Fox Corporation Defends Fox for Defamation and Its Role in the Murdoch Family: An Eye-Opening Exchange between Fox and Nelson
The attorneys for Fox had sought to keep any liability against the cable network separate from 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.
Grossberg worked for Maria Bartiromo during the 2020 election cycle, and some of the comments made on Bartiromo’s show are at the center of Dominion’s defamation case against Fox, which saw jury selection begin Thursday in Delaware. The network says it never defamed Dominion and that Dominion’s lawsuit undermines US press freedoms.
Fox tried to argue that its 2020 election coverage included a number of fact checks and reports saying that the allegations about machines weren’t true. And that’s true. Dana Perino, a former press secretary for Bush, was skeptical of this on many of the shows she hosted. And they were very upfront with the audience. The judge has said that it doesn’t matter to the jury. You can’t tell your audience lies in one hour and put someone on in another hour saying that they are lies and get away with it. That doesn’t absolve you.
Nelson’s comments appeared to have prompted Davis to excoriate Fox attorneys and even pose questions about their credibility. He did not know why the situation was complicated, with apparent confusion over the identities of Fox News’ officers.
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.
The cable network could be held responsible for the billion-dollar claim despite the fact that most of its hosts were not the culprits in the defamatory statements.
Davis said that “it’s irrelevant” whether the person is a Fox employee or a guest if the question is whether Fox published the information recklessly.
Fox wanted to be able to argue that Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, these folks who came on the air and said untrue things about Dominion, they were newsmakers and what they were saying was inherently newsworthy because they were representatives of the president of the United States. Well, the judge has now said that Fox can’t argue that because, you know, these statements were demonstrably false. Fox News doesn’t want to argue that the hosts and guests acted with malice. It is going to show that people were waiting for evidence at Fox News. The president’s lawyers had told them that there was evidence to back this up in court, so they put it on the air. They had affidavits. And so Fox’s lawyers will be able to say that shows they weren’t acting with actual malice. The crowd was given a set of facts that they believed the president would be able to prove in court.
During Tuesday’s hearing, attorneys for the company opposed a previous decision of the court that prevented them from introducing information about the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol.
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 effectively yelled fire in a crowded theater — quoting an often-cited limit to free speech — but Fox “doesn’t want to hear about the stampede that followed.”
In response to another suggestion, Davis suggested a question that could be asked from the other side. He said Dominion could inquire why Fox executives chose to pull back support from Trump. The judge said that if their answer came up, they could focus on the topic.
Davis said he must strike a balance between allowing attorneys to make their own decisions and making sure that jurors would only consider the claims in the case.
The judge reprimanded Fox on Wednesday for withholding evidence and said he would assign an attorney to look into whether Fox lied to the court.
Fox is denying wrongdoing, and says that Murdoch was properly disclosed in its public financial filings. Fox attorney Dan Webb said Wednesday that “nobody intentionally withheld information” from Dominion.
Trump is preparing to return to New York after his two-day Manhattan indictment of a crime against a wealthy ex-president
He’s due back in New York on Thursday under a dark legal cloud to answer more questions about his conduct, a week after becoming the first ex-president to be charged with a crime.
Last week, Trump pleaded not guilty in a case regarding a payment to an adult film star. He is expected back in the city that made his name, where he is accused of faking Trump Organization accounts to enrich himself along with three of his adult children.
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.
There are hundreds of credible legal threats against one person who once faced a charge of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed. How he can fully concentrate on the presidential campaign now that he is under so much legal and personal pressure is a question that may arise in the future. Being a defendants in multiple cases would mean court dates and not political rallies would dictate much of his schedule.
Trump’s lawyers, for example, are asking a judge to delay for one month a civil sexual assault and defamation trial brought by former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll, which was slated to begin later this month. His team wants a “cooling off period” following his indictment in the Manhattan case for falsifying business records, arguing that jurors would have those charges “top of mind” when they are called.
CNN legal analyst Eli Honig had predicted that the case would become a full-blown legal and journalistic disaster for Fox, and it took another ominous turn Wednesday when the judge said he would appoint an outside attorney to investigate.
A deposition that Donald Trump gave to the office of the Attorney General in New York City was used as evidence in the case against him and the Trump Organization. His position has been changed since there is a jury who can make adverse inference against someone if they refuse to testify.
The former president reacted to the suit filed by James, a Democrat, by accusing legal authorities of pursuing a political vendetta against him.
Similarly, he has responded to his indictment in Manhattan by accusing District Attorney Alvin Bragg, also a Democrat, of seeking to prevent him reclaiming the White House in his 2024 campaign. During an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox Tuesday, the ex-president said he would continue to run for president even if he was convicted of crimes he did not commit.
Trump has denied sexually assaulting Carroll, who alleges Trump raped her in a New York department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. After Trump denied the rape she alleged, she sued him for defamation, claiming she made it to boost sales of her book.
