Fox News, Dominion Voting Systems and the Corrupt Cases of Dobbs, Giuliani, Keller and Murdoch
The court filings offer the most detailed picture of the chaos that erupted behind the scenes at Fox News after Trump lost the election, with viewers revolting against the channel for accurately calling the contest in Biden’s favor.
Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott told her colleagues, “We can’t hand the crazies an inch”, after she was confused by what happened. That’s according to the account of a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems, which is seeking $1.6 billion from Fox in a defamation suit over false allegations on the network that the company committed election fraud. A trial date in Delaware has been set.
The judge’s ruling in the case supports the idea that Dominion should get the contracts.
According to Nelson’s remarks at the hearing, senior Fox News executives interceded to try to block Fox Business stars Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo from having Trump’s campaign attorneys, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, on their shows to repeat such lies. Trump’s allies hosted those accusations in the late 2020s.
Keller said that he was differentiating between a host and a network executive who are sometimes pre-scripting material for the show and a host who is not.
Rupert Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman, emailed Suzanne Scott, the Fox News chief executive, telling her that Newsmax needed to be “watched.” Murdoch stressed to her, “everything at stake here,” as he didn’t want to antagonize Trump further.
Nelson, the Dominion attorney, retorted by citing a document obtained from Fox that “talks about the daily editorial meeting that occurs, including almost all of these executives that we’re looking at right now.”
Lawyers for the Voting System couldn’t comment more on the matter. Fox News and parent company Fox Corp. declined to comment on the email. Fox accused the company of misrepresenting the record and cherry-picking quotes without proper context.
Fox’s lawyers argued in court that its broadcasts after the election did not amount to defamation because they were protected by the First Amendment. In court filings, Fox has defended its commentary and reporting as the kind of work that any journalistic outfit would do by covering events and newsmakers that are indisputably newsworthy.
Fear of Fox News’ audience abandoning it for good drove programming decisions. Alex Pfeiffer told the host that many viewers were upset that the show didn’t cover election fraud. It is all our viewers care about right now.
Even before Election Day, Clark and Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier separately told the network’s top news executive, Jay Wallace, that Bartiromo was pushing false claims of fraud on social media.
The show on Fox Business that was hosted by the same man who promoted baseless conspiracy about the election was canceled a few weeks after the January 6 insurrection.
In recent weeks, Dominion has argued that Fox host Jeanine Pirro – a former district attorney and New York state judge as well as a Trump confidant – sits at the heart of its case. The producer of Fox News begged her colleagues to ignore the lies she was spreading about election fraud because they were coming from dark corners of the Internet.
Fox News defended its actions by saying that the Smartmatic and Dominion cases were attempts to chill independent reporting and commentary, which is bound up in the First Amendment.
Murdoch is the CEO and Executive Chairman of Fox Corp and has taken conflicting stances halfway across the globe in Australia. A political columnist for the magazine Crikey accused the Murdochs of being “unindicted co-conspirators” in the insurrection at the U.S. Congress by Trump supporters because of the false fraud allegations and the hyper-charged rhetoric ahead of the planned rally.
In that case, Murdoch is accusing a much smaller media outlet of defamation. He has forced the site to pay out for highly critical commentary several times previously; Crikey says it intends to use the suit as a test case for recent changes in libel law in that country. Media outlets have less legal cover in Australia than they do here in the U.S.
Murdoch, who controls a number of conservative media organizations, said that he would prefer to remove Donald Trump from office in favor of Ron DeSantis as the new leader of the Republican party.
Newt Gingrich, a Republican and former House Speaker, said that his candidate, Gov. Ron DeSantis, is the biggest winner of Tuesday’s election and will become the most important figure in moving away from President Trump.
The home page of Fox News featured a column by Liz Peek in which she said that Congressman Ron DeSantis was the new leader of the Republican Party. It was called a new era by Fox News.
Murdoch-owned The Wall Street Journal published a piece by the conservative editorial board about the DeSANTIs Florida disaster.
“There’s little doubt that his Florida success will grab the attention of voters outside the Sunshine State,” the editorial board wrote. “You can bet Donald J. Trump was watching—unhappily.”
Murdoch asked Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to have Sean Hannity support Lindsey Graham ahead of the 2020 election. We cannot lose the Senate, according to Murdoch. Murdoch was directing the talk network’s head to help the GOP. Again, this type of directive from an executive would be a major scandal at an actual news network.
Murdoch commented on Trump after the 2020 election in his book, “We should throw this guy over.” According to the book, which was written by a reporter at The New York Times and CNN, Murdoch made the comment after the election.
The fate of the $1.75 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News is up to a plain-speaking judge who is known for his poker face.
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. Both sides have accused the other of acting in bad faith.
“If he were to be given a name in culture, it would be Cool Hand Luke,” says Joseph Hurley, a criminal defense attorney based in Wilmington who has argued before Davis but has no involvement with the case. He never shows any emotion in court, and that is a good thing.
