The Fox News Case Against The Dominance of Joe Biden’s Arizona, a Case Study in Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis

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. The private notes from Fox’s top stars show desperation because of their obsession with collapsing ratings.

Fox News and its trial attorney didn’t comment for the article. During a hearing Tuesday, the arguments played out looked like looking-glass world. Dominion depicted the network’s executives scrambling to rein in the chaos engendered by its stars, while Fox’s attorneys were effectively arguing the executives had little time, ability or inclination to do so.

In yesterday’s ruling, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis affirmed that the contracts should be given to Dominion.

Nelson said that senior Fox News executives tried to stop Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani from having Trump’s campaign attorneys tell lies on their shows. The advocates for Trump hosted Dobbs and Bartiromo to make those accusations.

In his exchanges with the judge, Keller drew a line distinguishing between a host or producer “who are sometimes pre-scripting material for the show, that is going to be tethered to a specific channel’s telecast” and a network executive.

Meanwhile, fixated on the erosion of viewers to smaller right-wing rivals, Fox News executives purged senior journalists who were fixated on reflecting the facts. Scott denounced Sammon in a note to the network’s top publicity executive. Sammon did not understand the impact on the brand and arrogance in projecting Arizona for Biden, Scott wrote.

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.”

According to those reviewed by NPR, Dominion is asking the court to force additional testimony from Fox star Sean Hannity, a close adviser to Trump. The full filing is sealed, but the attorneys want to bar improper assertions of reporter’s privilege, which they argued was done by Fox during earlier questioning. He was deposed in late August, according to court records.

Under U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Dominion has to prove Fox demonstrated “actual malice” to win a defamation case. Either broadcasting false and damaging information or doing so with disregard for the truth is what that means.

The fear that Fox News’ audience would abandon it for good also appeared to drive programming decisions. Many viewers were upset that they didn’t see election fraud, said Alex Pfeiffer, a Carlson producer. It’s all our viewers care about right now.”

Bartiromo became a star anchor at CNBC after working at CNN as a financial journalist. She joined Fox 10 years ago in an effort to give the business more cachet. She hosts 17 hours on Fox Business and Fox News each week.

Dobbs’ show on Fox Business – in which he routinely promoted baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election – was canceled a few weeks after the January 6 insurrection.

In the recent weeks, it has been argued that Fox host Jeanine Pirro sits at the center of its case. NPR previously revealed the existence of an anguished email from a Fox News producer begging colleagues to keep Pirro off the air because she was circulating lies about election fraud from dark corners of the Internet.

Fox News stated that there will be a lot of noise and confusion created by the private equity owners. The fundamental rights of the press and freedom of speech that are protected by the constitution remain the focus of the case.

Murdoch’s family lives in Australia, where the media mogul has taken a seemingly conflicting stance across the globe. 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. 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.

The fate of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News lies, for the moment, in the hands of a plainspoken judge known for his unflinching 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. The other side has 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, it’s a good way of showing that.”

A New York State Circuit Court Final Decision Judgment against Smartmatic, Fox Corp., the Dominion-Dominion Channel, and Smartmatic

Davis is also overseeing a separate defamation case filed by another voting tech company, Smartmatic, against Fox’s smaller rival Newsmax, over similar claims.

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.

“Newsmax either knew its statements regarding Smartmatic’s role in the election-fraud narrative were false, or at least it had a high degree of awareness that they were probably false,” the judge stated.

“It seems pretty clear to me that [the judge] was not having any of the Newsmax arguments – and nor should he have, by the way,” says John Culhane, a professor at Delaware Law School.

Culhane cautions against drawing too strong of a conclusion from the Newsmax ruling, but says Davis is very step-by-step when it comes to the law.

The Fox News executives privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, despite the fact that the channel allowed lies about the presidential contest to be promoted.

The Smartmatic suit was not as far along as that of Dominion’s. 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.

Smartmatic attorney Erik Connolly said it would file an amended complaint that “details the involvement of [Fox Corp. leaders] Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch.”

The attorneys of Newsmax say that they have a legal privilege, known as a neutral reportage, which allows them to present unprecedented allegations without any assumptions about their validity to the public.

He states the “first amendment is not unlimited” even though he notes that the First Amendment protects reporters. 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 seek to amplify his own profile. (Indeed, his court declined to make a photo of him available for this story.) The hallmark of the Delaware legal bar is an air of comity around proceedings.

During the February court hearing in the Fox lawsuit, Davis apologized to the opposing legal teams, saying he came off as less than PROFESSIONAL in an email.

He pinned it on his use of a pat phrase. “You know that typical sarcastic thing that judges say?” Davis wanted to know what was going on. I don’t want to hear I’m wrong. So tell me if I’m incorrect. It means that I’m making some kind of statement. But that wasn’t why I was doing it.”

Fox News, The Times, and the Future: a Comet against the Fox News ‘Brand Threat’ during the 2020 Midterm Election

The Times has an account of an exchange that took place last Nov. 12th, 2020 between Mr. Carlson and a Fox reporter. ‘Please get her fired,’ Mr. Carlson said. He said that it needs to stop immediately. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price has fallen. That is not a joke. Ms. Heinrich deleted her account by the next morning.

The court filing reveals that Carlson sent a text to Ingraham saying that an attorney who was associated with the Trump campaign had lied to him. Ridney is a complete nut. No one is going to work with her. Ditto with Rudy [Giuliani].”

The material presented in the remarkable 178-page brief reflects there were no illusions that there was heft to the allegations of election fraud even among those Fox figures who gave the most intense embrace to Trump allies peddling those lies.

“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, an incensed Trump had attacked Fox News and encouraged his followers to switch to Newsmax, a smaller right-wing talk channel that was saturating its airwaves with election denialism.

