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Comment by walthamstow

1 day ago

Hoo boy we have some classics in that category in the UK.

My personal fave is when morning TV host Lorraine Kelly successfully argued she wasn’t hosting as herself but acting a character called Lorraine Kelly, with very favourable tax consequences.

There was also the famous decision in the Jaffa Cake case where the VAT treatment depended on whether or not a Jaffa cake was a cake or a biscuit https://standrewseconomist.com/2023/12/31/let-them-eat-cake-...

The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.

This is akin to Fox News arguing in court that it is, in fact, entertainment and not news, despite it's name.

  • It's true though. All cable news is "entertainment news", not "news".

    Nobody should have been getting their "news" from Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, or Rachel Maddow.

    IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.

    • Absolutely- even as a lifelong leftie, I find the rhetoric on CNBC just as sickening as that on Fox.

      I've (somewhat sardonically) wondered if they're both false flag operations. Imagine CNBC started with the idea "we'll parody the left to make them seem radical and unreasonable" but accidentally developed a huge following who didn't get the joke.

      1 reply →

    • Thank you for pointing this out. Carlson and Maddow made nearly identical arguments in court and if both are not mentioned in the same breath, the speakers bias is instantly displayed to anyone who is educated on this topic.

      > IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.

      Agreed but the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News. The problem goes deeper. I despair.

      7 replies →

  • What Fox News argued was a bit more nuanced than that all of Fox News isn't news. Rather, "Fox successfully argued that one particular segment on Tucker Carlson’s show could only be reasonably interpreted as making political arguments, not making factual assertions, and therefore couldn’t be defamation."[1]

    That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.

    [1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-fox-entertainment-...

    • I know nothing about the case but isn't that a little like saying "look, we weren't lying, cause we never said we were saying the truth"?

      2 replies →

    • Political argument, as such, is worthwhile insofar as it can cause me to reexamine my own preconceptions. Facts I can pick up almost anytime.

  • Isn't it also how, many years ago, Top Gear got away with a hit job on Tesla by claiming they're just an entertainment show, so they're not obligated to do honest or truthful reviews?

I think Steven Colbert hosted a show using himself as the host. I’m not sure about the tax implications though.

  • And then when he tried using the "Steven Colbert" character on a different show, Comedy Central threatened him because Steven Colbert does not have rights to the "Steven Colbert" character.

    • Al Shugart started Shugart Associates and pretty much created the 5 1/4" floppy market. He sold to Xerox. He later started Shugart Technology and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit because he literally had sold his rights to his own name (in the particular context). He changed the name to Seagate Technology and the rest is history.

      Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.

      4 replies →

    • That doesn’t seem like that should be possible. He sold his identity for life? Hollywood really does ask for your soul huh.

      It would make sense why he’s never even jokingly gone back into that character on his new show.

      4 replies →

  • If there were any tax implications, they were incidental. The show was parody, so the opinions he espoused in character were necessarily ones he didn't actually hold.

I'm not from the UK, but wasn't there also a cake Vs biscuits thing for tax reasons?

Alex Jones argued this, with the obvious implication, that whoever buys Infowars also owns the character of Alex Jones, and Alex Jones cannot play Alex Jones any more without infringing their copyright. (But I suspect this incoming government doesn't care to apply logical consistency to his case)

I had a friend that argued that Marshall Mathers (Eminem) could never actually be sued for defamation because most of the defamatory things "he" said wasn't actually him saying it, but Slim Shady.

Hah.