The 2020 Fox News Sliding Down the Rabbit Hole: The Story of Jim Rutenberg and the Bragg Suspense
On Wednesday, the ex-president said he was going to file a $500 million lawsuit against his former personal attorney because he didn’t like how he was treated.
The move raised suspicions that Trump was trying to intimidate Cohen, the key witness in Braggs prosecution, who testified before the Manhattan grand jury. Prosecutors say that Trump tried to hide payments to Stormy Daniels in order to hurt his campaign.
The CNN legal analyst said that Trump appeared to be trying to get around the judge by saying that he didn’t want the case heard in the public eye. “The timing is suspect, the claims are suspect, and I also don’t logistically see how this is going to work,” Agnifilo, a former chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan, said.
Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has stepped up his apparent effort to get rid of the investigation into Bragg in order to get rid of him in the eyes of voters. 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.
jurors can ask about their news consumption habits, such as whether they watch Fox News. 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: So part of what makes this case so important and fascinating is the texts and emails and the depositions that have been made public, and we know now that what Fox hosts and commentators said in public on the air about Trump and about the conspiracies to steal the election are very different from what they said in private to their fellow colleagues.
And many of us — maybe even most of us — do. Jim Rutenberg, my Times colleague, wrote an excellent article about Fox News sliding down the rabbit hole and that is one of the morals of the suit. Rutenberg tells the tale of that network’s spectacularly cynical dealings with its particular audience. But a larger story hovers over it, one about every audience’s relationship with reality today.
The Defamation Case Involving Rupert Murdoch: It’s a Murdoch Case And It Isn’t
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.
Judge Davis wrote in the decision that the evidence showed that no statements about the 2020 election were true.
There is a PBS show called “Gross”. Well, let’s take another break here. Jeremy Peters is a reporter for the New York Times who is covering the defamation lawsuit against Fox News. Peters covers media and its intersection with politics, law and culture for the Times. We’ll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: Well, getting back to Rupert Murdoch and what he said behind the scenes. This was after January 6 and he said that Trump’s insistence the election being stolen and convincing 25% ofAmericans was a huge disservice to the country, very much a crime. Best we don’t mention his name unless essential, and certainly don’t support him. We have to respect people of principle. And if it comes to the Senate, don’t take sides. He is being over demonized, but he brought it on himself. That seems like evidence to be used in a defamation case.
Dominion Voting Machines, and How Do They Stop in the Middle of an Election? (Interview on Bartiromo’s Show with Nancy Pelosi)
GROSS: Well, just recently, Shasta County, Calif., which is a very conservative county, decided to stop using Dominion voting machines, and it seems like that was influenced by the conspiracy theories. A recent example of how false conspiracy theories can lead to losing clients is that of Dominion.
There is a show called “Grocery.” Let’s talk about what people were saying on Fox. 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. And Powell, as I said, was a legal adviser to Trump. She was on Bartiromo’s show several times. 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. And I think what they’re talking about were instances in which some municipalities just stopped counting because it was late, and the vote counters tabulators needed to go home. They also may be referring to this incident that was widely misrepresented and distorted in right-wing media where a county in northern Michigan, the – one of the officials, the elections officials, just made a mistake, and he recorded Biden’s totals as Trump’s totals and vice versa. They realized that it was a human error. It had nothing to do with Dominion machines. But this became fodder for conspiracy theorists saying, see? 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. Senator Feinstein’s husband is a shareholder of the company. 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. I think they have taken them from the other Democrats in their own party as well. When it came to the Democratic candidate, they stole against whoever they wanted to steal from.
It is 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. Can you interpret what she’s talking about, for instance, when she says that voting machines were stopped in the middle of an election to assess the situation? What are they talking about?
GROSS: I want to fact-check the statement that Sidney Powell made about Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. The AP did a fact-check on that and said it’s not true. 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. That is something I want to keep on the record. There is something fascinating about who the source was for some of Sidney.
There is a show called “Genius.” Yes, for Sidney Powell’s claims. There were indications that she was not stable. Tell us about this source, Marlene Bourne, who claimed to be a tech analyst.
PETERS: This is a very important piece of the case because it shows that they acted recklessly. After seeing this email from this source, a jury could conclude that no one would trust this person and so they should not rely on it for their coverage. I’ll tell you what happened in that email. It’s so crazy. Sidney Powell had talked to a woman by the name of “MD,” and it’s a woman who has a similar name. And in this email, she describes to Sidney Powell how she talks to ghosts and listens to the wind, and that she has been “internally decapitated” – that’s a direct quote. I’m not sure what that means.
Perers, “That’s correct.” 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 – but the reason…
In the movie, “Gross Commandments.” She said she heard what other people didn’t hear and that it appeared she had been shot in the back after giving the FBI a tip.
Peters: Yeah. I mean, it’s just nuts. 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 crazy. I will not repeat the things they called her. That shows that they were doubts about her and they knew that she was crazy.
