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    Ignore Trump? Democrats Now Want Him Plastered All Over the News.

    The former president has been relatively quiet, out of the headlines and off mainstream social media. Democrats are hoping that more attention on him can help turn around President Biden’s fortunes.When Donald J. Trump left the White House, Democrats didn’t want to hear another word from him. President Biden dismissed him as “the former guy.” A party-wide consensus held that he was best left ignored.Three years later, Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign and Democratic officials across the party’s spectrum have landed on a new solution to his political slump:More Trump.Criticizing the news media for giving Mr. Trump a platform is out. Quietly pining for major networks to again broadcast live coverage of Trump campaign rallies is in.Behind the improbable longing for the former president to gobble up political oxygen again is Democrats’ yearslong dependence on the Trump outrage machine. Since his ascent, Mr. Trump has been a one-man Democratic turnout operation, uniting an otherwise fractured opposition and fueling victories in three straight election cycles.Now, Democrats worry that the fever of Trump fatigue has passed, and that some voters are softening toward a man they once loathed. Many others may simply be paying little attention, as Mr. Trump’s share of the daily national conversation has diminished, despite the occasional interruption of campaign-trail pronouncements like his recent vow to “root out” political opponents like “vermin.”Mr. Trump, who has never been called a shrinking violet, has nevertheless skipped the three Republican presidential debates and stayed away from the major social media platforms. He is expected to spend large parts of next year in criminal trials that, except for one in Georgia, will not be televised.Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina, said she didn’t hear much about Mr. Trump these days from the rural Black and Hispanic voters her organization focuses on.“I think it’s like a relationship,” she said. “There were a lot of bad things that happened, but the longer distance you get away from the bad things, you’re like, maybe the bad things weren’t that bad.”Cynthia Wallace, a co-founder of the New Rural Project, a progressive group in North Carolina that focuses on rural Black and Hispanic voters, said that these days, she didn’t hear as much from them about Mr. Trump. Travis Dove for The New York TimesMr. Biden’s campaign, which has been slow to ramp up its operations, is betting that once voters view the election as a choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, who remains highly polarizing, they will set aside their reservations about the president and fall in line behind him.But while Mr. Trump is likely to rise in the public consciousness as November 2024 approaches, it is far from certain that he will sabotage himself politically. And it remains unclear whether his criminal trials will make him more toxic among moderate and swing voters, or whether weeks of courtroom appearances will keep his presence more muted than normal.Other Biden efforts are meeting limited success. His campaign has little to show for a $40 million advertising push promoting his economic record. And approval of the president, according to polls released this month by The New York Times and Siena College, has fallen sharply among Black and Hispanic voters — demographics that strategists say are more likely to disregard Mr. Trump when he is not front and center in the news.“Not having the day-to-day chaos of Donald Trump in people’s faces certainly has an impact on how people are measuring the urgency of the danger of another Trump administration,” said Adrianne Shropshire, the executive director of BlackPAC, an African American political organizing group. “It is important to remind people of what a total and absolute disaster Trump was.”Mr. Biden and Democrats, of course, cannot control decisions that news organizations make or the topics that absorb voters in person and on social media. But the Biden campaign, which is aiming to make the 2024 election a referendum on whether Mr. Trump should return to the White House, can try to push the national discussion in his direction with its messaging.One big challenge, however, is that many Americans who tuned out the former president when he left office show little interest in hearing more about him.Several voters who backed Mr. Biden in 2020 and are now leaning toward Mr. Trump said they had not followed the ins and outs of the former president’s post-White House activities and tended to discount and brush aside his past scandals.“I know a lot of people get mad about what he said years ago about ‘grab them by whatever,’” said Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. “That was kind of aggravating. But, you know, that was years ago. And that’s how guys talk in a locker room. I don’t think he really would do that. I think he was just saying that.”Treena Fortney, 51, a wholesaler from Covington, Ga., voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 but now regrets it and is supporting Mr. Trump. Nicole Craine for The New York TimesArthur Taylor, a business owner from Mesa, Ariz., described himself as a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden and now says he will back Mr. Trump in 2024. He said that the business climate was better when Mr. Trump was president and that the 91 criminal charges against him might not be so bad.“There’s so many things that President Trump does that’s just not ethical,” Mr. Taylor said. But he added that with the former president, “there’s a level of honesty and almost transparency, even in a way that we might cringe at it.”Those sorts of sentiments have left the Biden campaign this past week to engage in its own media criticism, publicly urging news shows on network television to follow New York Times articles about Mr. Trump’s plans for immigration and deportation policies if he wins the election.