Tucker Carlson and Murdoch were correct in their opinion

Rupert Murdoch’s role in the Fox News defamation case: Tuesday’s hearing in New York Times and Fox News

Murdoch and his company, Fox Corp., have been accused of being involved with editorial decisions at the cable network for more than a year.

The court’s ruling on the rules of a landmark defamation trial, scheduled to take place this month, was one of the most eye-opening exchanges between Davis and attorneys at the Tuesday hearing.

GROSS: This is not an old show. I recorded an interview with Jeremy Peters, who’s covering a defamation lawsuit against Fox News. He is covering it in The New York Times, where he covers the intersection of media and politics.

The Maria Bartiromo instance that you just played is the most important moment of Dominion’s case. It is the first time on Fox News where these conspiracy theories about Dominion machines get an airing. It’s the first time the audience starts hearing about them. And inside Fox News, what we now know from the discovery in this case is that segment between Sidney and Maria Bartiromo rated so well. In fact, some executives and producers talking about it are just giddy after the fact, saying, did you see the ratings? This stuff has gold in it. And that’s significant legally for Dominion because it allows them to make the case that Fox did act with actual malice because it saw dollar signs in the ratings, and it knew that if it put Sidney Powell on the air, they would get even bigger ratings. So that’s what they continued to do after November 8. And that’s why we’re sitting here today talking about whether or not Rupert Murdoch is going to have to write a check for $1.6 billion.

Davis questioned the legitimacy of Fox attorneys after Nelson’s comments. He said he didn’t know why it was hard to identify the officers of Fox News.

Beyond the questions of Rupert Murdoch’s roles, Tuesday’s hearing also featured a testy exchange between Davis and attorneys that touched on a key Fox defense — that the network cannot be sued for defamation because it had a right to air newsworthy allegations made by people close to the president of the United States.

Davis made clear his opinion that the cable network could be held liable for the billion-dollar claim even though its hosts were often not those who uttered the defamatory statements.

It is “irrelevant” whether the person making a false claim was a Fox employee or a Fox guest, Davis said, arguing that the key question is whether Fox, as a company, published the information maliciously.

It was a partial win for Dominion, which still has to convince the jury that Fox acted with “actual malice,” a legal standard for defamation that requires proof that the defendant either knowingly spread lies or was so reckless that it amounted to a disregard of abundant evidence that the claims were not true.

On Tuesday, Judge Davis dealt a blow to Dominion, ruling that its lawyers could not refer to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol because it could prejudice the jury. At that hearing, he also limited how much Dominion’s legal team could tell jurors about death threats that the company’s employees had received, saying there should be no mention of the specific content of the threats.

In response, Dominion attorney Megan Meier argued that it was Fox broadcasts that directly motivated individuals to make threats against employees at the voting machine company.

She said Fox yelled fire in a crowded movie theater, but he doesn’t want to talk about the stampede that followed.

Davis suggested a question that had been thrown out by the company. He said Dominion could inquire why Fox executives chose to pull back support from Trump. If their answer brought up Jan. 6, Dominion could pursue the topic, the judge said.

To cap the exchange, Davis said he must strike a “balance” between giving attorneys discretion and ensuring jurors only hear the claims that are germane to the case.

An in an 11th-hour twist, the judge sanctioned Fox on Wednesday for withholding evidence from Dominion, and said he’d assign an outside attorney to investigate whether Fox misled the court and deliberately hid any additional material from Dominion.

Murdoch was properly disclosed in Fox’s public financial filing. Dan stated that nobody was to blame for the withholding of information from Dominion.

Trump’s case against false payments to an adult film star revisited: two weeks before he goes to New York, where he’s due in court

He is heading back to New York on Thursday under a dark legal cloud to explain his conduct, a week after being charged with a crime.

Last week, Trump pleaded not guilty in a case arising from a hush money payment to an adult film star. He’s expected back in the city where he made his name to give a deposition in a separate civil case alleging that he and three of his adult children falsified Trump Organization accounts in a years-long fraud to enrich themselves.