So that type of evidence, you know, that we – it’s so rare, and I can’t emphasize this enough. Like, the evidence in this case – it’s just – you don’t get evidence like this in a defamation case that shows so clearly that there were many people in positions of power who had serious doubts about what they were reporting on the air. And that is incredibly legally significant and to Dominion’s benefit.
GROSS: We need to have another break here. So let me reintroduce you. My guest is Jeremy Peters. He’s a reporter for The New York Times who covers a wide range of topics. After a break, we’re going to discuss the defamation lawsuit against Fox News. I’m Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud
Fox News and Donald Trump: Correspondence to a Reporter on a Fox News Press Conference about a Possible Campaign to Steal the Election from Donald Trump
Now, of course, that never happened. 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 is dependent on who the jurors are. And really, it only takes one, two, you know, very, you know, Trump-leaning jurors to throw a whole wrench in this for Dominion.
Fox has argued that these statements were made by commentators, not news. They disagreed about whether we were covering the news or not. They argued that the claims were not made by reporters, but by commentators.
They are called Petes. It says that Tucker Carlson is completely disingenuous when it comes to the type of commentary he provides his audience. He gives them information even if he doesn’t agree with them. Tucker Carlson and Terry talked to Donald Trump a little while back and told their audience that they think they will find what he has to say moderate, sensible and wise. Now, this is someone who Tucker has called a demonic force, a destroyer, somebody he expresses clear contempt for.
There is a show called “Gross Secrets.” A reporter for Fox reported at a press conference that Giuliani and Powell, two of Trump’s legal advisers, were discussing the possibility of a conspiracy to steal the election from Trump. She reported on the press conference and fact-checked it and showed that the conspiracy theories being floated were factually wrong. What consequences did she have for that report?
There is a person named Peters. Her name is Kristin Fisher. She no longer works for Fox. She left the network in large part because of this incident. After she fact-checked that press conference on the air, she received an angry phone call from her boss, who said, you need to do a better job of respecting our audience. And this is a sentiment that had been conveyed to her boss by the chief executive of Fox News, who, at this point in November of 2020, was looking at the ratings decline Fox had been suffering and the ratings gains that competitors like Newsmax had been enjoying because they were more overtly pro-Trump. Suzanne Scott panicked. Rupert Murdoch panicked. And they basically shut down an honest discussion of what really happened in the 2020 presidential election. In order to communicate with their audience, they only tell what they want to hear, and they don’t want to hear that President Trump has lost.
And he’s telling his audience now that this former president is moderate, sensible and wise. It just doesn’t track. I don’t want to be too cynical about this. I don’t believe there’s a way to see that other than he believes people will never know what he said about Trump because they live in separate media worlds. Tucker Carlson’s producers think the Tucker Carlson audience would like to hear the news they’re presented with.
When Tucker Carlson dropped the topic, he had text messages from his producers saying that their audience wanted to hear about voter fraud and that they weren’t covering it. They are not in favor of the idea that the election was rigged. They say openly, there just wasn’t enough fraud to have changed the outcome. The stuff makes me sick. The case raises a lot of questions about our democratic system, news media and the willingness of bad actors to profit from those things, but they are only going to turn on small incidents.
GrOSS: These are the rioters who broke into the Capitol. How does anyone square that? I don’t know if that is relevant 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 one of the big purveyors of the conspiracy theory on Fox News. 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
What are Pets? Murdoch and Fox News in the wake of Dominion’s decision on the summary judgment in the case of Rupert Murdoch
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. They can’t tell them anything that will upset them because they’re changing the channel.
Pets are Pets. And it’s true. It’s something that Dominion cited in its presentation to the judge when they were arguing the summary judgment phase of the case. It’s definitely something I expect to come up at trial, especially when they put Rupert Murdoch on the stand.
One of the things that happened recently, is that the judge granted access to more of Murdoch’s private messages because we didn’t know how big of a role Murdoch played in Fox News. Please tell us about this development.
There are people called Pets. The questions of what that means for Trump’s base and the larger media is complicated because we know they are not covering it 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 siding with Dominion want the First Amendment to protect baseless conspiracy theories, but not 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: A podcast to talk about spreading lies about voter fraud and the new Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd”
You can listen to 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 interviews on FRESH AIR.
FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Interviews and reviews are edited by Amy Salit, as well as by other people. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today’s show. I am 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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In Grossberg’s amended complaint filed this week, she accused Fox’s lawyers of deleting messages from her phone. The lawsuit says Grossberg gave her phone to Fox lawyers in 2022, and “that certain messages between Ms. Grossberg and Ms. Bartiromo were missing/appeared to have been deleted” when she got the device back from Fox’s team.
Scott was also on the receiving end of emails from Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, where he decried Trump’s election denialism and blamed Trump for the January 6 insurrection.