to um counter bad speech is to have more speech. The way you counter truthful untruthful statements is with more truthful statements. But when it's just straight up lying and nobody's benefiting financially from it that's protected under the first amendment.

[00:04:00]There have always been exceptions to free speech. Fraud is one of the oldest ones. Fraud under the common law was illegal. It's never been a pro protected form of speech. You also can't pull a a fire alarm, a smoke alarm if it if there's not really a fire. You can't child pornography, words of incitement.

[00:04:18]There are several categories of speech that are just speech, but because they have so much potential for causing damage, they are not protected under the First Amendment. And commercial fraud is a big one. So when you look at the holding of Alvarez where the Supreme Court said, "Look, it's it's just a lie unless someone's profiting on one side and somebody's hurt on the other side, then it's just a lie and it's not protected. But if someone is gaining financially from that false speech and someone else is being harmed from that false speech, that is fraud." And as I listen to Fox News um and watch Fox News, I try not to do a lot of it, but um what they are doing is is pure Trump propaganda. Once in a while they'll inject some fact or they'll have Pete Buddha Judge on on the program, but by and large it's about 95% proTrump propaganda.

[00:05:08]And of course, they are doing this for the benefit of their viewers. In the Dominion case, where Dominion sued them for false statements for falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, which of course it wasn't, Fox operatives admitted under oath that they lied for profit. Murdoch admitted it. uh Fox Dominion law Dominion law lawyers got their hands on uh text messages from some of the uh the talking heads and um like Tucker Carlson, Jean Perino. Uh a lot of the people that claimed on air that the election had been stolen were they were exchanging text messages with each other making fun of those people who believed that. I mean, outright mocking people who believed, including Trump, who believed that the election was stolen and who was perpetuating those lies. They got caught lying. They had those texts and they said, "Look, you can see that they knew that this was a lie. They did it anyway." And and Murdoch said, "Yeah, we stretch the truth. We do it for profit. This is how we gain our viewers, and this is clearly a for-profit entity lying to people."

[00:06:12]So, as I see the Alvarez decision, it's it's straight up commercial fraud.

[00:06:17]They're harming the people that are listening because they are encouraging people to vote against their own interests. They are doing this to to financially benefit themselves, the the Fox Corporation and their financial backers. I mean, Blackwater, some of the big financial backers are involved in defense. They're involved in all kinds of industry that right-wing media tends to protect. And unfortunately, it's also the um it's the same entities that this Roberts court is also currently protecting. So, I'm not I'm not naive about how uh this court would deal with a return to the fairness doctrine, but I want to talk about that also, but let me just make sure we're we're both on the same page here before I keep yammering on.

[00:06:56]>> Yeah. Well, so if we were to to go into court and try to prove that Fox News is engaged in consumer fraud rather than First Amendment protected political speech, who would have standing and what would be the uh the request? What what sort of relief would you be demanding or asking for?

[00:07:18]>> Right. Okay. So, two things. First of all, I'm more interested in legislation that returns us to the fairness doctrine. Uh the fairness doctrine was not a law. It was a policy uh that the FCC adopted in 1949 and we were a better country under that. The fairness doctrine was a a policy under which if you give one side of the news, you have to give another side.

[00:07:40]>> Well, that was the equal time rule. That was the fairness doctrine. Yeah.

[00:07:44]>> Uh okay. But but the same the I'm I'm arguing for the same principles that equal time and fairness give both sides of perspective if you're giving an opinion. And England has gone further into that requirement. They now require offcom requires due impartiality and fairness in the news. And they now apply that to news programs on the internet.

[00:08:03]>> Um so Fox, CNN, etc. Those are all going to be regulated under the new law uh the media law of 2024 that they're they're still rolling out uh the procedures for.

[00:08:13]But and there's a threshold. If it's under 500,000 people, I I think that's the the metric. U they don't they don't monitor you. But if it's over that different rules apply to the bigger platforms that you are if you if if you take the litigation approach I've done class action work as well. I see the this is a right for a class action because so much of the country has been hurt. 38% of the country has no idea what's really going on. I looked at how they handled the the slush fund and my my article talks about how the Trump Pope um issue was handled in Fox versus everywhere else. Other media, the BBC, etc., talked about how insane it was for the leader of the United States to go after the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion people. But Fox News didn't spin it that way. Fox News spun it as completely accurate. They attacked the pope. They they said he didn't know what he was talking about. They kept putting one talking head on after the other, disputing the pope instead of putting both sides on and saying, "Look, the pope, this is what the Catholics have always said, don't go to war." I this is not new. So I'm saying we need to return to that doctrine. If England can do it, we can do it. But if you want to talk about litigation, I also think that litigation is appropriate. I see a class action not just on behalf of Fox viewers, but they would be the first people to to bring the suit because 38% of them don't know what's going on. Back to the slush fund this morning. I looked at how Fox was spinning this 1.8 8 million billion dollars that Trump now basically robbed the til and he's given himself discretion over this $ 1.8 billion dollars where he's going to be doing out to people who break the law on his behalf probably the >> and perhaps to himself and his family as well.

[00:09:56]>> Oh no doubt. I mean he's lining his pockets. He's got something like $6 billion now and 10 years ago he was paying zero in prop income tax because he claimed he didn't have any income.

[00:10:06]>> Right. So, I looked at how Fox was presenting that this morning and they presented it as um basically justified because of the warfare that he endured, the warfare that J6 riers endured. These are people who beat the hell out of police officers >> who killed four of them.

[00:10:22]>> Oh my god. I mean, there he's going to use this money to reward them because he's setting up he >> Sabrina, I'm I'm down to a minute and a half here before we get our break. I can't control. So, um are you going to initiate a lawsuit like this? Do you know somebody who could? I would love to uh, you know, support it, sign on to it.

[00:10:39]>> The Roberts court has ruled that women are state property and they've disenfranchised black voters. This is not the court to do it in. Court reform has to come first. We won't have control of the whole government until 2029. I want to get this legislation going now to get support for it. So, I'm trying to send out I'm sending this notice out to as many uh elected officials as possible. Your viewers can go to democracy.io io and send a letter to any elected representative in Congress, Senate and Congress. You can put in a link to my Substack uh on the Fox News is my latest uh Substack and say, "Look, we need to start talking about requiring accuracy in the news because our country is going to stay divided until we fix it." So, that's the first step. Let's get the legislation going. The the litigation needs to wait until court reform. I have no delusions what this court will do. This is the most partisan activist court I've ever practiced. And I've been in practice for 30 years. I don't think we've ever seen a court like this. So, no. I This is not the court to do this in. But we have to reform this court or we're not going to get anywhere. This court is out of control.

[00:11:39]What they just did with the Voting Rights Act, I mean, that's another topic. Court reform is another topic.

[00:11:43]But no, I'm talking about legislation for get the legislation going. And when this gets in front of the Supreme Court in four or five years, hopefully we'll have a balanced court at that point.

[00:11:52]>> Yeah. Right now, John Roberts is clearly the heir to Roger Tony.

[00:11:56]>> Oh my god.

[00:11:58]>> It is uh it's it's it's mindboggling. He he's no uh uh well, he's no John Marshall. It's >> people going to stop respecting it all together. [music] >> There you go. Sabrina Hake is the author of the Hake Take on Substack. H Ake Sabrina Hake.substack.com [music] is the website. Well, you can just go over to Substack and just plug in hake or a just h a k. You'll [music] probably get it.

[00:12:22]Sabrina, thanks so much for dropping by.

[00:12:24]It's always great talking with you.

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