Dominion Voting System vs. Fox News: a Call to Quit the Voting Machines? When Fox News Melted Donald Trump
The messages, included in a legal filing as part of Dominion Voting System’s $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News, showed that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham brutally mocked lies being pushed by former President Donald Trump’s camp asserting that the election was rigged.
The court filing shows Carlson texting Ingraham to say that Sidney Powell, an attorney representing the Trump campaign, was lying. Sidney is a complete nut. Nobody will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.
On election night, Fox News was the first news outlet to report Biden’s name. the winner of Arizona — effectively projecting that he would become the next president. Fox’s ratings fell as Mr. Trump refused to concede he had lost, leading to his supporters turning against the network. Many of the most popular hosts and shows on Fox began promoting claims that voting machines were a part of a far-reaching voter fraud conspiracy to deny Donald Trump a second term.
For its part, Fox’s attorneys call Dominion’s suit an attempt to punish the news network for reporting on “one of the biggest stories of the day.” The network says it could dissuade journalists in the future from reporting allegations “inconvenient to Dominion—and other companies.”
The audience started to erode severely that fall, starting on Election Night itself. Fox executives and stars are both concerned about the threat from Newsmax. Hannity texted Carlson and Ingraham that Fox’s Arizona call “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.” Carlson said it was “vandalism”. Dana Perino, too, was shocked.
“Please get her fired,” Carlson told Hannity. “Seriously What the f**k? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop right now. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
A person with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN that Heinrich had not known about the effort by top hosts to get her fired when she was reading the legal filing.
Senior Fox News leadership was told when host Neil Cavuto cut away from the White House press briefing where election misinformation was being promoted that it was a brand threat.
► Murdoch asked Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to have Hannity say “something supportive” about Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham ahead of the 2020 election. Murdoch said that they couldn’t lose the Senate. The head of Murdoch’s talk network was being directed to help the GOP. This kind of directive from an executive would be a huge scandal at a news network.
The court filing also revealed that Fox News executives had criticized some of the network’s top talent behind the scenes. The network’s president, Jay Wallace, said that the North Koreans did a ” more nuanced show” than then host Lou Dobbs. The executive producer of “Justice with Judge Jeanine” referred to Jeanine Pirro as “nuts”.
The ABC News Correspondence Against Fox News During the Arizona Biden Run: Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity Revisited
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 had contempt for the same conspiracy that was called “mind-blowingly nuts”, ” totally off the rails” and “incomprehensible” off the air.
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.
► Despite Fox accurately calling the race in Arizona for Biden, Murdoch suggested firing Bill Sammon, then the head of the network’s Washington bureau. It’s better to let Bill go immediately, it will be a big message with Trump people. On Nov. 20, 2020, Sammon was told the inevitable.
The lawyers for the voting system wouldn’t speak to NPR. Fox News and parent company Fox Corp. declined to comment on the email. More broadly, Fox has accused Dominion of mischaracterizing the record and cherry-picked quotes without the proper context.
Tucker Carlson 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. It’s not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News on January 6, 2015: A witness witness testimony against the Fox News network’s alleged support for the US Capitol
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.
BaierTexted a friend, “There is no evidence of fraud” just days after the election. None. Allegations – stories. Twitter. Bulls—.”
Lou said he had never seen any true support for the company that was owned by Smartmatic. Yet that claim was repeatedly said on air by Fox hosts and guests. According to the legal documents, Dobbs said he wasn’t aware of any evidence that the election was rigged.
The terms of Sammon’s departure was not commented on by him, and Fox News referred to his departure as a retirement.
Donald Trump attempted to call into Fox News, but the network refused to put him on air, as a result of his support for the US Capitol being attacked.
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 wanted to understand the movements, actions and phone calls of Trump on that day. The committee faced obstacles that made it difficult for the record to remain current, according to his call to Fox News.
“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.
Fox executives did not approve of that decision, the filing continued. Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. By any measure January 6 was an important event. President Trump was not just the President, he was the key figure that day.
The show was canceled a few weeks after the January 6 revolt because of the fact that he was promoting baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
Despite privately acknowledging that the situation was real and that lies would continue to be told on the air, the network allowed the lies to take hold because executives and hosts were afraid that telling the truth would cause people to tune out.
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 said that the brand that took 25 years to build was destroyed in a week when the election was called.
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.
Hannity said he had already spoken to Scott about the matter. He criticized two colleagues that were critical of Donald Trump, including a Fox News anchor and a Fox News host.
Executives at Fox News worried about alienating him when he criticized the network, according to a legal filing. Scott sent a handwritten note and a gift to him.