“The more the American people are confronted with who Donald Trump is — a dangerous, extreme and erratic man who only cares about using the power of the government to help himself and his friends — the more they reject him,” said Ammar Moussa, a Biden campaign spokesman. “We will continue to highlight for voters what’s at stake if Trump and his cronies are allowed anywhere near the Oval Office.”Mr. Biden and most of his Democratic allies have adopted a collective vow of silence on what portends to be the biggest Trump-related story line over the next year — the four criminal trials he faces in Florida, Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C.In August, 38 House Democrats wrote to the federal courts administrator asking that Mr. Trump’s federal trials be broadcast live on television. Mr. Trump himself last week asked that cameras be allowed in the courtroom for his trial in Washington — a request that federal prosecutors swiftly opposed.“You see one of the court-artist sketches, and you look at that and you’re like, I’m not really sure which trial he’s on,” Senator John Fetterman, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said in an interview. “Is anyone paying attention to them?”Donna Brazile, a veteran Democratic strategist, said Mr. Biden’s decision to stay quiet had allowed Mr. Trump to frame the cases against him as “a one-sided conversation.”“We have not engaged on perhaps Donald Trump’s No. 1 Achilles’ heel, which is the 91 indictments,” she said. “We’ll see what happens when we do.”Aside from the trials, Democrats are longing for the days when cable networks carried Mr. Trump’s rallies live. To watch a Trump rally live now, viewers need to find an online stream or a fringy far-right cable station like Newsmax.On this, Mr. Trump and Democrats tend to be in agreement.“The more people see and hear from Donald Trump and what he has planned for the country if he regains power, the better off Democrats will be up and down the ballot,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “Trump’s voracious need for attention works to Democrats’ advantage.”Google search interest in Mr. Trump remains well below the level it was at when he was in office and running for re-election four years ago. The television ratings for Mr. Trump’s CNN town-hall event in May were strong, but well below what similar events in 2016 and 2020 drew.Jessica Floyd, the executive director of the Hub Project, a progressive group, urged mainstream cable TV networks to “remind people exactly how bad these rallies are and how corrosive they are for our democracy.”She added, “They should also show President Biden selling an absolutely historic level of investment in our economy.”Jon Soltz, a co-founder and chairman of VoteVets, a liberal veterans group, cautioned Democrats to be patient.“There’s a huge amount of the population right now that doesn’t realize that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president,” he said. “When that happens, you will see a different response.”Camille Baker More

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    Megyn Kelly Will Moderate the Next G.O.P. Debate, on NewsNation

    The event, on Dec. 6, is an opportunity for an upstart cable news network to expand its relatively small viewership.Megyn Kelly, whose high-flying career as a Fox News anchor fell to earth after an ill-advised move to NBC — and then remade herself as a conservative podcaster and radio host — is set to return to the political spotlight next month as a moderator for the next Republican primary debate.The event, set for Dec. 6 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., is the fourth meeting of the party’s presidential candidates. Former President Donald J. Trump, who famously clashed (and later made up) with Ms. Kelly during the 2016 election, is unlikely to attend.The debate will be hosted by the upstart television network NewsNation, a 24-hour cable news station that Nexstar Media Group owns. Its selection by the Republican Party is a breakthrough moment of sorts for a channel that is still unfamiliar to many viewers. The channel has aggressively hired veteran anchors and producers in recent years, but its audience remains small compared with rivals like Fox News or MSNBC.Ms. Kelly will be joined at the moderators’ desk by Elizabeth Vargas, a NewsNation anchor, and Eliana Johnson, editor in chief of The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site. The Free Beacon and SiriusXM, which airs Ms. Kelly’s radio show, are sponsors of the debate. The event will also be shown on digital platforms and local affiliates of the CW, the broadcast network that Nexstar owns.NewsNation, which presents itself as a centrist, independent news service, has been dogged in the past by accusations of conservative bias, staff resignations and reports of dysfunction. Recently, it has added a number of familiar on-air personalities, including Dan Abrams, Ashleigh Banfield and Ms. Vargas, who was previously an anchor of “World News Tonight” and “20/20” on ABC. Chris Cuomo, who was fired by CNN in 2021 amid ethics concerns, is the channel’s 8 p.m. host.NewsNation is an upstart television network.Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service, via Getty ImagesThe network has also hired numerous former employees of Fox News. They include Chris Stirewalt, the former Fox News politics editor who was fired because of his role in the network’s election night call in Arizona that enraged Mr. Trump, and Leland Vittert, a former correspondent who left the network after his critical reporting on Mr. Trump angered Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox News’s parent company. Cherie Grzech, who led Fox News’s politics and campaign coverage for many years, is also now at the network.Political parties typically team up with a major broadcast or cable channel to host their primary debates, with an eye toward achieving the largest possible audience. Last month, NewsNation averaged 118,000 viewers in prime time on weeknights, up 23 percent from a year earlier. Sean Compton, the Nexstar executive who oversees NewsNation, said on Thursday that the debate would be “an opportunity to introduce more Americans” to the channel’s “outstanding journalism.”Other participants suggested that viewers could expect a different tone. Ms. Johnson, of The Free Beacon, said the debate would occur “outside of the mainstream media echo chamber” and provide Republicans with “a debate where conservative ideas and values will be the terrain and not the target.”Ms. Kelly promised an entertaining night. “It will be the margarita of debates,” she said in a statement. “Spicy, fun and somewhat intoxicating. Looking forward to it.” More

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    Who Are Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Debate Moderators?