The two trips encapsulate the converging legal battles that are putting Trump’s time-honored strategy of delay, denial and distraction to its ultimate test.

These cases are unlikely to be the most serious legal jeopardy bearing down on Trump. He is not sure if he will be indicted in the probes into his actions leading up to the US Capitol insurrection. And Trump and supporters involved in the democracy-damaging chicanery following the 2020 election still don’t know whether they will be charged in yet another investigation, this one in Georgia, over his attempt to find just enough votes to try to steal President Joe Biden’s victory in the swing state.

Trump had no merit in asking for a delay of a month, as his lawyers said it would not cool press interest in the trial. “And in all events, Trump is exceptionally ill-suited to complain about fairness when he has instigated (and sought to benefit from) so much of the very coverage about which he now complains,” Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll, wrote to the judge.

Another thing the judge took off the table that was a big piece of Fox’s argument – and, you know, this is also going to be very difficult for them at trial – is all along, you know, Fox News has been an opinion network that had a rather robust news staff. And in the days of its former chief executive, Roger Ailes, they would point to that news staff, its White House correspondents, its congressional correspondents, its Vatican correspondent, and say, see, what’s said on the air in primetime by people like Hannity is just part of what we do. We have all of these honest journalists who work for us and do a pretty good job.

Trump’s trip back to New York on Thursday follows a deposition he gave Attorney General Letitia James’ office last year before the suit against him and the Trump Organization was filed, in which he cited his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to more than 400 questions. His position has changed since a jurors can make an adverse inference against a person if they refuse to testify.

The former president reacted to the suit filed by James, a Democrat, in the same way that he responds to any accusation of wrongdoing – by accusing legal authorities of pursuing a political vendetta against him.

He accused the District Attorney of seeking to prevent him from regaining the White House by responding to his indictment in Manhattan. In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox on Tuesday, the ex-president said he would never drop out of the presidential race if he was convicted and claimed his foes were using the “old Soviet process” to convict him of crimes he said he didn’t commit.

Trump has denied sexually assaulting Carroll, who alleges Trump raped her in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. She first sued Trump for defamation in 2019 after he denied the rape and alleged she made the claim to boost sales of her book.

The Case for the 2020 U.S. Presidential Insight into the Corrupt Practices of Bragg and the Media: A First Look at the FOX Case

The ex-president announced a $500 million lawsuit against his former personal attorney on Wednesday, which alleges that he had been mistreated by him.

The move raised immediate suspicions that Trump was seeking to intimidate or silence Cohen, who testified before the Manhattan grand jury and is likely to be a key witness in Bragg’s prosecution. Prosecutors allege that Trump tried to hide hush money payments to adult actress Stormy Daniels to avoid harming his 2016 campaign.

On Wednesday, a legal analyst for CNN said that Trump seemed to be trying to get around the judge’s warnings that the case should not be tried in the public eye. A former chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan said that the timing was suspect, claims weren’t good and he didn’t see how this would work.

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, meanwhile, stepped up his apparent effort to thwart Bragg’s investigation – or at least to discredit Bragg in the eyes of voters – in the latest move from Trump’s allies to fight the case in public before it ever reaches the courtroom. The Ohio Republican announced a slate of witnesses for a field hearing of his committee in New York on Monday as he attempts to make a case that Bragg went after Trump for political reasons.

Jury selection is set to begin Thursday in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation trial against Fox News over the right-wing network’s promotion of debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

Questions about their news consumption habits will be posed to the jury. But Judge Eric Davis has narrowed the scope of the questioning — he doesn’t want jurors to be asked if they believe the 2020 election was legitimate, or if they had any connection to the January 6 insurrection.