The Fox Business host and the host of CNBC received Powell’s memo four days after the election. Powell appeared on Dobbs’s show that day to push easily discredited conspiracy theories involving the CIA and Dominion. That night, Fox News followed other networks in projecting that Biden had won the presidential 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 is accusing Fox News of defaming them by airing false claims that they engaged in 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. (Scalia, a favorite of many Fox News hosts, died in 2016 of a heart attack, according to local officials in Texas, where he died.)
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?” How do I know what’s happening? The woman who wrote the email said she had had the strangest dreams ever when she was a little girl. I live despite being decapitated.
Fox News: Did David Clark Tell Dominion to ‘Don’t Tell Me What I Wanna Know’ About Fox Business Network, or How David Clark Spent the Night Before he Left?
David Clark, then the senior executive over Fox’s weekend shows, later said under oath to Dominion’s lawyers that he “would not have allowed that claim to be aired,” had he known this memo was the sole foundation of the “crazy” theories.
The deposition was conducted nearly two years later by the lawyers of Dominion and it revealed that he did not believe the whole story for a second.
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.”
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.
Even though Bartiromo shared the memo with a top producer and booker, they were not the only ones to have it.
According to the legal filings, Grossberg said that he wouldn’t use it for air, even though he was asked about it under oath. A top booker for Fox’s Tucker Carlson, Grossberg is a senior producer.
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 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. So did Trump administration election integrity officials – as did some Fox News journalists. No matter. Powell showed up on Fox News and the Fox Business Network airwaves again and again – with Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, and Hannity, often explicitly implicating Dominion.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/20/1158223099/fox-news-dominion-wackadoodle-election-fraud-claim
After the first interview with Donald J. Carlson, the Murdochs confront the evidence of voter fraud and the mismanagement of Fox News in the wake of the January 26, 2021 siege
On Nov. 29 Bartiromo had the first interview with Trump since Election Day and she told him he couldn’t allow our elections to be corrupted.
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, he said that he had evidence of voting fraud but “they don’t want to talk about that.”
If it would hold our audience and boost our stock, the Murdochs would be all right with defaming the core engine of America’s democracy, the ability to peacefully and legitimate transfer of power.
From afar, it appeared that Haley had a decent story to tell, as she was the daughter of Indian immigrants and successful as a governor in South Carolina. Her mother Raj was a law student at the University of New Delhi and later earned a master’s degree in education while living in South Carolina. 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.
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.”
Fox lawyers said in a brief filed this month that a reasonable viewer would understand that hosts were not promoting the President’s accusations themselves, but were giving a forum for the architects of those legal challenges.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The media landscape is chronicled in the daily digest.
The fury from the top was palpable. “I don’t like our decision desk people!” Fox Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch wrote on Nov. 7, the night the networks projected Biden would prevail nationally. He told Col Allan that he’s still praying for Az to prove them wrong and that he’s just for the hell of it.
Murdoch gave Kushner a preview of Joe Biden’s ads before they were made public, according to the filing. At most news organizations, this type of action would result in an investigation and disciplinary measures.
The documents show that the channel’s business model is more about feeding the audience with content that keeps them interested and happy than about telling them what is going on.
“How often do you get ‘smoking gun’ emails that show, first, that persons responsible for the editorial content knew that the accusation was false, and also convincing emails that show the reason Fox reported this was for its own mercenary interests?” says Rutgers University law professor Ronald Chen, an authority on Constitutional and media law.
“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. “We don’t suppress speech because we think it’s wrong.”
Top executives, including Murdoch and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, told one another they could not bluntly confront their viewers with the facts because that could alienate them further.
Even with that record, set out with voluminous documentation, some media lawyers say Fox’s attorneys may be right in predicting that a loss would constrict the media’s freedoms.
“To simply say Fox is a bunch of liars – that they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this and their wild speculations should not be reported and should not be protected – I just think that that is a slippery slope,” says Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Media outlets don’t lose defamation cases. Under a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the New York Times, plaintiffs have to prove the claims made about them were false and damaging to their reputation. They need to show that those making the statements knew the assertions were untrue, or that they willfully ignored that information. That’s known as “actual malice,” under the late Justice William Brennan’s decision.
Investigating the Cases of Murdoch’s and Sarah Palin’s Frauds in the Newspaper Age: The If Fox News Loses Defamation Dominion Media
Brennan believes Americans should have the right to disagree 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. A third, Elena Kagan, published her own musings years before she joined the court that the protections for the press might be too strong.
Murphy says the idea of “actual malice” requires the proof that specific people knew the statements they aired were wrong. She says that Murdoch’s sworn statements that he had dismissed the claims of election fraud as bogus and that some of his star hosts had nonetheless endorsed them publicly, carries no legal weight.
Regardless of whether the allegations were going to be anything they could prove, what the president and his lawyers were doing was important and must be acknowledged. She invoked what journalists consider the safe ground of “neutral reporting” – just telling their audiences what others are saying.
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.