    The role of debate moderator carries prestige, but it also brings exacting demands and inherent risks: personal attacks by candidates, grievances about perceived biases and, for the two moderators of Wednesday’s Republican primary debate, a tempestuous cable news network’s reputation.Enter Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the Fox News Channel mainstays who drew that assignment and will pose questions to the eight G.O.P. presidential candidates squaring off for the first time, absent former President Donald J. Trump.The party’s front-runner, Mr. Trump will bypass the debate in favor of an online interview with Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in April.But that doesn’t mean the debate’s moderators will be under any less of a microscope.Here’s a closer look at who they are:Bret BaierHe is the chief political anchor for Fox News and the host of “Special Report With Bret Baier” at 6 p.m. on weeknights. Mr. Baier, 53, joined the network in 1998, two years after the network debuted, according to his biography.Mr. Baier, like Ms. MacCallum, is no stranger to the debate spotlight.In 2016, he moderated three G.O.P. primary debates for Fox, alongside Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, who have since left the network. He was present when Ms. Kelly grilled Mr. Trump about his treatment of women during a 2015 debate, an exchange that drew Mr. Trump’s ire and led him to boycott the network’s next debate nearly six months later.During the 2012 presidential race, Mr. Baier moderated five Republican primary debates.At a network dominated by conservative commentators like Sean Hannity and the departed Mr. Carlson and Bill O’Reilly, Mr. Baier has generally avoided controversy — but not entirely.After Fox News called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. on election night in 2020, becoming the first major news network to do so and enraging Mr. Trump and his supporters, Mr. Baier suggested in an email to network executives the next morning that the outlet should reverse its projection.“It’s hurting us,” he wrote in the email, which was obtained by The New York Times.Mr. Baier was also part of a witness list in the defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems brought against Fox News over the network’s role in spreading disinformation about the company’s voting equipment. Fox settled the case for $787.5 million before it went to trial.Martha MacCallumShe is the anchor and executive editor of “The Story With Martha MacCallum” at 3 p.m. on weekdays. Ms. MacCallum, 59, joined the network in 2004, according to her biography.During the 2016 election, Ms. MacCallum moderated a Fox News forum for the bottom seven Republican presidential contenders who had not qualified for the party’s first debate in August 2015. She reprised that role in January 2016, just days before the Iowa caucuses.She and Mr. Baier also moderated a series of town halls with individual Democratic candidates during the 2020 election, including one that featured Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.Before joining Fox, she worked for NBC and CNBC.When Fox projected Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump in Arizona, effectively indicating that Mr. Biden had clinched the presidency, Ms. MacCallum was similarly drawn into the maelstrom at the network.During a Zoom meeting with network executives and Mr. Baier, she suggested it was not enough to call states based on numerical calculations — the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations — but that viewers’ reactions should be considered.“In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, according to a review of the phone call by The Times, “the game is just very, very different.” More

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    Fox News Gambled, but Tucker Carlson Can Still Take Down the House

    For the quarter-century-plus that the Fox News Channel has been coming into America’s living rooms, it has operated according to a cardinal tenet: No one at the cable network is bigger than Fox News itself. It’s a lesson Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly all learned the hard way after they left Fox and saw their fame and influence (if not their fortunes) evaporate. Once the biggest names in cable news, they now spend their days wandering in the wilderness of podcasts and third-tier streaming platforms. Even Roger Ailes, Fox News’s original architect and the man who devised — and then ruthlessly enforced — the no-one-bigger-than rule, discovered that he was expendable when Rupert Murdoch pushed him out as Fox’s chairman and chief executive in 2016 amid sexual harassment allegations. Mr. Ailes soon disappeared to a mansion in Florida and, less than a year later, died in exile from the media world he’d once commanded.When Fox News abruptly fired Tucker Carlson, the network’s most popular prime-time host and the most powerful person in conservative media, many savvy press critics predicted the same fate for him: professional oblivion. Mr. Carlson had himself once replaced Ms. Kelly, and later Mr. O’Reilly, and each time he climbed to a new, better slot in the Fox News lineup he garnered bigger and bigger ratings. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, some new up-and-comer would inherit Mr. Carlson’s audience and replace him as the king (or queen) of conservative media. “The ‘talent’ at the Fox News Channel has never been the star,” Politico’s Jack Shafer wrote earlier this week. “Fox itself, which convenes the audience, is the star.”But there’s good reason to believe Mr. Carlson will be the exception that proves the rule. For one thing, unlike previous stars who have left Fox News, Mr. Carlson departed when he was still at the height of his power, making his firing all the more sudden and shocking. Three days before his sacking, he gave the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala. Two weeks before that, he browbeat Texas’ Republican governor to issue a pardon to a man who had been convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin.More important, at Fox, he exercised power in ways that were new and unique for a cable star. He was a sophisticated political operator as much as he was a talented television host — to an astonishingly unsettling degree, as he continued to thrive while making racist and sexist comments and earning the praise of neo-Nazis. Like Donald Trump — to say nothing of other Republican politicians and conservative media figures — he gave voice to an anger, sense of grievance and conspiratorial mind-set that resonated with many Americans, particularly those on the far right. Unlike Mr. Trump — not to mention his motley crew of cheerleaders and imitators — Mr. Carlson developed and articulated a coherent political ideology that could prove more lasting, and influential, than any cult of personality. Mr. Carlson has left Fox News. But his dark and outsize influence on the conservative movement — and on American politics — is hardly over.Tucker Carlson merchandise at the Heritage Foundation’s Leadership Summit on Friday, April 21. Mr. Carlson is leaving Fox at the height of his power. Leigh Vogel for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Carlson met with Mr. Ailes in 2009 to discuss a job at Fox News, Mr. Carlson’s career was at a nadir. He’d been let go from both CNN and MSNBC. He’d developed a game show pilot for CBS that wasn’t picked up. His stint on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” lasted just one episode. His finances were so stretched that he’d decided to sell his suburban New Jersey mansion out from under his wife and four children.“You’re a loser and you screwed up your whole life,” Mr. Ailes told Mr. Carlson, according to an account of the conversation Mr. Carlson later gave to his friend, the former Dick Cheney adviser Neil Patel. “But you have talent. And the only thing you have going for you is that I like hiring talented people who have screwed things up for themselves and learned a lesson, because once I do, you’re gonna work your ass off for me.”Mr. Carlson didn’t disappoint. Relegated to weekend morning show anchor duties, he threw himself into the job, participating in cooking segments with guests like Billy Ray Cyrus, competing against (and losing to) his female co-anchor in a Spartan Race and even subjecting himself to a dunk tank. He did it all with a smile, but, for a man who once hosted two prime-time cable news shows, as well as a highbrow talk show on the Public Broadcasting System, it had to have been humiliating. When his wife, Susie, sent an email in 2014 inviting some of Mr. Carlson’s Washington friends up to New York to celebrate his 45th birthday, she told guests they might “throw eggs at the FOX studio window!” (Since Hunter Biden was a friend of Mr. Carlson’s at the time and on the invite list, the email was later discovered on Mr. Biden’s laptop.)During his time as a host on “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Carlson’s contrarian streak curdled into resentment against “the elites” who took the country into Iraq, triggered the 2008 financial crisis and refused to give him a television role commensurate with his talents.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesMr. Carlson’s big break at Fox News arrived in 2016 in the form of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Although it’s hard to imagine now, Fox initially seemed intent on torpedoing Mr. Trump’s candidacy. So antagonistic were its hosts and commentators toward Mr. Trump in the early days of the 2016 race that it became a challenge for Fox to produce compelling television about the man who was dominating the G.O.P. field. No one — or at least no one Fox’s producers deemed camera-ready — seemed willing to make a sensible case for him.Enter Mr. Carlson. He’d nursed a soft spot for Mr. Trump ever since the early 2000s, when he made a throwaway joke on CNN about Mr. Trump’s hair and Mr. Trump responded with a blunt voice mail. “It’s true you have better hair than I do,” Mr. Carlson recalled Mr. Trump telling his answering machine. But, Mr. Trump said, with a vulgar boast, he had sex with more women. Mr. Carlson, who’d never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, was amused. More than a decade later, when Mr. Trump ran for president, he became intrigued. And it was that early openness to Mr. Trump’s candidacy that facilitated Mr. Carlson’s rise at Fox.Mr. Carlson had two motivations for not joining in the chorus denouncing Mr. Trump. One was ruthlessly strategic. Through the conservative website he launched with Mr. Patel in 2010, The Daily Caller, Mr. Carlson could see what got clicks: sensational articles about the twin scourges of illegal immigration and Black-on-white crime, plus slide shows of busty supermodels. The Caller’s web traffic metrics served as an early warning system for Mr. Carlson about where the conservative base was headed, and how a populist candidate who explicitly ran on nativism, white grievance and sexism might have a lane in a Republican primary.Mr. Carlson’s openness to Mr. Trump also had something to do with his own ideological journey. He started his career as a writer at The Weekly Standard, as a standard issue Reagan conservative, albeit one with a contrarian streak. The Iraq War, which he initially supported despite harboring doubts, hardened his heterodox views. Then, as his professional struggles mounted, his contrarianism curdled into resentment against “the elites” who took the country into Iraq, triggered the 2008 financial crisis and refused to give Mr. Carlson a television role commensurate with his talents. He paired his staple rep ties and Rolex with this new populist streak — and assumed the role of class traitor.That meant that in 2016, when most of his fellow conservative pundits still believed the G.O.P. needed to broaden its tent and so dismissed Mr. Trump out of hand, Mr. Carlson was able to recognize the potential appeal of the businessman turned reality-TV star turned populist politician. He was