S03E08 – Fox News settlement and confidential document leak

In this episode of Finding Common Battle Grounds, we started with two topics but then led us off on two tangents. First, we discussed the Fox News settlement with Dominion Voting machines and Fox News’s firing of Tucker Carlson. Tom wasn’t as familiar with all of the revelations that resulted from the discovery part of the lawsuit that illustrated that the Fox News administration, personalities, and staff knew that they were lying about Dominion but did it anyway in order to maintain high ratings. Even so, Tom thinks that the dishonesty of Fox News is the same with all news outlets and that none of them can be fully trusted whereas Ryan is convinced that Fox News doesn’t care about truth but only about profits. Ryan’s position on the media is that many mainstream news outlets can generally be trusted to report the news and most are close to neutral. This leads pretty far down the rabbit hole as they end up discussing where and how they get their news. We then turn to the recent confidential document leak that led to the arrest of Jack Teixeira, an Air National Guard airman, who leaked hundreds of classified documents via a Discord server. We mostly sidestep the issue of whether such information should be made available (both of us think we have been slightly misled about the state of the war in Ukraine) and instead focus on what the US should be doing in Ukraine and whether we should be as involved as we are in fighting this proxy war with Russia. Ryan is actually more hawkish here, arguing that the US really does need to intervene in defense wars defending democracies while Tom is more circumspect and thinks that weaponizing the dollar may end up hurting the US in the end and replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.