Murdoch didn’t stop the Fox stars from lying about 2020
Defamation of Fox News for Defending President Donald Trump’s 2020 Presidential Election: A New Look at the Dynamics Behind the Scenes
The most vivid picture to date of the chaos that happened behind the scenes at Fox News after Trump lost the election is offered in the court filings.
“Their summary judgment motion took an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting, and their efforts to publicly smear FOX for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting President of the United States should be recognized for what it is: a blatant violation of the First Amendment.”
In a ruling yesterday, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis affirmed that Dominion should receive the contracts – the point of contention in Tuesday’s hearing.
Fox’s attorney did not disagree with the statements attributed to Scott. He did not deny that executives tried to stop the programs from booking Powell and Giuliani even though their claims had been discredited. Instead, Fox’s attorney made a broader argument against allowing scrutiny of the executives’ contracts, saying they were unnecessary given how many documents the network has already turned over to Dominion.
In his exchanges with the judge, Keller drew a line distinguishing between a host or producer “who are sometimes pre-scripting material for the show, that is going to be tethered to a specific channel’s telecast” and a network executive.
Rupert Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman, emailed Suzanne Scott, the Fox News chief executive, telling her that Newsmax needed to be “watched.” Murdoch said that he didn’t “want to antagonize Trump further” and stressed to her, “everything at stake here.”
Nelson pointed out that there is a document from Fox that states that the daily editorial meeting includes almost all of these executives.
Fox aired claims that they helped cheat President Donald Trump’s win in the 2020 election. Both sides asked Davis to grant them victory ahead of the jury trial that will begin in April. The motions are under seal, meaning they have not been made public.
Defamation is notoriously difficult to prove in the United States, which grants news organizations and entertainment companies wide berth under the First Amendment. Fox has repeatedly stressed that airing the fraud claims was newsworthy and protected under the Constitution.
The fear that Fox News’ audience would abandon it for good also appeared to drive programming decisions. In the days following the election, Alex Pfeiffer, a Carlson producer, told the host, “Many viewers were upset tonight that we didn’t cover election fraud …. It’s all our viewers care about right now.”
Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox Corporation, acknowledged in a deposition taken by Dominion Voting Systems that some Fox News hosts endorsed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
In December of 2020, he stated on the air that the Trump opponents within the government had committed “treason,” and suggested that a Republican officeholder could have been charged with a crime for upholdning Biden’s victory. The sudden departure from the network by him was announced a day after another election software company, Smartmatic, sued Fox for defamation over false accusations of fraud. The case is not very far along at this point.
A former district attorney, a New York state judge, and a Trump advisor are all believed to be at the center of the case. A Fox News producer begged her colleagues to keep her from interviewing her because she was spreading lies about election fraud from dark corners of the internet.
Fox News has repeatedly defended its conduct by invoking the importance of American free speech principles bound up in the First Amendment, saying the Smartmatic and Dominion cases are attempts to chill independent reporting and commentary.
The top was attacked by a lawyer who claimed that Fox News was told to “Shut down the talk of fact-checking” by Murdoch and his son after the 2020 election.
What’s the big deal? Murdoch is known to have a great deal of control over his news outlets. The consequences of decisions taken by leaders of Fox News have now led to a blockbuster lawsuit.
The judge who will rule on the fate of the Fox News defamation case has a reputation for being a hardboiled poker player.
Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis, a 12-year veteran of the state’s bench and former corporate attorney, has often sought to temper emotions in the contentious proceedings between the broadcasting giant and Dominion Voting Systems, a voting-technology company. Each side repeatedly has accused the other of acting in bad faith.
“If he were to be given a name in culture, it would be Cool Hand Luke”, said Joseph Hurley of a criminal defense attorney based in Wilmington who has argued before Davis. “It’s a good thing he doesn’t show emotion in court.”
Newsmax, Fox News and a New York State Circuit Court: A High-Dimensional Benchmark on Smartmatic’s Claims against Trump and Biden
Smartmatic, a voting tech company, filed a defamation case against Newsmax over the same claims.
The software of the company was the subject of false claims that it changed the votes of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Those claims were broadcast on Newsmax, Fox News and elsewhere.
According to the judge, Newsmax either knew its statements regarding Smartmatic’s role in the election-fraud narrative were false or it was aware they were probably false.
John Culhane says the judge was not having any of the Newsmax arguments and should not have.
Culhane cautions against drawing too strong a conclusion from the Newsmax ruling, but he believes Davis will follow the law step-by-step.
Murdoch knew in the middle of the night that his Fox News Channel hosts were supporting the lies of Donald trump about election fraud.