Newsmax tried to have Smartmatic’s defamation claim thrown out. Davis ruled that the facts pleaded by Smartmatic lead him to “reasonably infer” that Newsmax’s airing of stolen-election claims was reckless enough to meet the high legal bar required for defamation.
Like Dominion, Smartmatic was the subject of false claims that its software had switched Trump votes to Joe Biden. Those claims were broadcast on Newsmax, Fox News and elsewhere.
Smartmatic’s allegations support a conclusion that Newsmax’s reporting was neither accurate nor disinterested.
The professor at Delaware Law School believes that the judge should not have heard any of the arguments from Newsmax.
While Culhane, an authority on defamation law, cautions against drawing too strong a conclusion from the Newsmax ruling, he says Davis “is very clear and he’s very step-by-step when it comes to the law.”
Fox News and the First Amendment: a New New York State Circuit Court Judge Rescinds the Smartmatic Claims about the 2020 Presidential Campaign
The most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives at Fox News privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, despite the right-wing channel allowing lies about the presidential contest to be promoted on its air, damning messages contained in a Thursday court filing revealed.
Smartmatic has sued Fox for over a billion dollars but that is not as far along as the other ones. 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 he would file an amended complaint that included details of the involvement of 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.”
The First Amendment protects reporters because they can guarantee a “robust and unintimidated press”, but also because it guarantees not an unlimited press. 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 could hardly be greater in the two cases. Davis doesn’t 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.
He apologized to the legal teams in the case after re- reading an email in which he said he was not that smart.
He pinned it on how he uses a pat phrase. “You know that typical sarcastic thing that judges say?” Davis asked. Do not tell me I’m wrong. I’m making a statement with it. But that wasn’t why I was doing it.”
The Fox News Case for Election Fraud and Freedom of Speech: Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto Revisited
The network’s top primetime stars – Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity – texted contemptuously of the claims in group chats, but also denounced colleagues pointing that out publicly or on television.
The Trump campaign attorney is called a bit nuts by Ingraham. 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 wrote privately that he did not believe the shows of Carlson, Hannity and Jeanine Pirro were credible sources of news.
The material presented shows that there was no illusions about the magnitude of the election fraud accusations, even among the most ardent of Trump supporters.
The network said there would be a lot of noise and confusion but that the core of the case remained about freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
As pro-Trump viewers abandoned Fox News, a panic set in. The evidence presented by Dominion shows that Fox News executives seized on the false claims of fraud to be a good strategy even as some of their executives took exception.
Fox News stars and executives privately reviled their newsroom colleagues who told viewers that such claims were baseless, because such fact-checks alienated viewers.
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.
Fox News host Neil Cavuto was attacked by colleagues for pulling his show away from a presentation by then White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany in which she made unfounded claims of fraud once more. Murdoch is a host on Fox News.
The next day, Lachlan Murdoch warned Scott that a Fox News anchor’s coverage of a pro-Trump rally was “[s]mug and obnoxious”; Scott responded that she was “calling now” to remedy. (Anchor Leland Vittert’s final appearance on Fox was in January 2021; he is now an anchor for the fledgling cable news outlet NewsNation.)
Fox News Stars False Claims Are Tolerant Candidates: Sammon, Murdoch, Staple Street Partners, and Dominion
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
In the studio, the network’s stars, producers and executives called the conspiracy “mind-blowingly nuts”, “Totally off the rails”, and ” completely bs”.
“Good journalists do bad things because of weak ratings,” said Bill Sammon, the network’s Washington Managing Editor, at the time. Network executives above him stewed over the hit to Fox News’ brand among its viewers. Yet there was little apparent concern, other than some inquiries from Fox Corp founder Rupert Murdoch, over the journalistic values of fairness and accuracy.
In a separate filing, also released to the public on Thursday, the cable network’s attorneys say Dominion’s ten-figure request for damages is designed to “generate headlines” and to enrich the company’s controlling owner, the private equity fund Staple Street Capital Partners.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157558299/fox-news-stars-false-claims-trump-election-2020
Donald Trump left Fox News after the Capitol attack: He wasn’t there, nor had he been. Senator Sammon didn’t leave, or was he?
On the day after the election, a friend of Baier’s received a text saying there was no evidence of fraud. None. Allegations – stories. Twitter. Bulls—.
Sammon has declined to comment on his departure because of the terms of his departure.
Fox News refused to show Donald Trump after his supporters attacked the US Capitol in January 2021, despite the former president attempting to call the network.
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 reconstruct a near minute-by-minute account of when and who Trump was on that day. Some of the gaps in the records exist due to the committee facing more than one roadblock.
“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 refused to approve the decision, stated the filing. “Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. It was an important event that happened in January. He was the key figure that day and the President of the United States.
But, despite privately acknowledging the realiity of the situation, the network allowed the lies to take hold on its air, in large part because executives and hosts were terrified that telling its sizable audience the truth would prompt them to tune out.