The New York Times successfully defended their editorial against SarahPalin, after it wrongly linked her advertisements to a mass shooting months later.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161221798/if-fox-news-loses-defamation-dominion-media
Dominion, Fox News, and a Whose Unsurprised by Shocking Fox News Velocity Reveals a Fox Journalist
“The Dominion case is such a strange case it provides an exception to the general rule,” Goodale says. Let us hope this case isn’t something we see again.
Some people, including former journalists at Fox News, think that the public now understands what they have seen from the inside.
There is no one thing that surprised or struck Julie Roginsky. “And I’ve read everything in those filings.”
Despite all that, Roginsky says Ailes enforced an intense discipline at Fox that vanished, right as Trump won the nomination and headed to the White House. Over the Trump years, many journalists left Fox, including Cameron, anchor Shepard Smith and others.
“There was a time when the journalists had some control,” Cameron says now. That has eroded. And exactly when that started … really doesn’t matter. What it ended up with, is the organization has a serious legal problem. “
The departures of Roger Ailes, the celebrated, reviled and ultimately disgraced former Fox News boss, are some of the ways each of them point in.
To be clear on Roginsky’s feelings about Ailes, she was one of many women at Fox News who alleged he sexually harassed her. She reached a settlement 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
Why didn’t Jonah Goldberg, Stephen Hayes and Chris Stirewalt quit Fox News in 2021? A Conversation with Roginsky
“The people who stayed — by the very nature of being allowed to stay — had to accept the notion that they were going to be led by the mob and the mob was being led by Donald Trump,” Roginsky says.
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.” The new cable station News Nation has a political director.
“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.” Stirewalt says so. He mentioned the willingness to suffer the short-term cost for the long-term good and the good of the Republic.
Carlson’s show feeding such baseless beliefs led Fox commentators Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes to leave Fox in fall 2021. Chris Wallace was the second Fox News Sunday host to take a job at CNN.
Reporters said they were being punished simply for doing their jobs. A producer told colleagues he was quitting because he couldn’t justify working for Fox anymore.
“What’s wrong with a news broadcaster?” comedians knocked down by a right-wing commentator about the anti-Trump agenda
The level of discovery in this case — an avalanche of evidence — would trigger disclosures that would make any news organization quail. But legal observers say Dominion has put together a powerhouse case.
They made fun of their reporting colleagues, for example, the director of the Fox News Decision Desk. She told the other two prime time hosts that he made her skin crawl.
Carlson said it should be. Chris Wallace and Leland were let down by Vittert because they were trying to build an audience.
Fisher appeared on the Dana Perino show and knocked down claims made by Rudy Giuliani. Fisher told viewers that Giuliani’s news conference was light on facts. “He said a lot of things that were not true, and have already been thrown out in 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 Corp. staffer warned of “a backlash from the pro-Trump orbit,” citing social media posts from a trio of right-wing commentators who have spread baseless conspiracy theories.
On Dec.9th, the reporter wrote to the host of Fox & Friends that she was no longer being asked to fill in as a host. “That makes two of us!” Fisher texted. “It’s a sh– network. I’m 100% being muzzled.”
In November, he chatted with Steve Doocy via text. The picture of his turkey was sent by Hannity the day after Thanksgiving. “This year is gonna suck my friend,” Hannity texted Doocy. “‘News’ destroyed us’.”
Turner remains with the network and Vogel is working at a software technology company. So did Leland Vittert, now with News Nation. Fisher was at CNN in the spring.
Phil wrote that he was taking a pay cut and wouldn’t be taking paid leave for six weeks. “The post election coverage of ‘voter fraud’ was the complete end,” Vogel wrote, citing the birth of his daughter. I realized I can’t defend my employer to my daughter and teach her how to do the right thing.
The network took over two hours of political news programs, it laid off a lot of writers and reporters, and it forced out the political director and the Washington Managing Editor.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/08/1161694400/fox-news-lawsuit-civil-war-ingraham-hannity
Fox News Media, the Associated Producer of the Capitol Insurrection, and the Investigative Response to a Fox News News Media Proposal
The siege of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020 was the focus of new conspiracy theories, which were being pushed by Trump supporters who wanted to block the congressional certification of Biden’s victory. Carlson has variously suggested it was organized by Antifa and the FBI. The insurrection was portrayed as a peaceful protest by the snippets of official video that he relied on.
A temporary restraining order has been filed to protect the rights of FOX News Media after Ms. Grossberg threatened to release their attorney client privileged information.
A senior producer at Fox told them last month that she planned to file a lawsuit against the network for discrimination and retaliation.
In its lawsuit against Grossberg, Fox’s legal team said it informed her attorney that information included in her draft complaint against the network was privileged earlier this month. But on Monday, Fox said, Grossberg’s law firm shared drafts of lawsuits that would incorporate that material.