willing to say as much on air, which meant that Mr. Carlson began getting more and choicer opportunities at Fox to make the case that Mr. Trump should be taken seriously. Then, shortly after Mr. Trump’s election in November, as a reward of sorts for his prescience, Mr. Murdoch gave Mr. Carlson his own evening show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” By then, of course, Fox News was fully on board the Trump Train. Which is what made Mr. Carlson’s next move so interesting: He took a step off.At one point during Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated show in the history of cable news, drawing over four million viewers on some evenings. But it was not a down-the-line, pro-Trump show. Each night, Mr. Carlson articulated a populist-nationalist ideology best described as Trumpism without Mr. Trump. He borrowed from (and sometimes, on his Fox Nation streaming show, even invited on air) “new right” intellectuals like the blogger Curtis Yarvin and the Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton, smuggling their fringe ideas — about how the United States would work better as a monarchy, for instance — into the conservative mainstream. Indeed, Mr. Carlson himself often offered views that were more inflammatory and more extreme than the president’s — complaining that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided,” for instance, and proclaiming that white supremacy was “a hoax.” A blog post on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer celebrated: “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”Mr. Carlson has already folded his firing into the apocalyptic worldview he’s so successfully promulgated these last few years.Max Oden/Sipa, via Associated PressAnd when Mr. Trump wasn’t willing to go as far as Mr. Carlson, Mr. Carlson wasn’t afraid to call Mr. Trump out. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, he lambasted Mr. Trump for not cracking down harder on Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington and elsewhere. “If you can’t keep a Fox News correspondent from getting attacked directly across from your house, how can you protect my family?” Mr. Carlson said on his show. “How are you going to protect the country? How hard are you trying?” He was positioning himself, in opposition to Mr. Trump, as the vanguard of the American right. As Christopher Rufo, the ubiquitous conservative culture warrior whose own rise to prominence began with an appearance on Mr. Carlson’s show, once explained: “Tucker frames the narrative for conservative politics. Tucker doesn’t react to the news; he creates the news.”Mr. Carlson’s criticism of Mr. Trump and the wary distance he kept from him — sometimes even refusing to take his calls — made him that much more intriguing to the president. “Tucker was the hot girl that didn’t want to sleep with him,” says one former Trump White House official. “I think Trump was fascinated by this idea that ‘Everybody else is calling me. Why aren’t you calling me?’” Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as Mr. Trump’s White House communications director, recalls the president frequently fretting about getting on Mr. Carlson’s bad side. “He’d say, ‘Tucker’s crushing us, our base is going to leave us,’” Ms. Farah Griffin says. It was an acknowledgment from Mr. Trump that Mr. Carlson had become bigger than Fox.That certainly seemed to be the view inside the cable network. When Mr. Ailes ran Fox News, the pecking order was clear. If a host or reporter stepped out of line, Mr. Ailes would simply yank that person off the air, instructing producers to “show ’em the red light.” Mr. Carlson’s ascension at Fox occurred after Mr. Ailes’s departure from the network. The executive team that replaced him — the Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott and Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan, who’s the chief executive of the Fox Corporation — did not enforce as much discipline. Mr. Carlson repeatedly seemed to step over lines at Fox — endorsing the racist “great replacement theory,” circulating false conspiracy theories about Covid and Jan. 6, and attacking other Fox hosts on-air — only to have Fox execs then move the line. If Mr. Ailes was always goading disgruntled hosts to quit, telling them they would be nothing without Fox, Mr. Carlson seemed to be daring his bosses to fire him.After Mr. Trump went kicking and screaming from the White House (as well as from Twitter and Facebook), Mr. Carlson, still ensconced on Fox News and with unfettered access to social media, emerged as the far right’s standard-bearer in America’s culture wars, coming to occupy the same mental real estate — among both conservatives and liberals — that Mr. Trump once did. He was no longer just a cable host but a movement leader — working to bring the G.O.P. in line with his own views. On his show, he boosted ideological comrades like J.D. Vance, who shared Mr. Carlson’s skepticism about U.S. support of Ukraine in its war with Russia, gifting Mr. Vance hours of free airtime in the run-up to the Republican primary for the 2022 Ohio Senate race. Off-air, he personally lobbied Mr. Trump to give Mr. Vance his endorsement. At one point Mr. Carlson spent nearly two hours on FaceTime with Mr. Trump, while Mr. Trump golfed in Florida, making the case that Mr. Vance believed what Mr. Trump believed and that, were Mr. Trump to run for president again, he needed someone like Mr. Vance in the Senate. According to a person familiar with the call, Mr. Trump ended it by telling Mr. Carlson, “You’ll be happy.” A few weeks later, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Vance, propelling him to the Republican nomination and, eventually, the Senate — one of the few 2022 bright spots for Republicans.As Mr. Carlson turned his attention toward the 2024 presidential race, his relationship with Mr. Trump, once again, became complicated. On the one hand, he was dead-set opposed to Nikki Haley, for whom he’d developed an intense personal dislike during an ill-fated hunting weekend about 10 years ago. (After Ms. Haley eventually launched her presidential candidacy in February, Mr. Carlson told his viewers, “Nikki Haley believes in collective racial guilt,” before going on to say, “She believes identity politics is our future. ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman,’ she says. That’s her pitch.”) On the other hand, Mr. Carlson, like many at Fox News — including Mr. Murdoch, who, in the wake of Jan. 6, told a former executive that Fox was seeking “to make Trump a nonperson” — appeared to be leaning toward the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, as a less erratic, more electable alternative to Mr. Trump. (In 2020, Mr. Carlson moved from Washington, D.C., to the small resort town of Boca Grande, Fla.)Sensing this, Mr. Trump tried to win back Mr. Carlson, but Mr. Carlson refused a sit-down. Finally, last July, Donald Trump Jr., with whom Mr. Carlson has become close, traveled to Mr. Carlson’s summer residence in rural Maine. There, according to people familiar with the visit, Mr. Trump Jr. pressed Mr. Carlson to meet with his father. A few weeks later, Mr. Carlson showed up at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster resort in New Jersey on the same weekend it was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour. The result was pictures of Mr. Carlson yukking it up with Mr. Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene in the tournament’s V.I.P. section.By keeping his distance from Mr. Trump, Mr. Carlson only made himself more intriguing to the former president.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd the two have grown closer since. Although Mr. Trump was reportedly upset when text messages from Mr. Carlson calling Mr. Trump “a demonic force” and claiming “I hate him passionately” were released in March as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox, the two patched things up in a phone call. And in April, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” devoted a whole hour to Mr. Carlson’s one-on-one softball interview with Mr. Trump — one of Mr. Trump’s longest appearances on the cable network since he was in the White House.Less than two weeks later, Fox fired Mr. Carlson. The reasons for his sacking remain unclear. It may have had to do with offensive comments he had made about Fox executives in texts uncovered in the Dominion suit. Or it could have been because of another lawsuit, from Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on his show, accusing him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. Or it might have had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a Jan. 6 protester from Arizona who was at the center of Mr. Carlson’s false conspiracy theory about the day. Or perhaps, as some reporting from Semafor suggests, the 92-year-old Mr. Murdoch has simply become erratic in his decision-making.Whatever the reason, Mr. Carlson now finds himself with no shortage of options. He could go to work for Newsmax or One America News Network, two upstart right-wing networks that have been trying to outflank Fox. (By Wednesday, two days after Mr. Carlson’s firing, Fox News’s ratings in the 8 p.m. hour had plummeted by roughly half, to their lowest levels in more than 20 years. Meanwhile, Newsmax’s audience in that time slot rose more than 300 percent over the previous week.) He might strike out on his own and form a media company to stream his show online. (“The world is Tucker’s oyster,” says one person who spoke with Mr. Carlson this week. “Many billionaires and others with deep pockets would be eager to fund a new venture.”)Ratings at Fox News during Mr. Carlson’s former time slot have plummetedTotal weeknight viewership at 8 p.m.

    Source: AdweekBy The New York TimesAnd there’s always the chance that he could run for office. That’s a prospect that Mr. Carlson has long pooh-poohed. “I have zero ambition, not just politically but in life,” he demurred last summer when he was asked about any White House ambitions. But one of his friends recalls a family member discussing the possibility of Mr. Carlson running for president as far back as 2012.On Wednesday night just after 8 o’clock — the time when, until his firing two days earlier, he’d usually be launching into his opening monologue on Fox News — Mr. Carlson reappeared with a short, somewhat cryptic video on Twitter. He talked about “how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are” and complained that both political parties and their donors “actively collude” to shut down discussion of the truly important issues: “war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources.” America has become a “one-party state,” where the “people in charge” know that the old “orthodoxies” won’t last, he said, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. “True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left but there are some, and that’s enough,” he continued. “As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon.” In under two hours, the video racked up 11 million views.It was vintage Mr. Carlson, and it showed how he had already incorporated his firing into the apocalyptic worldview he’s so successfully promulgated these last few years. Fox News was now part of “the elite consensus” Mr. Carlson seeks to overturn. And in this moment of unraveling, when hostility toward and distrust of institutions and elites is at an all-time high, it’s not hard to imagine a good segment of Americans following along with this logic. In their minds, Fox will now join Wall Street and big tech, globalists and the deep state, the Republican establishment and the woke as something that must be opposed. And in a world in which an increasing number of Americans are already fracturing into their own realities, Mr. Carlson will stand, for many of them, as the one person who’s independent and courageous and powerful enough to tell them the truth. Just as Mr. Murdoch and Fox failed to make Mr. Trump a nonperson, they likely won’t be able to make Mr. Carlson one, either.

