Fox News, Dominion Voting Systems and the Murdoch Defamation Claims: An interview with Jeremy Peters at the court hearing in New York
Fox attorneys sought to keep the liability against the cable network separate from that against the parent company. They also resisted requests from Dominion during the early stages of the lawsuit for information about the Murdoch family because, as Fox argued, “they were only affiliated with Fox Corporation,” Dominion attorney Justin Nelson said on Tuesday.
The statement was one of a flurry of eye-opening exchanges between Davis and attorneys at the Tuesday hearing, during which the court set rules for what is certain to be a landmark defamation trial, scheduled for later this month.
Grossestes: The show is called FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Jeremy Peters, who’s covering the defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. He’s covering the intersection of media with politics, law and culture for The New York Times.
GROSS: This is not the usual show. I’m Terry Gross. Jeremy Peters, who is covering the defamation lawsuit against Fox News by the company that made voting machines used in some battleground states in the 2020 presidential election, was interviewing me yesterday. Jeremy is covering the lawsuit. It goes to trial Monday. Fox hosts and commentators are accused of lying about the fact that a conspiracy to steal votes from Trump and give them to Biden meant that the election was stolen.
Davis questioned the credibility of the attorneys after Nelson’s comments. He said that he didn’t know why it was difficult to figure out the identity of Fox News’ officers.
One Fox attorney said Murdoch’s position at the network was “honorific” and that the role had been disclosed during a previous deposition. Davis wasn’t taken under advisement. He said an officer of a company cannot “escape responsibility” by saying they didn’t have any tasks.
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.
But he has also made some important decisions that have shaped the parameters of the case. In a setback for Fox in late March, Judge Davis dismissed the news network’s argument that the First Amendment protected it on the grounds that it accurately reported on the voter fraud allegations and that its hosts’ endorsement of the false claims were covered as “opinion.”
Later during Tuesday’s hearing, Dominion attorneys also pushed back against a previous decision from the court that barred them from introducing information at trial about the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol, or about details of threats made against Dominion employees.
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 theater and that he didn’t want to hear about the commotion that followed.
Davis in response again suggested a question that Dominion could ask in its place. He said Dominion could inquire why Fox executives chose to pull back support from Trump. If the answer was brought up in January, it could lead to the topic being pursued.
To cap the exchange, Davis stressed that he must strike a “balance” between giving attorneys leeway and ensuring jurors would rule only on the claims in the case — and not the controversial issues that linger just beyond it.
An 11th-hour twist led the judge to sanction Fox and assign an outside lawyer to investigate whether Fox lied or hid material from the court.
Fox denies wrongdoing and says it properly disclosed Murdoch’s roles in its public financial filings. Dan said that nobody intentionally kept information from the company.
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.
Jurors will be peppered with questions about their news consumption habits, including whether they watch Fox News. The jury will not be asked if the 2020 election was legitimate or if they had any connection to the January 6 insurrection.
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.
And many of us — maybe even most of us — do. In an excellent article about Fox News’s fall down the rabbit hole, my Times colleague Jim Rutenberg correctly called it “seismic”, one of the morals of Dominion’s suit. The tale of that network’s dealings with its audience is told by Rutenberg. But a larger story hovers over it, one about every audience’s relationship with reality today.
Defaming Fox News. The New York Times’s New Show: Pets, Fees, and Fairness in the 2020 Presidential Election
A series of recent pretrial rulings has provided more clarity on how Judge Davis operates, and shows he has taken steps to reassure both parties that he had not predetermined the outcomes.
“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” Judge Davis wrote in a 130-page decision.
You’re talking gossip. Let’s take another break. Jeremy Peters is a reporter for The New York Times, who’s covering the defamation case against Fox News. Peters is the author of a book on media, politics, law and culture. We will be back soon after a short break. This is a new show.
Pets are a subject. Yes. And that really limits Fox’s ability to mount the kind of legal defense that it wanted to 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? Yes, OK. That seems like a pretty decent argument. 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.
