Q: Who was not surprised by the Fox News revelations?

Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and Fox News: What the f**k is telling us about the 2020 presidential election? Murdoch says he wants to help the GOP

Murdoch rejected that Fox News, as an entity, endorsed former President Donald Trump’s election lies. Murdoch conceded that some people promoted false narratives about the 2020 presidential contest being stolen.

Ingraham said Sidney Powell was a bit nuts. Carlson, who famously demanded evidence from Powell on the air, privately used a vulgar epithet for women to describe her. A top network programming executive did not believe in the accuracy of the shows of Carlson, Fox and Jeanine.

The audience of Fox News was repelled by Trump in the days and weeks that followed the presidential contest. Fox News had a decreasing audience while Newsmax had an increase.

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” the network said.

► Murdoch said it was “wrong” for Tucker Carlson to host conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell after the election. Murdoch was asked why he kept allowing the MyPillow CEO to be on Fox News, he said it was a business decision. He said it was green, not red or blue. That’s a shocking admission from Murdoch about what actually guides coverage at Fox News.

“Please get her fired,” Carlson told Hannity. “Seriously What the f**k? I am surprised. Tonight it needs to stop immediately. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is lower. Not a joke.”

A person with direct knowledge of the matter told CNN that Heinrich was blindsided reading the details in the legal filing and was not aware of the efforts by top hosts behind the scenes to get her fired.

Senior Fox News leadership was told that when host NeilCavuto cut away from the White House press briefing where election info was being promoted, it was a brand threat.

Murdoch asked Suzanne Scott of Fox News not to say anything supportive about Lindsey Graham. Murdoch explained, “We cannot lose the Senate if at all possible.” In other words, Murdoch was directing the head of his talk network to help the GOP. Again, this type of directive from an executive would be a major scandal at an actual news network.

Fox News executives had criticized some of their top talent, according to the court filing. The North Koreans did a show that was more nuanced than the one hosted by Lou Dobbs said Jay Wallace, the network president. The executive producers of “Justice with Judge Jeanine” referred to host Jeanine Pirro asnuts.

Comments on a slanderous email by Fox News on the Daily Beast from Nov. 15, 2020: A cable network lawsuit against Bartiromo

Jason Koerner/Getty Images; Jason Koerner/Getty Images; Carolyn Kaster/AP; Alex Brandon/AP; Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images; Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images

The network’s stars, producers and executives were contemptuous of the conspiracy when they were off the air.

In a group chat of the network’s three biggest prime-time stars on Nov. 15, Tucker Carlson noted that a segment by Fox reporter Eric Shawn was being used by the Daily Beast to assail Maria Bartiromo — one of the most pro-Trump hosts on the network.

Some Fox alumni do not agree. Former primetime star Bill O’Reilly says the rest of the media makes too much of the story. The network will keep its core audience of older conservative viewers,” he wrote recently. “They will stand by their men and women, having nowhere else to go.”

Lawyers for the Voting System wouldn’t comment to NPR. Fox News and parent company Fox Corp. declined to comment on the email. Fox accused the man of mischaracterizing the record and cherry-picking quotes without proper context.

In November 2020, Grossberg was booking guests for the weekend show of another Fox star, Maria Bartiromo. According to evidence in the lawsuit, Bartiromo was forwarded a memo by Sidney Powell, who was associated with the false election-fraud claims by Donald Trump.

The attorneys for the cable network said in a filing that the damages request was part of a plan to improve the company’s financial position and to generate headlines.

Fox Business Network Investigates the 2017 January 6 Insurrection: When Dobbs and his Host Lou Sammon left Fox News

Clark and Baier had told Fox News’ Jay Wallace that Bartiromo was pushing false claims on social media.

In answering questions from Dominion’s attorneys under oath, former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said he had never “seen any verifiable, tangible support” that Dominion was owned by a second voting-tech company Smartmatic. It was said on air by Fox hosts and guests. Dobbs also said he was aware of no evidence that Dominion rigged the election, according to Dominion’s legal filings.

Sammon refused to comment on his departure being called a retirement by Fox News, citing the terms of his departure.

According to the testimony, Lauren Petterson, president of Fox Business Network, said that it would be irresponsible to putTrump on the air, and that he could impact many people in a negative way.

A source familiar with the work of the House select committee said that they did not know that Trump had made the call.

The panel sought to piece together a near minute-by-minute account of Trump’s movements, actions and phone calls on that day. His newly revealed call to Fox News shows some of the gaps in the record that still exist, due to roadblocks the committee faced.

