Judge rules that Rachel Maddow's show is not news, someone should tell her 3 viewers

pjmedia


Journalist Glenn Greenwald reports that an Obama-appointed judge ruled last month that “Maddow’s show is different than a typical news segment where anchors inform viewers about the daily news.”

The Obama-appointed judge Cynthia Bashant dismissed the defamation lawsuit on the grounds that Maddow’s audience knows she’s hyperpartisan, and thus, as Greenwald put it, that her 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’).”

Bashant also ruled that Maddow’s viewers “expect” this of Maddow and watch her show “with the understanding that it will contain Maddow’s ‘personal and subjective views’ about the news.”

So, while I agree with the judge ruling that Rachel Maddow isn’t news, this explanation was used to protect Maddow, MSNBC, and Comcast from a legitimate defamation claim. So, in that respect, the ruling was quite awful.





I think there needs to be a warning coming out of every commercial break then.