Speaker 1: this story I love, because it's really a bunch of different stories.
It's a story about the absurd lies of the 2020 election that are still being told by
many right wing media networks.
It's also a story about really the futility of the types of corrections that we only ever
get.
So what am I talking about?
Let me explain it to you.
There is a right wing network, Oann.
So the way I kind of place them on a spectrum of wacky is you've got Fox News, which is
slightly crazier than the Republican Party.
You've then got Newsmax, which is crazier than Fox News, and then you've got Oann, which
is in a category kind of not really of its own, but it's in a very extreme category,
along with real America's voice and those types of channels.
And four months and really, quite frankly, at this point, it's almost years after the
2020 election, Oann was parroting and repeating and repeating all sorts of lies about the
2020 election, hosting the most unhinged guests to comment on the 2020 election.
They have now been forced to settle a defamation suit, and they issued a sort of retraction
on air, but it was only 36 seconds long and we're going to look at it.
The Daily Beast reporting on finally admits no widespread voter fraud after settling defamation
suit.
Georgia election workers were dragged through the mud on a and by right wing conspiracy
theorists like Rudy Giuliani.
Now, the network is finally acknowledging there was no fraud.
So let's take a look at this clip.
Speaker 2: We now provide you with this updated report from Georgia.
Speaker 4: Officials.
Take a listen.
Georgia officials have concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election
workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena.
Speaker 1: But that's not what you told us for a year and a half.
Speaker 4: November 2020.
The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Andrea Shea Moss did
not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election
night.
A legal matter with this network and the two election workers has been resolved to the
mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.
Speaker 1: So.
So there's been a settlement.
I understand that.
That's what they saying.
And clearly, this report is part of that settlement.
Now, will they go right back to immediately spreading lies?
Because as often is the case, when you have such a big lie that you're telling and the
big lie that they're telling is Biden stole the whole thing.
It was Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona.
They did dumps in the middle of the night, all this different stuff.
The issue here is just about the two individuals named Freeman and the other person.
So they're kind of like correcting one tiny little slice of the story and then they can
just go right back to fomenting all of the same lies.
And the settlement should really be you have to mention this ten times a day for a year
in prime time.
And this gets to the issue of corrections and why I make every effort on this show to
be accurate.
And then when I get something wrong, I will start the next show with it.
I don't I do everything I can not to bury the correction because nobody sees the correction.
Right.
36 seconds, 12 of which sort of really relate to the settlement after a year and a half
of spreading this stuff, it's just not enough.
It's kind of like punching someone in the face for three weeks in a row.
And then on the last day you quietly say, I'm sorry, and then you walk away, and that
we're supposed to believe that they've been made whole.
And that's essentially what this is.
The damage has probably been done irreversibly in the sense that I don't know what the numbers
now are.
It's probably around.
20 to 30% of America that believes the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden and actually
won by Donald Trump.
This correction on Oann isn't going to trickle down to the cult members.
The settlement.
It almost should be like a permanent banner that scrolls the screen and says, We lied
about 2020.
Biden actually won.
But even the settlement isn't related to that.
It's only think about how narrow the settlement is.
It's the two individuals we named weren't involved in funny business in Georgia in 2020.
And really, this is a network that is extraordinarily dangerous.
And the good news is they seem to kind of be dead in the water.
I don't even know that anybody's watching.
Oann.
You might remember famously a couple of months ago, AT&T and a couple of other cable carriers
said they're going to be dropping Oann and Trump went nuts and all these people went
nuts.
But the hope is that Oann ends up shutting down, not because some regulator forces them
to, but because everybody stops watching.
That's that's my desire.
And we'll see if that happens.
We'll have their quote correction up on our Instagram, which you can find at David Pakman
show.
We'll take a quick break and be back right after this