An example of a county where voting machines stopped in the middle of an election and how to take away the votes from the Democratic National Committee? — Barbara Bartiromo on Fox airwaves
GROSS: In a recent instance, it has been shown that conspiracy theories influenced the decision of a very conservative county to stop using voting machines. So that would be an example of – a very recent example of Dominion losing clients as a result of these false conspiracy theories.
It’s a show called “Gross Soup.” Let’s hear an example of what people were saying on the Fox airwaves. And this is an interview on 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. Powell was a legal adviser to Trump. She appeared several times on Bartiromo’s show. And here’s an example of what she said while they were talking about Dominion, and Bartiromo speaks first.
Sidney Powell. That’s to be expected. The computer glitches could not and should not have happened in – at all. That is where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist. We need an audit of all of the computer systems that played any role in this fraud whatsoever. And, you know, Joe Biden had it right. He said that he no longer needed people’s votes because he has the biggest voter fraud organization ever. He would need people of his own later. They had this all planned, Maria. They had the tools to do it. They had the paper ballots waiting to be inserted if and when needed. And notably, President Trump’s vote in the blue states went up enormously. That’s when they had to stop the vote count and go in and replace votes for Biden and take away Trump votes.
BARTIROMO: I’ve never seen voting machines stop in the middle of an election, stop down and assess the situation. Nancy Pelosi has a long-time chief of staff who is a key executive at the company. The husband of Senator Feinstein is a significant shareholder of the company. Can you tell us about the interest on the other side of the 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 stole them from other democrats in their own party so they should be angry at this too. Bernie Sanders might very well have been the Democratic candidate, but they’ve stolen against whoever they wanted to steal it from.
It is called “Gross”. OK, so that was Sidney Powell on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox News November 8, 2020. So that was just – the election was November 3, so that’s just a few days after the election. Is it possible to assess what she means when she says voting machines were stopped in the middle of an election? Like, what are they talking about?
GROSS: I want to fact-check one thing that Sidney Powell had said, 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 Dominion as a lobbyist, but so have lobbyists who have worked for Republicans, and claims that Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, holds a stake in Dominion are baseless. So I just want to get that on the record. There’s something interesting about who the source for some of Sidney was.
GROSS: For a few of Sidney Powell’s claims. And there were signs that she was mentally unstable. Tell us about this source, Marlene Bourne, who claimed to be a tech analyst.
PETERS: So, again, this is a really significant piece of Dominion’s case because it shows that they acted recklessly. After seeing this email from this source, a jury could conclude that nobody would read it and that they didn’t need to rely on it for their coverage. I’ll let you know what’s 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 that she has been “internally decapitated” and that she talks to ghosts and listens to the wind. I don’t even know what that means.
PETERS: (Laughter) But it’s clear as day that a person like that is unreliable, 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 the reason…
In thisOSS: She claimed that she was shot in the back after giving the FBI a tip and that she saw what other people did not hear.
PETERS: Yeah. I mean, it’s just crazy. And that’s the kind of language that people at Fox started to use to describe Sidney Powell. They called her crazy. They called her nuts. On this air, I won’t repeat the things they called her. It shows that they had doubts about her and that they knew she was crazy.
So that type of evidence, you know, that we – it’s so rare, and I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s just evidence, you don’t get evidence like this in a defamation case where there are many people in power who have serious doubts about what they are reporting on the air. And that is incredibly legally significant and to Dominion’s benefit.
“GOSS:” Jeremy Peters, thank you so much for talking to us. I really look forward to your coverage of the defamation trial. Thank you for being here today.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud
The Fox News Critics: Tucker Carlson, Terry, Sue Scott and Rupert Murdoch, a former Fox News aide, and what Donald Trump really wanted to hear about stealing the election from Trump
Now, of course, that never happened. And, you know, a jury could buy that. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s a total slam dunk, because it is. It depends on who’s on the jury. It only takes one, two, Trump-leaning jurors to throw a wrench in this.