► Murdoch said he “suggested or urged” the firing of host Lou Dobbs because he “was an extremist,” but allowed him to continue hosting a program at the network until after the election. Dominion argues that’s because Dobbs was popular with Trump and his supporters and the network was fending off viewer defections to Newsmax.

“But Fox executives vetoed that decision,” Dominion’s filing continued. “Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. January 6 was a big event. President Trump not only was the sitting President, he was the key figure that day.”

Dobbs’ show on Fox Business – in which he routinely promoted baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election – was canceled a few weeks after the January 6 insurrection.

Executives and host were scared that telling the truth would prompt them to disengage from the show, so they allowed the lies to take hold of its air.

Behind the scenes, Fox News executives and hosts were in panic. Jay Wallace, the Fox News president, described Newsmax’s surge as “troubling” and said the network needed to be “on war footing.”

Sean Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham that the damage to a brand that took 25 years to build iscalculable from a week after the election.

The hosts were so alarmed by Newsmax’s rise, they were enraged when their colleague, White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, tweeted a mere fact check of Trump’s election lies.

► Murdoch responded to one email from Ryan by telling him that Sean Hannity had “been privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” In other words, Hannity, who always claims to say the same things on camera as when he’s off camera, was not being up front with his loyal audience for fear they’d rebel against him.

And CEO Suzanne Scott and Fox News President Jay Wallace, the network’s executive editor, exchanged irate notes a few days later after appearances by White House reporter Kristin Fisher.

On Nov. 7, just four days after Election Day, Powell sent Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and Bartiromo the memo. Powell was on the show trying to push discredited conspiracy theories about the CIA. That night, Fox News followed other networks in projecting that Biden had won the presidential election.

Fox said that her law firm shared a draft version of her civil complaint that contained allegations that her attorneys had communicated with Fox News.

The woman, who is not named in the legal brief, wrote that she knew the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been killed during a week-long human hunting expedition at an elite social club. Scalia died of a heart attack in Texas in the year 2016, according to local officials.

And the woman asserted that the late Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and Fox Corporation founder Rupert Murdoch “secretly huddle most days to determine how best to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible.” The woman wrote a memo three years after Ailes died.

“Who am I? And how do I know all of this?… The woman wrote in an email that she had the strangest dreams as a little girl. “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”

Fox News News Dominion Was Wackadoodle Election Fraud? David Clark, David Bartiromo, David Hannity, and David Powell

David Clark, then the senior executive over Fox’s weekend shows, said under oath to the lawyers that he would not have allowed that claim to be aired if he knew the memo was the sole foundation of the “crazy” theories.

In a deposition conducted over two years later by the lawyers for Dominion, Hannity said he had not believed the whole story for one second.

Bartiromo is a veteran financial journalist, with earlier stints at CNN and CNBC, where she became a star anchor. She joined Fox a decade ago to help give Fox Business greater cachet and respectability. She hosts 17 hours across Fox Business and Fox News each week.

Senior executives weren’t motivated to block or rebroadcast her program because of their skepticism about Bartiromo.

Bartiromo was not alone in possessing the memo; Dobbs received it too, and Bartiromo had shared that memo with a senior producer and top booker, Abby Grossberg.

Asked about it under oath by Dominion’s attorneys late last summer, Grossberg said the memo “isn’t something that I would use right now as reportable for air, no,” according to the legal filings. Grossberg is a top booker for Tucker Carlson.

Powell was on Fox News again two days after the Bartiromo appearance, this time on Ingraham’s show. Powell asserted, “We have demonstrable, statistical and mathematical and computer evidence of hundreds of thousands of votes being injected into the computer systems repeatedly.”

She didn’t. Republican and Democratic state and local officials disputed and disproved her claims. Trump administration officials and some Fox News journalists did as well. No matter. Powell frequently appeared on the Fox News and Fox Business Network, with many of them implicating Dominion.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/20/1158223099/fox-news-dominion-wackadoodle-election-fraud-claim

MyPillow: How the Murdochs Demystified the First U.N. Senator’s Interview with Donald W. Bartiromo

The first interview with Trump since Election Day happened on Nov. 29 when Bartiromo told him that he couldn’t allow elections to be corrupted.

Carlson invited the founder of MyPillow to his show on January 26, 2021, three weeks after the violence at the U.S. Capitol.

Carlson gave Lindell the opportunity to make claims about the media, and many other things. On Carlson’s show, Lindell dared Dominion to sue him, saying he had the evidence of voting fraud but “they don’t want to talk about that.”

