...Schartel’s Alpine Broadcasting Corp. is paid $5,000 a month to air Radio Sputnik in two three-hour blocks each day, according to a U.S. Justice Department Foreign Agent Registration Act filing in December 2021. The station's schedule shows Radio Sputnik airing for three hours at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. every day, with Friday being the exception at 6 a.m. for three hours and 6 p.m. for one hour.

Schartel said he initially accepted the contract because he was struggling to keep KCXL afloat. He also said he airs programs that are not commercially viable and don’t depend on advertising, which he claims is promoting free speech by providing a platform for people who otherwise aren’t heard.

Other shows available on KCXL, such as TruNews and Dr. Tom Curran, are heavily religious, with some discussing conspiracies....

But will it get accepted?

A Connecticut judge on Wednesday said Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will be fined $25,000 to $50,000 per weekday until he appears for a deposition in a lawsuit brought by relatives of some victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Jones' testimony is being sought ahead of a trial to determine how much he should pay in damages to the families for pushing a conspiracy theory that the massacre never happened.

Jones cited a health problem last week when he defied an order by Judge Barbara Bellis to attend a deposition. Bellis said there wasn’t enough evidence that Jones was too ill to attend and found him in contempt of court.

Bellis also ruled that the deposition will now be held at the office of the families’ lawyers in Bridgeport, Connecticut, instead of Texas, where Jones lives....

...But the biggest takeaway for me is the realization that Fox viewers aren’t just manipulated and misinformed — they are literally being made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear a lot of “news-like” things, but they don’t learn about what’s really happening.

And here’s where we in the mainstream media can do something useful: We can stop talking about Fox like it’s a different form of news — and start talking about how it isn’t news at all. It’s the opposite of news. It’s instead of news. It’s the absence of news.

We can explain more clearly that real news organizations present viewers with the information they need regardless of whether it hurts or helps a specific cause or political party.

Mainstream, reality-based journalists have been way too charitable to Fox over the years, partly because the network once employed some of them, and partly to maintain the façade of political neutrality.

But it’s time to firmly declare that Fox is not news.

The study started with 763 far-right loyal Fox News viewers, then randomly assigned 40 percent to a “treatment” group. That group was then paid $15 an hour to watch up to seven hours of CNN per week during September 2020, during prime-time hours. Participants were given quizzes to make sure they were paying attention.

It found that CNN and Fox were covering dramatically different things that month. The severity of Covid and the Trump administration’s failures to control it “were by far the most common topics on CNN” — even as Fox downplayed it and praised Trump’s behavior. By contrast, Fox News spent 15,236 words discussing “Biden/Democrats support for extreme racial ideology/protests,” to CNN’s 1,300.

The study found that the CNN-watching group was “much more likely to see issues covered on CNN (COVID-19) instead of on Fox News (racial protests) as important.” The group also “became more likely to agree that if Donald Trump made a mistake, Fox News would not cover it.”...

An April 2023 jury trial has been scheduled in Dominion Voting Systems Inc's $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit accusing Fox News of trying to boost its ratings by falsely claiming the voting machine company rigged the 2020 U.S. presidential election against former President Donald Trump.

In a short written order issued on Friday, Delaware state court judge Eric Davis said he was scheduling Denver-based Dominion's lawsuit for trial on April 17, 2023. Fox, part of Fox Corp, had asked Owens for a trial date in early 2024.

Owens set aside five weeks for the trial, which could be the first of several involving baseless claims made by a variety of news outlets and individuals about Dominion's technology. Dominion filed its lawsuit against Fox News in March 2021.

People associated with Trump's campaign, including lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, floated conspiracy theories that Dominion rigged vote totals in the weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, election in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Trump.

Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against several Trump allies, including Giuliani and Powell, as well as conservative television networks Newsmax and One America News. Another election technology firm at the center of conspiracy theories, Smartmatic, has filed similar lawsuits.....

Infowars has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as the website's founder and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones faces defamation lawsuits over his comments that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.

The bankruptcy filing Sunday in Texas puts civil litigation on hold while the business reorganizes its finances. The filing came a week before a jury in Texas was set to begin considering how much money Jones, who has already lost the defamation lawsuits, should pay the families of Sandy Hook victims.

In its court filing, Infowars said it had estimated assets of $50,000 or less and estimated liabilities of $1 million to $10 million. Creditors listed in the bankruptcy filing include relatives of some of the 20 children and six educators killed in the 2012 school massacre in Connecticut.

The plaintiffs in that case have said they were subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because he promoted the hoax conspiracy that crisis actors faked the shooting in an effort by the government to take away guns and restrict firearms.

Jones has since conceded that the shooting did happen.

“Alex Jones is just delaying the inevitable: a public trial in which he will be held accountable for his profit-driven campaign of lies against the Sandy Hook families who have brought this lawsuit," said Christopher Mattei, who represents the families in a Connecticut lawsuit against Jones.

An attorney for Jones has not returned a message seeking comment. Jones told his Infowars listeners Monday that he was “totally maxed out” and urged them to contribute money and buy nutritional supplements on his website to keep him on the air....