GROSS: A strong expression of skepticism. Yet when Lou Dobbs had Powell on his show a few days after that message, he described Sidney Powell as one of the country’s leading appellate attorneys, which is surely not true. So of course, the question is, if people inside FOX – some executives, hosts – didn’t believe the conspiracy theories, why were they broadcasting them? The answer can be found in the ratings. How ratings and fears of losing viewers to more conservative networks figured into the programming plan?

We have an unprecedented ability to find what we want to hear, thanks to our access to cable and the internet, which gives us so many different information options. We needn’t reckon with the truth. We can shop for it instead.

What do Fox’s lawyers say about the 2020 election? A new judge’s opinion on the alleged lying of the campaign and the case of Judge Davis

The recent rulings have provided more clarity on how Judge Davis operates, and he has taken steps to make sure both parties are comfortable with the outcome.

Judge Davis wrote in a 130-page decision that there was evidence that none of the statements about the 2020 election were true.

The case has been reported on by Jeremy Peters. He is a New York Times reporter and coverspolitics, law and culture. The book “Insurgency: How Republicans lost their Party and got everything they ever wanted” is written by him. We recorded our interview yesterday morning.

Peters. Yes, just so you know. That limits the kind of legal defense Fox can mount. In court before the judge, in their legal proceedings, in interviews with me, Fox’s lawyers said that their hosts were simply doing their job as people who interviewed newsmakers. And what was more newsworthy than the president’s lawyers arguing that the presidential election wasn’t free or fair? Okay. That sounds better than it sounds. But as recently as this week, the judge in the case admonished Fox lawyers, saying they cannot broach that subject, and if they do, he will cut them off and tell the jury, no, that is incorrect.

Counting Voting Machines Stop due to Corrupt Practices: A Case Study on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Show

GROSS: In a county which is very conservative, the use of voting machines was stopped due to conspiracy theories. This is an example of a recent example of a company losing clients because of false conspiracy theories.

This is a show called “Grossest.” Let’s hear an example of what people were saying on the Fox airwaves. This is a transcript of Maria Bartiromo’s show. She’s interviewing Sidney Powell, who was one of the chief purveyors of the conspiracy theory that Dominion was part of a conspiracy to steal the election from Trump. And Powell, as I said, was a legal adviser to Trump. She was a guest several times on Bartiromo’s Fox show. And here’s an example of what she said while they were talking about Dominion, and Bartiromo speaks first.

PETERS: It’s so preposterous, Terry. I think what they’re saying is that some municipalities stopped counting because it was late, and the tabulators needed to go home. They may be referring to an incident in which the elections official in northern Michigan accidentally recorded Biden’s totals as Trump’s totals in order to make up for the mistake they made with Biden. They realized that it was a human error. It had nothing to do with machines. But it became fodder for conspiracy theorists. Look; these machines can flip votes, and they were taking votes away from President Trump, or they were trying to.

BARTIROMO: I’ve never seen voting machines stop in the middle of an election, stop down and assess the situation. I also see reports that Nancy Pelosi’s longtime chief of staff is a key executive at that company. The husband of Senator Feinstein is a significant shareholder of the company. You can tell us something about the interest in the other side of this software.

POWELL: Well, obviously, they have invested in it for their own reasons and are using it to commit this fraud to steal votes. They should be angry about this because they stole them from other Democrats in their own party. Bernie Sanders might very well have been the Democratic candidate, but they’ve stolen against whoever they wanted to steal it from.

GROSS: Sidney Powell was on Maria Bartiromo’s show in November of 2020. So that was just – the election was November 3, so that’s just a few days after the election. Can you interpret what she said about the voting machines being stopped in the middle of an election? What are they talking about?

GOSS: Before we move on from that clip, I just want to fact-check another thing that Sidney Powell said, and this was about Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. The Associated Press, the AP, did a fact-check on that and said it’s all false. A former aide to Pelosi has represented the company as a lobbyist, while lobbyists who have worked for Republicans and Feinstein’s husband are all wrong about their stake in the company. So I just want to get that on the record. So there’s something really interesting about who the source was for some of Sidney…

GROSS: Sidney Powell’s claims were some of the things that he said. There were signs that she was mentally unstable. Tell us about this source, Marlene Bourne, who claimed to be a tech analyst.