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    Jason Zengerle (@zengerle) is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a New America national fellow. His forthcoming book about Tucker Carlson and conservative media is “Hated by All the Right People.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    What Tucker Carlson’s Dismissal From Fox News Means for the Network

    The host’s abrupt dismissal upends Fox News’s prime-time lineup — and the carefully honed impression that the ratings star was all but untouchable.In the days after the 2020 election, the Fox host Tucker Carlson sent an anxious text message to one of his producers. Fox viewers were furious about the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr.The defeated president, Donald J. Trump, was eagerly stoking their anger. As Mr. Carlson and his producer batted around ideas for a new Carlson podcast — one that might help win back the audience most angry about Mr. Trump’s defeat — they saw both opportunity and peril in the moment.“He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” Mr. Carlson warned, in a text released during Fox’s now-settled litigation with the voting software company Dominion.Mr. Carlson proved prophetic, if not entirely in the way he had predicted. His nearly six-year reign in prime-time cable came to a sudden end on Monday, as Fox abruptly cut ties with the host, thanking him in a terse news release “for his service to the network.”And while the exact circumstances of his departure remained hazy on Monday evening, the dismissal comes amid a series of high-stakes — and already high-priced — legal battles emanating from Fox’s postelection campaign to placate Mr. Trump’s base and win back viewers who believed that his defeat was a sham.Mr. Carlson’s departure upended Fox’s lucrative prime-time lineup and shocked a media world far more accustomed to his remarkable staying power. Over his years at Fox, the host had proved capable of withstanding controversy after controversy.The network stuck by him — as did Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation — after Mr. Carlson claimed that immigration had made America “poor and dirtier.” He seemed to shrug off his on-air popularization of a racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” along with revelations that he was a prodigious airer of the company’s own dirty laundry. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Carlson’s show frequently promoted the Kremlin’s point of view, attacking U.S. sanctions and blaming the conflict on American designs for expanding NATO.The drought of premium advertisers on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” — driven away by boycotts targeting his more racist and inflammatory segments — did not seem to dent his standing within the network, so long as the audience stuck around. Disdainful of the cable network’s top executives, Mr. Carlson cultivated the impression that he was close to the Murdoch family and, perhaps, untouchable.Mr. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media figure prefigured Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party: His own conversion from bow-tied libertarian to vengeful populist traced the nativist insurgency that fractured and remade the party during the Obama years. But he prospered in tandem with Mr. Trump’s presidency, as the New York real estate tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the primary touchstones of conservative politics.Despite his private disparagement of Mr. Trump — “I hate him,” Mr. Carlson texted a colleague in January 2021 — Mr. Carlson electrified the president’s white, older base with vivid monologues about elite corruption, American decay and a grand plan by “the ruling class” to replace “legacy” Americans with a flood of migrants from other countries and cultures. With deliberate, hypnotic repetition, he warned viewers: “They” want to control and destroy “you.”Crucially, he worked to help Fox woo Trump supporters back to the network in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat.In 2022, Mr. Carlson’s program averaged three million total viewers a night.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesIn broadcast after broadcast, he unspooled a counternarrative claiming falsely that the election had been “seized from the hands of voters” and suggesting that the voting had been rife with fraud and corruption. After Trump supporters — whipped into a frenzy in part by Mr. Trump and Fox — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, he recast the assault as a largely peaceful protest against legitimate wrongdoing, its violence the product of a false-flag operation orchestrated by the F.B.I.As a programming strategy, it worked: Last year, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged more than three million total viewers a night. At his height, and perhaps still, Mr. Carlson counted among the most influential figures on the right.But if Fox and its star host once prospered because of Mr. Trump, their efforts to deny or overturn the election results have also thrust both the network and the former president into legal peril.Mr. Trump faces one investigation by a federal special counsel over his efforts to retain power after losing and another by a local prosecutor in Georgia that began after the defeated president, determined to prevail, asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results there.A lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems speaking to reporters last week. Fox has agreed to pay the voting software company $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesFox agreed last week to pay three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation claim brought by Dominion, which had sued Fox for spreading false accusations that the voting software company was at the center of a vast conspiracy to cheat Mr. Trump of victory in 2020.Mr. Carlson and his show featured prominently in the Dominion case. And thousands of pages of internal texts and emails released as part of the suit revealed that the network’s embrace of election-fraud theories — and their promotion by guests and personalities at Fox News and Fox Business — were part of a broader campaign to assuage viewers angry about Mr. Trump’s loss.They also revealed that neither Mr. Carlson nor his fellow hosts truly believed that the election was rigged, despite their on-air commentary. And texts showed that Mr. Carlson held Fox’s titular executives in low regard, slamming them for “destroying our credibility” — for allowing Fox to accurately report Mr. Biden’s win — and belittling them as a “combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down.”Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer, is also suing the network.