GROSS: One of the cases that Fox wanted to make was, hey, we were just covering the news. These stories were in the news. We were covering them. The judge had already knocked that argument down.
The person says “Peters.” It says that Tucker Carlson is completely disingenuous when it comes to the type of commentary he provides his audience. He tells them what he believes they want to hear, even if he doesn’t. Tucker Carlson and Terry talked to Donald Trump about the man who is seen as Extremist and they said they thought you will find what he has to say moderate, sensible and wise. The person Tucker has called a demonic force, a destroyer, is now this person.
It’s Gross. One of the reporters on Fox reported on a press conference held by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, two of Trump’s legal advisers, and they were talking about conspiracies to steal the election from Trump. She reported on the press conference and found the conspiracy theories to be false. What consequences did she face for that report?
Pets are Pets: She is named Kristin Fisher. She used to work at Fox. She left the network in large part because of this incident. She got an angry call from her boss after she fact-checked that press conference on the air. This is the sentiment conveyed to her boss by the chief executive of Fox News, who was looking at the ratings decline Fox had been experiencing and the ratings gains that competitors such as Newsmax had been enjoying because they were more pro-Trump. And Suzanne Scott panicked. Rupert Murdoch panicked. An honest discussion of what actually happened in the president’s race was shut down. 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.
He’s going to tell his audience that the former president is moderate, sensible and wise. It just doesn’t track. And I think – you know, I don’t want to be too cynical about this. But I really don’t think there’s any other way to see that other than he thinks his audience isn’t ever going to know what he said about Trump privately because we all live in such siloed media worlds. Tucker Carlson believes his producers want to hear about the news he’s presenting to his audience.
Tucker Carlson dropped the subject in the midst of the intense backlash, and you saw text messages from his producers saying they were not covering voter fraud because the audience wanted to hear about it. They are against the idea that the election was messed up. They say openly, there just wasn’t enough fraud to have changed the outcome. I feel sick by this stuff. While this case raises a lot of questions about our democratic system and our news media as well as the susceptibility that people have to disinformation and bad actors to profit from it, the case is actually going to turn on very small incidents.
GOSS: These are the rioters who broke into the Capitol. How does anyone square that? I don’t know that that’s relevant to the actual, to the defamation lawsuit. But what does it say about Tucker Carlson and Fox?
So I just want to get to one more thing about Sidney Powell. Lou Dobbs was a big supporter of the conspiracy theory. He hosted his own show on Fox Business News. And Dobbs’ producer said that he believed that Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s legal advisers, was, quote, “doing LSD and cocaine and heroin and shrooms.”
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud
Murdoch’s Private Messages and the First Amendment: Will Fox News Pay for Spreading Lies About Voter Fraud, or Can We Trust Dominion?
And that’s when, as Dominion has laid out in its case, you see this moment where Suzanne Scott tells her lieutenants at the network, we need to respect our audience. And that’s basically code for we can’t tell them anything that they’ll 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. When they put Murdoch on the stand it’s something I expect to hear, it’s definitely something I expect to happen at trial.
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.
Pets are Pets: The questions of what that means for Trump, his base, and the larger conservative media are a lot more complicated because we know they’re not really covering it. And I don’t know that those kinds of lessons of accountability will sink in with the average conservative.
GROSS: Is the First Amendment lawyers that are siding with Dominion not want the First Amendment to protect baseless conspiracy theories and not protect the media that promotes them?
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud
FRESH AIR: Radio and TV interviews with the Rev. Mary Louise Kelly of the New Broadway Revival of Sondheim
GROSS: If you missed an interview with Mary Louise Kelly, host of All Things Considered, or Josh Groban, star of the new Broadway revival of Sondheim, you can catch up on it here. You’ll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews.
FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. All of our interviews and reviews are edited by Amy and her colleauges. Molly Seavy-Nesper is our digital media producer. Thea directed the show. I’m Terry Gross.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud
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