The Defamation Case against Fox News after the 2016 U.S. Supreme Court Indictment Against President J.P. Biden

Even so, top executives strategized about how to make it up to their viewers – among Trump’s strongest supporters – after Fox News’ election-night team correctly called the pivotal state of Arizona for Democratic nominee Joe Biden before other networks. Fox’s top stars have a sense of desperation, reflecting their obsession with collapsing ratings.

In the legal filing made public on Thursday, there were more revelations as a result of the defamation lawsuit against Fox. Fox hosts claimed that the company had voted for Trump instead of Biden.

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.

Nelson claims senior Fox News executives tried to stop Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani from having their shows repeat lying about Trump during the presidential campaign. Trump’s people made those accusations in late 2020.

Keller said that there was a distinction between a host or producer who were pre-scripting material for the show that was being tethered to a specific channel 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 wanted to make sure her that everything was at stake and did not 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.”

The court is being asked to compel further testimony from Fox star Sean Hannity who is a close adviser to Trump. The full filing is sealed, but the attorneys claim that Fox used reporter’s privilege for Hannity in order to gain an unfair advantage. According to records, he was deposed in August.

Under the high legal bar of actual malice, defined in that 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving The New York Times, Dominion has to show Fox acted either with knowledge that what it was broadcasting to the public was false, or that it acted with reckless disregard of the truth.

The most vivid picture to date of the chaos behind the scenes at Fox News after Trump lost the election is in the court filing.

By Nov. 8, Fox Business Network senior vice president Gary Schreier was warning the channel’s president, Lauren Petterson, that Bartiromo “has GOP conspiracy theorists in her ear and they use her for their message sometimes.”

The show on Fox Business that was hosted by Lou Dobbs was canceled a month after the January 6 insurrection.

The court filing states that executives at Fox News had criticized some of their top talent. The network president said that the North Koreans did a more nuanced show than Lou was able to do. The executive producer of Justice with Judge Jeanine referred to Jeanine Pirro asnuts.

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” Fox News said in a statement today. The core of the case is still about freedom of the press and freedom of speech which are protected by the Constitution.

Fox Corp CEO and Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch has taken a seemingly conflicting stance halfway across the globe in Australia, where the media magnate and his family now live. 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.

Murdoch is accusing a smaller media outlet of defamation. The site will use the suit as a test case for recent changes in the country’s libel law. Media outlets have less legal cover in Australia than they do here in the U.S.

Fox News stars and executives hated their newsroom colleagues for telling viewers the claims were not true.

Ingraham called Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell “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 executive wrote that he did not believe that the shows of Carlson and others were credible sources of news.

The messages were included in a stunning legal filing made public on Thursday, showing the executives and talk hosts privately trashing the lies pushed by the Trump camp and his supporters.

“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.

After the election, a furious Trump attacked Fox News and encouraged his followers to switch to Newsmax. And, in the days and weeks after the presidential contest had been called, they did just that. Fox News shed a chunk of its audience while Newsmax gained significant viewership.

“Please get her fired,” Carlson told Hannity over text message. “Seriously … what the f**k? It needs to stop right now… I am shocked. It is measurably hurting the company.

According to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, however, Heinrich was not aware of the efforts to get her fired when she read details in the legal filing.

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.

Scott exchanged messages with Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chief executive, and outlined a plan to win viewers back. The channel would highlight our stars and plant flags to let the viewers know they hear them, according to Scott. Murdoch said that the brand needed to be rebuilt without any mistakes.

Fox News Behaving Unlike the Media: On the Reporters’ Antics and the Media’s View of the Broadcast News Showcase

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

Off the air, the stars, producers and executives of the network were angry with them, calling them mind blowingly nuts, totally off the rails, and completely bs.

The messages showed that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked lies being pushed by Trump’s camp asserting that the election had been rigged.