If it would bolster their stock and hold their audience in check, the Murdoch family would be okay with defaming America’s ability to peacefully transfer power.

I’ve never met Haley, but from afar it seemed that she had a reasonably good story to tell — a successful South Carolina governor from 2011 to 2017, Trump’s first U.N. ambassador and the daughter of Indian immigrants. Her mother, Raj, studied law at the University of New Delhi, and after immigrating to South Carolina, earned a master’s degree in education and became a local public-school teacher. Her father, Ajit, earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia and then taught as a biology professor at Voorhees College for 29 years. On the side, they even opened a clothing boutique.

Yet Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum also were deeply concerned about the loss of viewers and deliberated about how to win them back, evidence uncovered by Dominion’s attorneys and separate reporting by the New York Times’ Peter Baker show.

Mr. Dinh, in his deposition said that Fox executives had an obligation to prevent hosts of shows from broadcasting lies.

Fox lawyers said in a brief filed this month that a fair viewer would know that the hosts were not giving their own testimony, but were providing a venue for the architects of the legal challenges.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

► Murdoch described the election lies that Trump was pushing as bulls**t in an email to the New York Post.

► Murdoch gave Jared Kushner “confidential information” about then-candidate Joe Biden’s ads “along with debate strategy” in 2020, the filing said, offering Trump’s son-in-law “a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public.” The type of action that would lead to an investigation is most news organizations.

According to documents, the channel has a business model that ignores its audience in favor of feeding its viewers with content that keeps them happy and watching.

Ronald Chen is a law professor at Rutgers University, and he says that it’s normal to get “smoking gun” emails showing that the accusation wasn’t true and that Fox was trying to undermine it.

“We err on the side of speech because the more and more speech you have, the better chance of having people actually getting the opportunity to point out what’s right and what’s wrong,” attorney Erin Murphy, one of the senior figures on Fox’s defense team, tells NPR in an interview. “And that’s why we don’t suppress the speech that we don’t think is right.”

Suzanne Scott said that the network’s chief executive could not defend reporters who did not understand viewers and how to handle stories.

Some media lawyers say that Fox’s attorneys may have been correct when they predicted that a loss would restrict the media’s freedom.

Jane Kirtley is a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and she says she’s more worried about long termramifications than what Fox has done.

News outlets that have lost defamation cases often end up with apologies and settlements while still on appeal. The two most prominent defamation cases of recent years resulted in divergent outcomes.

if fox news loses defamation dominion media, how did Murdoch’s case against rape allegations come to light?

Brennan believes Americans should have latitude to disagree in order to ensure a free and robust debate.

Two current Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, have indicated they would be open to making it easier for plaintiffs to prevail in defamation suits. Elena had a different take on the protections for the press as a member of the court.

The idea of “actual malice,” Murphy says, requires Dominion to prove specific people directly involved with the broadcasts knew the statements they aired were wrong. For instance, Murdoch’s sworn statements that he had dismissed the claims of election fraud as bogus, and affirmed under oath that some of his star hosts had nonetheless endorsed them publicly, carries no legal weight, she says.

The president and his lawyers were doing their job and it was news regardless of what the accusations were, according to Murphy. Journalists consider neutral reporting a safe ground and she just told their audiences what other people are saying.

The dean at the University of Virginia and a campus Fraternity were among many people who got settlements from Rolling Stone magazine, which was forced to stop reporting on rape allegations on its website after a source’s fabricated account of campus rape.

The New York Times went against SarahPalin after an editorial wrongly linked her advertisements to a mass shooting.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161221798/if-fox-news-loses-defamation-dominion-media

What did Fox News tell us afterward about the Dominion case? “What did we learn from the filings,” said former Fox News commentator Julie Roginsky

“The Dominion case is such a strange case it provides an exception to the general rule,” Goodale says. “Let us hope we don’t see such a bizarre case as this one again.”

Those who say they are not shocked include former journalists at Fox News who think the public may have a better understanding of what they saw.

“There’s not one thing that surprised me or struck me,” says former Fox commentator and guest host Julie Roginsky. “And I’ve read everything in those filings.”

Cameron left Fox about seven months into the Trump administration — after 21 years at the network. He later said “right wing hosts drowned out straight journalism” at the channel.

“There was a time when the journalists had some control,” Cameron says now. And that seems to have eroded. Exactly when that began does not matter. What it ended up with, is the organization has a serious legal problem. “

Each of them point in some ways to the 2016 departure of the late Roger Ailes — the celebrated, reviled and ultimately disgraced former Fox News chief.