PETERS: This is a really significant part of the case, it shows that they acted recklessly. The jury should not rely on this email from this source for their coverage because no one will read it and think that this person is credible. And I’ll tell you what was in that email. It’s truly bonkers. It’s a woman by the name of Marlene Bourne, who Sidney Powell had been speaking to. She tells Sidney Powell about how she talks to ghosts and listens to the wind and that she has been internally decapitated. I do not know what that means.

The person said, “peters: (Laughter)” It’s clear that a person like that is unreliable and mentally unstable. I think if I had forwarded that email to your producers saying that this was a source for my story, I would never be appearing on FRESH AIR. And – but the reason…

GROSS: She said she saw something that others didn’t see, and she heard something that others didn’t hear, which led to her shooting in the back.

PETERS: Yeah. I think it’s just crazy. The people at Fox began to use that kind of language to describe Sidney Powell. They thought she was crazy. They said she was nuts. I will not repeat the things they called her. And that, again, points to the doubts that they had about her and shows that, you know, they knew that this was all reckless nonsense.

The question about Maria Bartiromo is interesting in another sense, that she appears to really want to believe this stuff is true. She talks to people like Steve Bannon, and we can see her texts, and they’re talking about voter fraud and how the president’s lawyers are going to be able to prove all of this stuff, of course, that they never prove. Maria Bartiromo had this email from a woman who said that she talks to ghosts. She had seen it. She recalled reading it in her deposition. The evidence can be shown that Maria Bartiromo, one of the anchors at Fox News, acted in a way she knew wouldn’t be good for the viewers because she was relying on someone who wasn’t reliable. It is very compelling evidence in their favor.

GROSS: We need to take a break. So let me reintroduce you. My guest is Jeremy Peters. He’s a reporter for The New York Times who covers the intersection of media, politics, culture and law. And we’re going to talk more about the defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems after we take a short break. Terry is the host of FRESH AIR.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

The Fox Show: Tucker and Rupert Murdoch in the News, Tucker Carlson, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell

That never happened. And, you know, a jury could buy that. You know, I don’t want to make it sound like Dominion’s case is a total slam dunk, as strong as it is. It’s dependent on who is on the jury. It only takes one, two, and very, you know, Trump- leaning jurors to throw a wrench in this.

It’s called grOSS. One of the cases that Fox wanted to make was, hey, we were just covering the news. The stories were in the news. We were covering them. But the judge already knocked down that argument.

Peters: Tucker Carlson told me that the text message I referred to was the one he sent to Sidney Powell telling her to show us the evidence. And at one point in November 2020, Tucker goes on his show and he says, look, Sidney Powell promised us this evidence. She doesn’t give us it, which raises real doubts about her credibility and story. The blowback from the audience at hearing that truth from Tucker Carlson – because he – at the time, he was telling his audience the truth – they didn’t want to hear it.

They had a show called “GOSS.” One of the reporters on Fox reported that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, two of Donald Trump’s legal advisers, were discussing a conspiracy to help him win the election. She reported on the press conference and showed that the conspiracy theories were incorrect. What consequences existed for that report?

Pets are Pets: Her name is a woman. She no longer works at Fox. This incident forced her to leave the network. Her boss called after she fact-checked the press conference, saying that she needed to do a better job respecting her audience. At this point in the year, Fox had been suffering a ratings decline and competitors like Newsmax were gaining on them because they were pro-Trump, and this sentiment had been conveyed by the chief executive to her boss. And Suzanne Scott panicked. Rupert Murdoch panicked. There was an honest discussion of what really happened in the presidential election. And the way they do that is by telling their correspondents, effectively, only tell our audience what they want to hear, and they don’t want to hear that President Trump has lost.