“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make… good journalists do bad things,” Bill Sammon, at the time the network’s Washington Managing Editor, privately wrote on Dec. 2, 2020. 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.

Why did the Fox News Network Oppose to Put Sammon on Air? The Case of the January 6, 2021 Capitol Attack: The Case against Fox News

Baier was the network’s chief political anchor and just days after the election, he sent a text to a friend that said there was no evidence of fraud. None. There are allegations and stories. Twitter. Bulls—.

Sammon’s departure was termed aretirement by Fox News but he has not commented on that citing the terms of 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.

A source said that the House select committee was not aware that Trump had made the call.

The panel spent the day trying to piece together a quick account of Trump’s actions on that day. The gaps in the record still exist, due to the obstacles faced by the committee.

“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.”

Despite acknowledging the reality of it, the network allowed lies to take hold of it’s air because they were terrified of offending their large audience.

Behind the scenes, Fox News executives and hosts were in panic. Fox News president Jay Wallace called Newsmax surge troubling, and said the network needed to be on war footing.

Sean Hannity said a week after the election that the brand that took 25 years to build was ruined by the debate.

The hosts were so concerned by Newsmax growing that they were enraged when his colleague, a White House correspondent, just looked at Trump’s election lies.

Hannity said he had already spoken to Scott about the matter. He then proceeded to criticize two of his other colleagues, Fox News host Neil Cavuto and then-Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, both of whom were critical of Trump.

The legal filing said executives at Fox News fretted about alienating him when he criticized them. Scott sent a handwritten note and a gift to him.

On Nov. 7, just four days after Election Day, Powell sent Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and Bartiromo the memo. Powell appeared on Dobbs’s show that day to push easily discredited conspiracy theories involving the CIA and Dominion. Fox News was one of the networks that projected that Biden had won the election.

The existence of the memo, its enigmatic author, and her role in Fox’s broadcasts surfaced in a devastating 178-page legal brief filed by Dominion Voting Systems and made public last week by a Delaware court. The election-tech company filed a lawsuit against Fox News for defamation, claiming they aired false claims of election fraud.

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. According to officials in Texas, Scalia died of a heart attack in 2016 and he was a favorite of Fox News hosts.

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.

“Who am I?” 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’s Tucker Carlson: Two Years After the Deposition by Susan Bartiromo and Eric Dominion of the Fox News Investigative Director

I didn’t believe the whole narrative for one second, according to a deposition conducted two years later by the lawyers of the company.

Bartiromo replied glowingly to Powell, saying she had endorsed the information in the memo during a conversation with one of Trump’s sons: “I just spoke to Eric & 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.

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 now a senior producer and top booker for Fox’s Tucker Carlson.

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 a lot of evidence of votes being injected into the computer systems.

She didn’t. State and local officials lied to her about what she had said. The Trump administration’s election integrity officials and some Fox News journalists did the same. No matter. Powell appeared on Fox News and Fox Business Network dozens of times, with many of them pointing out the misrepresentation of the situation.

Tucker Carlson challenged Powell on air during the post- election season of Fox’s opinion stars. Carlson told viewers on Nov. 19, 2020 that they took her seriously. She didn’t send us any evidence despite a lot of requests. Not a page. She told us to stop contacting her when we kept pressing.

On Jan. 26, 2021, three weeks after the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to block congressional certification of Biden’s win, Carlson invited on one of his main advertisers: Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow and a chief proponent of pro-Trump claims of election fraud.

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.”

If our ability to peacefully transfer power and hold our audience was undermined, Fox would be ok with it because their stock would go down and they would get more viewers.

Haley, the first U.N. ambassador to South Carolina from 2011 to 2017 and the first daughter of an Indian immigrant and a student living in South Carolina

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. After moving to South Carolina from India, her mother earned a master’s degree in education and became a local public school teacher. Her dad taught biology for 29 years at Voorhees College after he earned a PhD from the University of British Columbia. They opened a clothing boutique on the side.