One of the women at Fox News who had alleged that Ailes had sexually harassed her, was not exactly clear on her feelings about him. She settled with Fox and Ailes. Fox News says CEO Suzanne Scott has completely reshaped the network’s culture.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/07/1161552307/q-whos-unsurprised-by-shocking-fox-news-revelations-a-ex-fox-journalists

After Biden, Stirewalt, Sammon, and Wallace: The Bounds for the Future of Fox News and the Establishment of the Corresponding Editorial Board

Those who stayed were allowed to stay, but had to accept that they were going to be part of the mob and lead by Donald Trump.

Before Biden even took office, Fox forced out Stirewalt and Sammon, along with a host of other journalists from the newsroom. (A top Fox News PR executive said “Chris Stirewalt’s quest for relevancy knows no bounds.” He is the political director at News Nation.

“It was particularly sad for an organization that had used to call itself ‘the most powerful name in news’ that it was such a fear-driven, such an anxious thing.” “Stire Wilcox says that.” He cites “the unwillingness to suffer the short-term cost for the long-term good, and, if I can be especially corny, the good of the Republic.”

The show that fed the baseless beliefs of Carlson caused Fox commentators to leave. Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace followed suit a few weeks later, taking a job at CNN.

The reporters said that they were being punished for doing their jobs. One producer told colleagues he was quitting because he could not justify working for Fox anymore.

Rudy Giuliani’s Fox News conference was “fake” and the Fox news decision desk did not apologize for the actions of J.C. Fisher

The level of discovery would give rise to disclosures that would make any news organization cringe. Legal observers say that the case is a powerhouse.

They were angry for their reporting colleagues, but they also made fun of the director of the Fox News Decision Desk. She told the other two prime time hosts that mastick made her skin crawl.

“It should be,” Carlson responded. “We devote our lives to building an audience and they let Chris Wallace and Leland ruin it.”

Fisher appeared on Dana Perino’s afternoon program and knocked down claims made by Rudy Giuliani. Fisher said that Rudy Giuliani’s news conference was light on facts. He said a lot of things that were not true or have already been thrown out of court. And she unraveled many of Giuliani’s false claims.

“I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories,” Scott wrote. “The audience feels like we crapped on [it] and we have damaged their trust and belief in us.”

A Fox staffer warned that there would be a backlash from the Trump camp, due to posts from right-wing commentators who spread conspiracy theories.

The theme was picked up again, when reporter Gillan Turner wrote to the hosts of the popular morning show Fox & Friends that she was no longer being asked to host the show. “That makes two of us!” Fisher’s phone rang and he sent a text. “It’s a sh– network. I’m being muzzled.

In November, Hannity chatted with Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy. On Thanksgiving weekend, Hannity sent a picture of his turkey. “This year is gonna suck my friend,” Hannity texted Doocy. News destroyed us.

A producer on Special Report later wrote to Fisher of his decision to leave the network, saying Fox “removed every panelist on SR who spoke out against Trump[‘]s false election sh–.”

Phil Vogel wrote he was taking a pay cut and forgoing six weeks paid leave to get out. The birth of his daughter was cited as the reason for the coverage of “voter fraud” after the election. “I realized I couldn’t defend my employer to my daughter while trying to teach her to do what is right.”

The network took two hours of political news programs and gave them to opinion hosts; it laid off a significant number of writers and reporters; and it forced out political director Chris Stirewalt and Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon, both of whom were part of the decision desk team that made the Arizona projection for Biden.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/08/1161694400/fox-news-lawsuit-civil-war-ingraham-hannity

Tucker Carlson vs Fox News: Insights on a Democratic Candidate’s Claim for Discrimination and Retaliation

Carlson began to research new conspiracy theories about the siege of the U.S. Capitol by the Trump supporters intent on blocking the congressional certification of Biden’s victory. Carlson has variously suggested it was organized by Antifa and the FBI. This week, he relied on snippets of official video released to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a Trump ally, to contend falsely that the insurrection represented the harmless ambling of peaceful protesters.

A restraining order was sought by Fox News against a senior producer to prevent them from revealing information related to the defamation claim.

Abby Grossberg, the senior producer in charge of booking guests for star Tucker Carlson, told Fox last month she intended to sue the network for discrimination and retaliation, according to Fox’s lawsuit.

Fox’s legal team claimed that information in her draft complaint about the network was privileged and that it informed her attorney. On Monday, Fox said, Grossberg’s law firm shared drafts of lawsuits that incorporated that material.