Smartmatic also has sued Fox for $2.7 billion, but that suit is not as far along as Dominion’s. On Tuesday, a New York state appellate court rejected Fox News’ motion to have the Smartmatic case against the network and several of its stars dismissed. The ruling dismissed claims against parent company Fox Corp, saying no cause was stated.
Connolly said that an amended complaint would detail the involvement of the Murdochs.
Much like Fox’s lawyers in New York and Delaware, Newsmax’s attorneys similarly cite a legal privilege, known as neutral reportage, allowing it to present “unprecedented allegations without adopting them as true, so that the public could draw its own conclusions” about “a news story of extraordinary public interest.”
He states that the first amendment protects reporters in order to guarantee a robustness and unintimidated press, but he also says that it is not unlimited. He said a neutral reportage principle does not protect a publisher who “deliberately distorts” statements to “launch a personal attack of [its] own on a public figure.”
The stakes in both cases are very high. Davis does not want to amplify his profile. (Indeed, his court declined to make a photo of him available for this story.) And the judge has repeatedly sought to ensure an air of comity around the proceedings, a hallmark of the Delaware legal bar.
In a Feb. 8 court hearing in Dominion’s suit against Fox, Davis apologized to the rival legal teams, saying he had been surprised to re-read an email in which he said he came off as snarky.
He pinned it on his use of a pat phrase. “You know that typical sarcastic thing that judges say?” Davis asked. Don’t tell me I’m wrong; that’s what it means. It means that I’m making some kind of statement. That wasn’t the reason I was doing it.
The documents contained in the legal filing showed that during and after the election, executives at Fox News trashed the lies being told by former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
Carlson told Ingraham in a text that he had caught Sidney Powell, an attorney who was working for the Trump campaign, lying. Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. Nobody will work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”
The material presented in the remarkable 178-page brief reflects there were no illusions that there was heft to the allegations of election fraud even among those Fox figures who gave the most intense embrace to Trump allies peddling those lies.
This lawsuit is about “protecting the integrity of our public discourse itself,” Dominion lawyer Rodney Smolla said, adding cases like these “protect the public from deliberate falsehoods.”
Fact-checking the MyPillow founder’s “Brand Threat”: Incensed Trump and the Fox News News Executives on a “Trusted” Campaign
After the election, an incensed Trump had attacked Fox News and encouraged his followers to switch to Newsmax, a smaller right-wing talk channel that was saturating its airwaves with election denialism.
Fox News executives and hosts began to crack down on people who fact-checked election fraud after they expressed concern over the matter. In one case, after White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked a Trump tweet pushing election fraud, Carlson said he wanted her fired.
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.
A team led by then-Fox Corp senior vice president Raj Shah, formerly a White House aide to Trump, warned other top corporate leaders of a “Brand Threat” after Cavuto’s refusal to air McEnany’s White House press briefing on baseless claims of voter fraud.
Fox News chief executive Scott had been in touch with one of Trump’s most ardent followers, the MyPillow founder, according to the filing. Scott sent Lindell a personal note and a gift while encouraging Fox shows to book him as a guest to “get ratings.”
Slaven Vlasic/ Getty Images; Carolyn Kaster and Alex Brandon from AP; Michael Streisand/SOPA Images.
Off the air, the network’s stars, producers and executives expressed contempt for those same conspiracies, calling them “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails” and “completely bs” – often in far earthier terms.
Murdoch, Dobbs, and Fox News: What Have We Learned since the January 6 Senators Attack? On the Defamation of Fox News
Murdoch is the head of Fox News. Fox News has played, by far, the largest single part in the polarization of American politics, in the amplification of political hatred. I challenge anyone to name the person living today who has done more to undermine American democracy than Murdoch.
The cable network’s attorneys said in a separate filing that the damages requested by the company is meant to “generate headlines” and enrich the private equity fund behind the company.
On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor texted a friend: “[T]here is NO evidence of fraud. None. Allegations – stories. Twitter. Bulls—.
The terms of Sammon’s departure were not made public, but he has declined to speak about it, citing his departure.
Former President Donald Trump tried to call into Fox News after his supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, but the network refused to put him on air, according to court filings from Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation case against the company.
The House select committee that investigated the January 6 attack did not know that Trump had made this call, according to a source familiar with the panel’s work.
The panel sought to piece together a near minute-by-minute account of Trump’s movements, actions and phone calls on that day. Some of the gaps in the record can be found due to the committee not being able to meet certain deadlines.
“The afternoon of January 6, after the Capitol came under attack, then-President Trump dialed into Lou Dobbs’ show attempting to get on air,” Dominion lawyers wrote in their legal brief.
“But Fox executives vetoed that decision,” Dominion’s filing continued. Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. January 6 was an important event by any measure. President Trump not only was the sitting President, he was the key figure that day.”