GROSS: Another thing about Tucker Carlson – and he also trades emails with his producers in January. There’s one that you mentioned from January 4 in which he said, we’re very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I don’t like him very much. And then on January 7 – so this is the day after the attack on the Capitol – Tucker Carlson’s producer wrote about his fears of more chaos and said, the Trump anger spiral is vicious. And Carlson responded, that’s for sure – deadly. We’ve got a couple of weeks left. This means we can do this until Biden becomes president, and then Trump leaves office. We’ve only got two weeks left. We can do this. So not only do what he and guests said on his show contradict those private messages, he got exclusive access to, like – what? – thousands of hours of video from January 6 and reedited it in a way to make it seem like these were kind of quiet tourists. They were acting like tourists at the White House.

The backlash was so intense, Tucker Carlson dropped the subject and you could see text messages, both prior to this Sidney Powell incident and after, in which his producers say their audience wants to hear about voter fraud and we’re not covering it. They are not in agreement with the whole notion that the election was dirty. They say there was not enough fraud to change the outcome. This stuff makes me sick. The case raises a lot of questions about the democratic system and news media, but will ultimately turn on small incidents because of their susceptibility to bad actors.

GROSS: These are the rioters who broke into the Capitol. How does anyone figure that out? That’s irrelevant to the defamation lawsuit. What do it tell us about Tucker Carlson and Fox?

I want to know one more thing about Sidney Powell. One of the biggest proponents of the conspiracy theory on Fox News was Lou Dobbs. He hosted his own show. The producer said that he believed that Sidney Powell was doing drugs like cocaine and heroin.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

What is it that Fox News will tell us about a candidate that is wrong: Murdoch’s private messages and his role in Fox News

Suzanne Scott told the lieutenants at the network that they should respect their audience. We cannot tell them anything that they will find upsetting because they’re changing the channel.

PETERS: And it is. It’s something that Dominion cited in its presentation to the judge when they were arguing the summary judgment phase of the case. I anticipate it to come up when they put Murdoch on the stand.

One of the things that happened really recently is that Dominion went to the judge and said, we want access to more of Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, because when – during the period of disclosure, we didn’t realize how big a role Murdoch played in Fox News and in deciding what was going to be covered and how it was going to be covered. Tell us about this recent development.

PETERS: You know, I think the questions of what that means for Trump, his base and the larger conservative media ecosystem are much more complicated because I just honestly don’t know how – I mean, we know they’re not really covering it, this trial, very much on the right. And I don’t know that those kinds of lessons of accountability will sink in with the average conservative.

GrOSS: The First Amendment lawyers who are in favor of Dominion don’t want the First Amendment to protect baseless conspiracy theories and media that promotes them.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

A FRESH AIR Interview With Mary Louise Kelly: Where are the funniest interviews? (with an interview with Josh Groban)

GROSS: If you’d like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed – like this week’s interview with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly, whose new memoir is about juggling her career and parenting; or with Josh Groban, who’s starring in the new Broadway revival of the Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd” – check out our podcast. There are a lot of FRESH AIR interviews.

Danny Miller is the executive producer of FRESH AIR. Our technical director is also an engineer. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Ann Marie Baldonado, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakundi. Molly Seavy-Nesper is the digital media producer. Thea Chaloner directed today’s show. I’m Terry Gross.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

NPR Observations after the January 6 Insurrection: An Update on Grossberg’s Amended Claims against Fox and Murdoch

A rush deadline is the time when NPR transcripts are created. The text may be changed in the future, and it is not certain at this time. Accuracy and availability may vary. A record of NPR programming can be found in the audio record.

In Grossberg’s amended complaint filed this week, she accused Fox’s lawyers of deleting messages from her phone. When Grossberg returned her phone to Fox, it appeared that some messages between her and Bartiromo had been deleted.

Scott received emails from Murdoch, where he blamed Trump for the January 6 insurrection, as well as decried Trump’s election denialism.