The Fox Business Network, Fox News, and Dominion in a U.S. Supreme Court Appeals: A No-Go Theorem to Win the Vote
After Fox projected that Joe Biden was in Arizona, network leaders made a deal with Trump’s supporters. Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott texted Lachlan Murdoch, the Fox Corp co-chairman, that “the AZ We will highlight our stars and put flags on the buildings so the viewers know we hear them and respect them.
The bombshell revelations were contained in legal filings made public as part of the lawsuit against Fox and its parent company. Dominion sued after Fox hosts and guests repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that the company had switched Trump votes to 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.
Desperate to win back the Trump supporters, Fox News and the Fox Business Network used a pro- Trump attorney named Sidney Powell who forwarded a memo to Maria Bartiromo called “Election FraudInfo.” Sidney Powell is a pro-Trump attorney. Bartiromo hosted Powell on her Fox News show the day after receiving it.
Keller spoke about the difference between a host and producer who are pre-scripting material for the show which is tethered to a network executive, and a network executive who is not.
Executives at Fox were so worried about their audience protesting the channel that Scott, the network chief executive, even made an overture to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a prominent Fox News advertiser and election conspiracy theorist.
Nelson cited a document from Fox that said that most of the executives that we’re looking at are at the same daily editorial meeting.
“Here”, the legal team wrote in it’s filings, “no one acted with malice.” It offered one example after another that key Fox figures knew what the network was putting on the air was false.
Under U.S. Supreme Court rulings, Dominion has to prove Fox demonstrated “actual malice” to win a defamation case. That means either knowingly broadcasting false and damaging information, or doing so with reckless disregard for the truth.
The court filing offered the most vivid picture to date of the chaos that transpired behind the scenes at Fox News after Trump lost the election and viewers rebelled against the channel for accurately calling the contest in Biden’s favor.
At CNN and CNBC, Bartiromo became a star anchor, but she is in fact a veteran financial journalist. She joined Fox a decade ago to help give Fox Business greater cachet and respectability. She hosts 17 hours across Fox Business and Fox News each week.
In December 2020, Dobbs contended on the air that Trump’s opponents within the government had committed “treason,” and later suggested any action by a Republican officeholder to uphold Biden’s victory might have been “criminal.” His departure from the network was hastily announced the day after another election software company, Smartmatic, filed its own $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox for defamation surrounding similarly false accusations of fraud. That case is not as far along in the process.
Some of the top talent at Fox News was criticized behind the scenes by executives. The North Koreans did a more nuanced show than then-host Lou Dobbs, according to the network president. The executive producer of “Justice with Judge Jeanine” referred to the host as nuts.
There will be a lot of confusion and noise by the owners of Dominion, according to Fox. The Constitution and New York Times v. Sullivan still protect the freedom of the press and free speech in this case.
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. 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. The legal cover for the media in Australia is not as high as in the US.
Fox News executives and hosts expressed concern over the matter and began to crack down on those who fact-check the election. Carlson wanted the White House correspondent’s firing after she fact-checked a Trump claim about election fraud.
Carlson sent a text to Ingraham where he said that Sidney Powell, an attorney for the Trump campaign, was lying and that he had caught her doing so. Ingraham responded, “Sidney is a complete nut. Nobody will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.
The legal filing also underscored how worried Fox News executives and hosts were in the immediate aftermath of the election of losing its viewership to Newsmax, a smaller right-wing talk channel that was saturating its airwaves with election denialism.
The network says that the core of the case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution.
What the Fox Corp. Call for Action? The Case for Resolving the Fox Cosmic Brand Threat Against the Newsmax Call on Election Night
The audience started to erode severely that fall, starting on Election Night itself. Fox executives and stars are obsessed with the threat posed by Newsmax. The damaged brand that took 25 years to build was destroyed by the Fox call. Carlson said it was “vandalism”. Others hosts, including Dana Perino, were equally shocked.
Carlson wanted her to get fired. What the f**k? I’m actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.
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 claims the right-wing talk channel will highlight the stars and plant flags to let viewers know they’re listened to. Murdoch responded that the brand needed “rebuilding without any missteps.”
The cable network sued Fox Corp, claiming damages in a letter to the Washington Managing Editor over its coverage of “Bad News or Bad News”
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.
The network’s top primetime stars, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, all sent text messages contemptuously of the claims in a group chat, but also denounced their colleagues for pointing that out.
Bill Sammon wrote a private letter to the network’s Washington Managing Editor in December of 2020 about how weak ratings make good journalists bad. Network executives were angry with Fox News over the hit to its 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.
The attorneys for the cable network said in a new filing that the damages request is meant to enrich the private equity fund that owns the company.
The wake of the Fox News era: President Donald Trump’s calls to Fox News after the January 6 Capitol attack, and his personal frustrations with Newsmax
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. Allegations – stories. Twitter. Bulls.
His departure two months later was termed a retirement by Fox News; through an intermediary, Sammon has declined to comment 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.
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 sought to piece together a near minute-by-minute account of Trump’s movements, actions and phone calls on that day. His newly revealed call to Fox News shows some of the gaps in the record that still exist, due to roadblocks the committee faced.
The afternoon of January 6, when the Capitol came under attack, then-President Trump called into Lou Dobbs’ show to try to get on the air.
“But Fox executives vetoed that decision,” Dominion’s filing continued. Why? Not because of a lack of newsworthiness. The January 6 event was important. President Trump not only was the sitting President, he was the key figure that day.”
But, despite privately acknowledging the realiity of the situation, the network allowed the lies to take hold on its air, in large part because executives and hosts were terrified that telling its sizable audience the truth would prompt them to tune out.
Behind the scenes, Fox News executives and hosts were in panic. Wallace said the network had to be on war footing after the surge of Newsmax.
A week after the election had been called, Sean Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”
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.
He talked 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.
When Lindell appeared on Newsmax and criticized Fox News, executives at Fox News “exchanged worried emails about alienating him,” the legal filing said. Scott sent a handwritten note and gift to him.
On the next day, Powell was invited to present her fraud claims on Bartiromo’s show. “We’ve talked about the Dominion software,” Bartiromo said to Powell on her show, Sunday Morning Futures. “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”
A legal brief filed by a company in Delaware sheds light on the existence of the memo, its enigmatic author, and her role in Fox’s broadcasts. The election-tech company is taking Fox News to court over their false claims that it committed 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. In 2016 Scalia died of a heart attack and was a favorite of many 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,” wrote a woman in an email shared by Powell and Bartiromo. “I was internally decapitated, and yet, I live.”
Fox News and the Dilemma on Election Integrity: Tucker Carlson vs. Sidney Bartiromo in the Deposition on Jan. 26, 2020
“I didn’t believe the whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, for a second, but I knew what he was talking about,” he said in the deposition.
Bartiromo said she endorsed the information in the memo when she spoke to one of Trump’s sons.
Senior executives were not encouraged to block her program that day or from rebroadcasting it hours later because of their skepticism about Bartiromo.
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. Tucker Carlson has a senior producer and top booker named Grossberg.
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 claimed, “We have 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. Fox News journalists and election integrity officials did the same. No matter. Powell showed up on Fox News multiple times and was often critical of the company.
Tucker Carlson directly challenged Powell on air during the post- election period, as one of the Fox opinion stars. “We took her seriously,” Carlson told viewers on Nov. 19, 2020. She never gave us evidence despite a lot of 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 him plenty of time to make wild claims. Lindell said on Carlson’s show that he had the evidence of voting fraud but they don’t want to talk about it.