The network allowed the lies to go on air despite acknowledging the reality of the situation, in part because they were afraid of not telling the truth to their large audience.
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.”
And Dinh was warning Lachlan Murdoch, Scott and a top deputy that “Hannity is getting awfully close to the line with his commentary and guests tonight.” The next day, Rupert Murdoch warned that if Trump refused to concede graciously, “we should watch Sean especially and others don’t sound the same.”
Executives from Fox News were concerned about alienating him when he criticized them, according to a legal filing. The filing added that Scott then sent him a handwritten note along with a gift.
Yup, Fox hosts and the Murdoch family were OK with discrediting the core engine of America’s democracy — our ability to peacefully and legitimately transfer power — if it would hold their audience and boost their stock.
The story of Haley, Fox News, and Jacobi Jones: how the defamation case against Fox News is likely to have serious teeth
From afar, it seemed like Haley had a pretty good story to tell, that she was a successful South Carolina governor from 2011 to 2017, 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 was a biology teacher at Voorhees College for almost three decades and earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia. On the side, they even opened a clothing boutique.
FloydAbrams, renowned First Amendment attorney, said that the recent revelations put Fox in a more precarious situation in protecting against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.
A journalist can be threatened by damages even if they are not as lucrative as Fox.
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Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion’s evidence as a “very strong” filing that “clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting.”
Tushnet said she didn’t see anything like that before the trial of a defamation suit.
The filing showed that the case against Fox News has serious teeth, according to an attorney who teaches First Amendment law.
Jones said that the dream for a lawsuit’s attorney is what the company claimed to have here.
Murdoch is a journalist at heart: When Fox News executives stop broadcasting lies, they’re not listening to the opinion of Rudy Giuliani
Murdoch said that some of the commentators were endorsing the election, according to the filing. He said that he would have liked for them to be stronger in condemning it.
In his deposition, Mr. Dinh, when asked if Fox executives had an obligation to stop hosts of shows from broadcasting lies, said: “Yes, to prevent and correct known falsehoods.”
In the wake of the election, Murdoch wrote in an email to the New York Post’s Col Allan, describing election lies that Trump was pushing as “bulls**t and damaging.”
► 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.” This type of action would result in an investigation for most news organizations.
The documents show that the business model for the channel is to keep viewers happy and watching, rather than inform them.
Asked whether he could have told Fox News’ chief executive and its stars to stop giving airtime to Rudy Giuliani — a key Trump campaign attorney peddling election lies — Murdoch assented. “I could have,” Murdoch said. “But I didn’t.”
Emails and other communications introduced into the case by Dominion reflect deep involvement by the Murdochs and other Fox Corp. senior figures in the network’s editorial path.
Murdoch revealed in his deposition that he’s a journalist at heart, two weeks before his 92nd birthday. “I like to be involved in these things.”
He had been resolute about defending Fox News’ call of the key state of Arizona for Joe Biden on election night — Nov. 3, 2020. Murdoch testified that he could hear Trump yelling in the background as his son-in-law said the situation was terrible.
Scott forwarded his recommendation to the top executive over prime-time programming, Meade Cooper. She canceled the show because she was worried that guests would say the election was lost, and if she pushed back it would be seen as a token.
By Nov. 13, Raj Shah, a senior vice president at Fox Corp., was advising Lachlan Murdoch, Scott and Dinh of the “strong conservative and viewer backlash to Fox that we are working to track and mitigate.” He said that positive impressions among Fox News viewers “dropped precipitously after Election Day to the lowest levels we’ve ever seen.”
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, an anti-Trump Republican, sits on Fox Corp.’s board of directors. He told Murdoch that he should not be promoting conspiracy theories at Fox News. And he testified that he advised them that the post-election period represented an inflection point in which Fox could pivot away from its prior support for Trump.
“Just tell her,” said Murdoch. Fox News was correct in calling the election. It is not easy to lead our viewers.
Tucker Carlson had a guest on his show. Rupert Murdoch told Dominion’s attorneys he could stop taking money for MyPillow ads, “[B]ut I’m not about to.”
“This is one of the most devastating depositions that I’ve ever seen,” CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen said Monday. “When you go beyond reporting and your chairman admits there was endorsement, then that opens you up to liability under the actual malice standard.”
Grossberg was forced to testify in a way that portrayed the facts “in a false light” in order to “shift culpability” away from senior Fox News executives and “away from Fox Corporation,” according to the lawsuit.
Murdoch conceded that some hosts promoted false claims about the presidential contest being stolen.
Who is he? Rupert Murdoch is a media magnate and the Fox News Channel’s controlling owner (as well as one of the inspirations for the protagonist in HBO’s Succession).
Defaming Fox News: Why Do We Care? How Do We Know Who Arises Them, and Why Do They Care?