Carlson was angry that the newsside colleagues of Fox News publicly noted the false claims made by Powell and others. They argued that it fed the outrage of Trump fans.

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.

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. Scott said the right-wing talk channel would “highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.” Murdoch said that the brand needed to be rebuilt without any mistakes.

The Fox News Stars False Claims 2020: Why we should care about what we’ve learned from the past, and how we can improve our own journalism

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 network’s stars, producers and executives expressed contempt for those same conspiracies, calling them “mind-blowingly nuts,” “totally off the rails” and “completely bs” – often in far earthier terms.

Bill Sammon, the network’s Washington Managing Editor, privately wrote on Dec 2, 2020, that it’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists bad. Network executives were angry at the hit to Fox News’ brand. 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 filing released to the public on Thursday, the cable network says that the damages request is being made by the company’s controlling owner as a way to “generate headlines” and to enrich them.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/1157558299/fox-news-stars-false-claims-trump-election-2020

Defamation of Fox News during the January 6, 2020 Capitol Attack: Jaymon and Scott Baier Dialed into Fox News after the Capitol

On Nov. 5, 2020, just days after the election, Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor texted a friend: “[T]here is NO evidence of fraud. None. There are some allegations and stories. In case you are wondering, there is a social media platform calledTwitter. Bulls—.

Sammon said he wouldn’t be commenting on his departure since it was termed a retirement by Fox News.

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.

According to a source familiar with the work, the House select committee didn’t know that Trump had made the call.

The panel wanted to gather a detailed account of Trump’s movements, actions and phone calls on that day. The committee faced some challenges, which led to some gaps in the record that still exist.

“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 like the decision, according to the filing. Why? Not because there is not much newsworthiness. January 6 was an important event by any measure. The key figure for that day was President Trump, who was sitting in the Oval Office.

Executives and hosts of the network were afraid of telling the truth to their large audience and so they allowed the lies to keep airing.

Behind the scenes, Fox News executives and hosts were in panic. Fox News president Jay Wallace said that Newsmax had to be on war footing as he described its surge as “troubling”.

Hannity said he had already spoken to Scott about the matter. He criticized two of his colleagues, including the anchor of Fox News, Chris Wallace, who was critical of Trump.

The legal filing stated that executives at Fox News were worried about alienating him when he appeared on Newsmax. The filing added that Scott then sent him a handwritten note along with a gift.

A woman who said the wind talked to her about the 2020 presidential race and she admitted she was crazy, is a key source of the accusations that Fox News presented to millions of viewers late that fall.

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. That night, Fox News followed other networks in projecting that Biden had won the presidential election.

The existence of the memo, its author and her role in Fox’s broadcasts came to light in a devastating 178 page legal brief made public by a Delaware court. The election-tech company has sued Fox News for $1.6 billion for defamation over the airing of false claims that it 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.)

The woman said that Roger Ailes and Murdoch huddle daily to figure out how to portray Mr. Trump as badly as possible. When the woman wrote her memo, Ailes had been dead for 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.”

Tucker Carlson vs. Hannity: A Fox News Perspective on the Post-Trump Voting Crisis in the U.S. Capitol

“I don’t believe the entire narrative that Sidney was pushing, for one second,” Hannity said in a deposition conducted almost two years later.

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.”

The skepticism of Bartiromo from senior executives didn’t inspire them to block her show or rebroadcast 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.

According to the legal filings, Grossberg told his attorneys that the memo is not something he’d use for air at the moment. Grossberg is now a senior producer and top booker for Fox’s Tucker Carlson.

Powell appeared on the Fox News show a second time two days after his appearance on Bartiromo. Powell stated, “We have a huge amount of proof of votes being injected into the computer systems frequently.”

She didn’t. Republican and Democratic state and local officials disputed and disproved her claims. The Trump election integrity officials and some Fox News journalists were also present. No matter. Powell appeared on Fox News and Fox Business Network again and again and was often implicated in the case of Dominion.

Tucker Carlson directly challenged Powell on the air during the post election season, as one of Fox’s main opinion stars. Carlson told viewers that they took her seriously. “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, 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 time to make wild claims about the media. “They don’t want to talk about that, but I had evidence of voting fraud but they don’t want to take action against me,” he said on the Carlson show.

If the core of America’s democracy were to be lost, Fox hosts and the Murdoch family would be fine with that, because it would hold their audience and boost their stock.

Haley, Trump, and Fox News: Defamation and Democracy on the Media Landscape (with an appendix by Tom Tushnet)

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. 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 taught biology at Voorhees College for nearly three decades, after he received a doctorate from the University of British Columbia. On the side, there was a clothing boutique.

While the legal experts cautioned that they wouldn’t want to see Fox News’ formal legal reply to the filing, they all said that the evidence in it was a serious threat to the channel.

“It’s a major blow,” attorney Floyd Abrams of Pentagon Papers fame said, adding that the “recent revelations certainly put Fox in a more precarious situation” in defending against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. This is where you’ll find the daily digest on the evolving media landscape.

Ron Nell Andersen Jones, a professor and media law scholar at the University of Utah, said that she had never seen evidence like it collected in a defamation case against an outlet like Fox.

Tushnet said that in her years of practicing and teaching law, she had never seen such damning evidence collected in the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit.

The filing showed that the case against Fox News has serious teeth according to an attorney who teaches First Amendment law.

Jones said this was a pretty staggering brief. “Dominion’s filing here is unique not just as to the volume of the evidence but also as to the directness of the evidence and the timeline of the evidence.”

Reply to Murdoch’s Decclamation of the Second Low-Energy Electoral Case in the U.S. Senate

Murdoch said that some of the commentators were in favor of the election. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight,” he added.

Mr. Dinh said in his deposition that Fox executives have a duty to prevent hosts from broadcasting lies.