Fox News executives and hosts were in a panic. Fox News president Jay Wallace said Newsmax was troubling, and needed to be on war footing.
► 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.
The legal filing said executives at Fox News were worried about alienating him when he criticized them on Newsmax. The filing added that Scott then sent him a handwritten note along with a gift.
A woman who says the wind talks to her and put forth claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race that she admitted were “pretty wackadoodle” turns out to be a key source of allegations that Fox News presented, night after night, to millions of viewers late that fall.
Powell did not show any evidence when he said that there were evidence of corruption all across the country. “The machine ran an algorithm that shaved votes from Trump and awarded them to Biden. They took the votes that should have gone to Trump and used the machines to destroy them. And they used the machines to inject and add massive quantities of votes for Mr. Biden.”
Among revelations in the Monday filing was the fact that Murdoch admitted in a deposition that some of his hosts were pushing election lies to his audience.
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, which is what local officials in Texas say he died of.
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.” By the time the woman wrote her memo, Ailes had been dead for more than three years.
I am not sure who I am. And how do I know all of this?… I’ve had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl,” the woman wrote in the email shared by Powell with Bartiromo and Dobbs. “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”
Fox News Revisited: A Fox Business Insider’s View of Donald Trump’s Unpopularity Concerning Voting in the Post-Election Season
The deposition was conducted more than two years later by the lawyers for the company, and Hannity stated that he did not believe the whole story.
Bartiromo said that she endorsed the info in the memo during a conversation with one of Trump’s sons: “I just spoke to Eric and told him you gave very imp info.”
As Dominion’s lawyers noted, however, such skepticism about Bartiromo from senior executives did not inspire them to block her program that day or from rebroadcasting it hours later.
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.
When asked about it under oath by their attorneys, Grossberg said the memo was not something that he would use for air. The top booker for Fox’s Tucker Carlson is Grossberg.
Two days after the fateful Bartiromo appearance, Powell turned up on Fox’s air once more, this time on Ingraham’s primetime Fox News show. Powell said there was evidence of hundreds of thousands of votes being injected into the computer systems.
She didn’t. Republican and Democratic state and local officials disputed and disproved her claims. The Trump administration’s election integrity officials and some of the Fox News journalists did too. No matter. Powell was on Fox News and Fox Business Network many times, often implicating Dominion.
Of Fox’s main opinion stars, only Tucker Carlson directly challenged Powell on the air during the post-election season. “We took her seriously,” Carlson told viewers on Nov. 19, 2020. “She never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests. Not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
On Jan. 26, Tucker Carlson had Lindell on his show. Murdoch told theattorneys he couldn’t take money for MyPillow ads.
Carlson gave Lindell plenty of time to make wild claims about Twitter, the media, and Dominion. 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.”
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.
Investigating Murdoch’s First Amendment Charges Against Election Fraud and Other Election-Like Phenomena in Fox News
I have never had the chance to meet Haley but when I did I was struck by the fact that she was the 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. They opened a clothing boutique.
Similarly, Murdoch sought to distinguish between the two in his sworn remarks. When asked whether Fox News embraced the idea of election fraud, he pointed instead to his own stars: “No. Some of our commentators supported it.
A renowned First Amendment attorney said that the motion for summary judgment has put Fox in a better situation to defend against the lawsuit on its First Amendment grounds.
Tushnet said that she had never seen evidence like that before in her years of practicing and teaching law.
Mr. Dinh said that Fox execs had an obligation to prevent hosts of shows from broadcasting lies.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. There is a daily digest about the evolving media landscape.
► 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 Kushner a preview of Biden’s ads before they were public, according to a filing. This type of action would create an investigation and punishments for those found guilty.
The documents lay bare that the channel’s business model is not based on informing its audience, but rather on feeding them content — even dangerous conspiracy theories — that keeps viewers happy and watching.
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. Murdoch said he could have. “But I didn’t.”
To counter that defense, Dominion’s legal filings summon the words of seemingly authoritative figures: Fox Corp. founder Rupert Murdoch and his top corporate advisers.
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 said in his deposition that he is a journalist at heart. “I like to be involved in these things.”
He was steadfast about defending the call of the key state of Arizona to Joe Biden on election night. Murdoch testified that he heard Trump yelling as the son-in-law of the president told him the situation was bad.
Scott forwarded the recommendation to the top executive. She and another executive canceled the show over fears that the guests would say the election was stolen and it would be a token, according to the filings.
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 after Election Day positive impressions of Fox News viewers were the lowest they’ve ever seen.
Ryan is on Fox Corp.’s board of directors. He said he told the Murdochs “that Fox News should not be spreading conspiracy theories.” He testified that Fox could pivot away from its support for Trump in the wake of the election.
“Just tell her”, was the advice from Rupert. Fox News, which called the election correctly, is pivoting as fast as possible. It might seem like it is easy to lead our viewers, but it isn’t.