“How often do you get emails that show that someone in the editorial department knew that the accusation was false and that it was for Fox’s own purposes?” says Ronald Chen, an authority on law.
Murdoch and Scott told their colleagues they couldn’t bluntly confront viewers with the facts because it could make them more hostile to them.
Even with the record set out, some media lawyers say that Fox’s attorneys could be correct in predicting a loss would keep the freedom of the media.
“I don’t worry about what Fox has done, I worry about the longer termramifications of journalism,” says Jane Kirtley, a University of Minnesota media law professor.
Brennan also argued Americans should have latitude to get some things wrong in talking about public officials and politics, in order to ensure 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 her own thoughts on the protections for the press when she was 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. Murdoch’s sworn statements that he had dismissed the claims of election fraud as fraudulent and that some of his star hosts had endorsed them publicly should not carry any legalweight, she said.
“Anybody would have to acknowledge that what the president and his lawyers were doing was newsworthy in and of itself, regardless of whether the allegations were ultimately going to be anything they could prove,” Murphy says. She invoked what journalists consider the safe ground of “neutral reporting” – just telling their audiences what others are saying.
Even though Fox News anchormen were worried about the loss of viewers and examined how to win them over, they were also looking into the evidence uncovered by attorneys and the Peter Baker show.
When a news organization does lose a defamation case, it is more likely to result in apologies and settlements. The two most prominent defamation cases of recent years resulted in divergent outcomes.
In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine settled separate cases filed by a University of Virginia dean and a campus fraternity after a collapse of standards in reporting on what turned out to be a source’s fabricated account of campus rape.
A year ago, The New York Times prevailed against former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin after an editorial wrongly linked her advertisements from her political action committee to a mass shooting months later.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161221798/if-fox-news-loses-defamation-dominion-media
Dominion Voting Systems is All You Need: The Fox News Producer-Lawsuit against the Fox News Network During a Critical Performance Review
“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.”
A Fox News producer on Monday filed a pair of explosive lawsuits against the right-wing talk channel, alleging that the network’s lawyers coerced her into providing misleading testimony in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation case against the company.
The lawsuits from Grossberg, who has since been placed on administrative leave by Fox, were filed in Delaware Superior Court and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
In a phone interview Monday night, Grossberg and her attorney, Gerry Filippatos, disputed Fox News’ assertion the complaints only came after a critical performance review.
“Fox just does not care,” Grossberg added. “It summarizes everything perfectly. They don’t care about their employees … and they don’t care about their viewers.”
“Grossberg was mortified by what she was witnessing and began to experience a sinking feeling in her stomach as it became apparent how pervasive the misogyny and drive to embarrass and objectify women was among the male staff at [‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’],” the lawsuit filed in New York said.
When she first started working on Carlson’s show, Grossberg said the environment was horrible. On her first day, she said she learned the show’s workspace was decorated with large photos of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “in a plunging bathing suit revealing her cleavage.”
The lawsuit continued to describe a culture at Carlson’s program in which women were subjected to crude terms and in which jokes about Jewish people were made out in the open. Grossberg named Carlson and members of his staff in the lawsuit filed in New York.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/21/media/fox-news-producer-lawsuit/index.html
What are the ratings of Fox News? When did Fox News lose the 2020 election? The case of Lou Dobbs, the president, and his lawyers
“It’s constant,” she added. Ratings are important to the shows, the network and the hosts. It’s a business and that’s what drives coverage.”
Both sides were in court for a major hearing, where they tried to persuade Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis to to grant “summary judgment” — and decide the case in their favor now, instead of proceeding to a scheduled jury trial next month.
“They made the decision to let it happen,” Nelson said, referring to the litany of baseless claims about the voting company that got airtime on Fox News in late 2020.
The right-wing network argued in Monday’s filing that compelling live testimony at trial would not add anything but media interest. This is neither a public relations campaign nor a trial.
He said one of the arguments of Fox wasn’t really intellectually honest. He wondered if Fox News could argue that Lou Dobbs had engaged in legally protected “neutral” reporting after he signed a bunch of his posts with the phrase “Make America Great Again”.
The President who lost the election could have made a larger story out of it, Davis mused from the bench.
She told the judge that they did not provide viewers with the truth about the allegations being leveled by the president and his lawyers.
On Dominion’s Charges of Failure and Insights into the “Successfulness” of Peabody’s Anomaly
She went on to argue that Dominion’s calculations were dishonest, and accused the company of goosing the numbers by assuming that “they would’ve succeeded every single time in the future, every time they ever competed for business,” even though there’s no guarantee they’d get every deal they seek. In previous court documents, Dominion has said that its calculation is correct. They achieved the figure by hiring experts to evaluate their books and lost business opportunities.