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe company is also facing a lawsuit from a former Carlson producer, Abby Grossberg, who said that she faced sexual harassment from other Carlson staff members and was coached by Fox lawyers to downplay the role of news executives in allowing unproven allegations of voting fraud onto the air.Yet another election technology company that featured in Fox’s coverage of supposed election fraud, Smartmatic, is still suing the network. In its complaint, Smartmatic said that Fox knowingly aired more than 100 false statements about its products. A day after the suit was filed in 2021, Fox Business canceled the show hosted by Lou Dobbs, who had been among the foremost spreaders of baseless theories involving election fraud.In the wake of Mr. Carlson’s abrupt dismissal, current and former Fox employees buzzed with speculation about the true reasons for his firing, and what it said about the company plans moving forward.Few seemed to believe that Mr. Carlson was being punished for his lengthy history of inflammatory remarks on-air — if so, why now? — or for his formerly private criticisms of Fox executives. (Some pointed out that his fellow prime-time hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were similarly scathing in their own text messages.)A more interesting question, perhaps, is what Mr. Carlson will do next.Like his clearest intellectual predecessor, the commentator and politician Patrick J. Buchanan, Mr. Carlson is one of the few people to find success as not only a television entertainer, but also an institution-builder — he co-founded the pioneering right-wing tabloid The Daily Caller — and a movement leader. More than any other figure with a mainstream platform, he succeeded in bring far-right ideas about immigration and culture to a broad audience.He is also, now, among the very few television talents to have been canceled by all three major cable news networks. Before Fox, he had a long run as a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” and later headlined a show at MSNBC. In recent years, he served as both a pillar of Fox News’s prime-time lineup and the biggest-name draw on the company’s paid streaming network, Fox Nation, where he aired a thrice-weekly talk show and occasional documentaries.Within hours of his firing on Monday, at least one putative job offer was forthcoming.“Hey @TuckerCarlson,” tweeted RT, the Russian state-backed media channel. “You can always question more with @RT_com.” More

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    Why Fox News Lied to the Viewers It ‘Respects’

    There are some stories that are important enough to pause the news cycle and linger on them, to explore not just what happened, but why. And so it is with Fox News’s role in the events leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Thanks to a recent filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit against Fox, there is now compelling evidence that America’s most-watched cable news network presented information it knew to be false as part of an effort to placate an angry audience. It knowingly sacrificed its integrity to maintain its market share.Why? There are the obvious reasons: Money. Power. Fame. These are universal human temptations. But the answer goes deeper. Fox News became a juggernaut not simply by being “Republican,” or “conservative,” but by offering its audience something it craved even more deeply: representation. And journalism centered on representation ultimately isn’t journalism at all.To understand the Fox News phenomenon, one has to understand the place it occupies in Red America. It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard. If there’s an important good news story in Red America, the first call is to Fox. If conservative Christians face a threat to their civil liberties, the first call is to Fox. If you’re a conservative celebrity and you need to sell a book, the first call is to Fox.And Fox takes those calls. In the time before Donald Trump, I spent my share of moments in Fox green rooms and pitching stories to Fox producers. I knew they were more interested in stories about, say, religious liberty than most mainstream media outlets were. I knew they loved human-interest stories about virtuous veterans and cops. Sometimes this was good — we need more coverage of religion in America, for example — but over time Fox morphed into something well beyond a news network.Fox isn’t just the news hub of right-wing America, it’s a cultural cornerstone, and its business model is so successful that it’s more accurate to think of the rest of the right-wing media universe not as a collection of competitors to Fox, but rather as imitators. From television channels to news sites, right-wing personalities aren’t so much competing with Fox as auditioning for it.Take, for example, the online space. Fox News is so dominant that, according to data from December, you could take the total traffic of the next 19 conservative websites combined, and still not reach half of Fox’s audience.But that kind of loyalty is built around a social compact, the profound and powerful sense in Red America that Fox is for us. It’s our megaphone to the culture. Yet when Fox created this compact, it placed the audience in charge of its content.During the Trump years, Fox faithfully upheld its end of the bargain. If you were Republican and felt embattled for supporting Donald Trump, a quick visit to Fox (especially in prime time) would calm your mind and soothe your soul. There you’d be reminded that the Democrats are the real radicals. That the Democrats are the true threat to America. And if you voted for Trump even though you were uncomfortable with some of his conduct, it was only because “they” forced your hand.As the Trump years wore on, the prime-time messaging became more blatant. Supporting Trump became a marker not just of patriotism, but also of courage. And what of conservatives, like myself, who opposed Trump? We were “cowards” or “grifters” who sold our souls for 30 pieces of silver and airtime on MSNBC.Our disagreement was cast as an act of outright betrayal. People like me had allegedly turned our backs on our own community. We had failed in our obligation to be their voice.So you can start to understand the shock when, on Election Day in 2020, Fox News accurately, if arguably prematurely, called Arizona for Joe Biden. It broke the social compact. By presuming the fairness of the election and by declaring Joe Biden the winner of a previously red state, Fox sent a message to its own audience — an audience that had been primed to mistrust election results by Trump and by reports on Fox News — that it did not hear them. It did not see them.In the emails and texts highlighted in the Dominion filing, you see Fox News figures, including Sean Hannity and Suzanne Scott and Lachlan Murdoch, referring to the need to “respect” the audience. To be clear, by “respect” they didn’t mean “tell the truth” — an act of genuine respect. Instead they meant “represent.”Representation can have its place. Fox’s deep connection with its conservative audience means that it can be ahead of the rest of the media on stories that affect red states and red culture.But there is a difference between coming from a community and speaking for a community. In journalism, the former can be valuable, but the latter can be corrupt. It can result in audience capture (writing to please your audience, not challenge it) and in fear and timidity in reporting facts that contradict popular narratives. And in extreme instances — such as what we witnessed from Fox News after the 2020 presidential election — it can result in almost cartoonish villainy.There are courageous reporters at Fox. We learned some of their names in the Dominion filing. They were the people who had the courage to tell the truth. But then there are the leaders, and the prime-time stars. Tough? Courageous? Hardly. When push comes to shove, they embody the possibly apocryphal remark of the French revolutionary Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” And follow them they did, straight into a morass of lies and conspiracy theories that should undermine Fox’s credibility for years to come.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    What Fox News Says When You’re Not Listening

    People who remember Fox News host Tucker Carlson as a bow-tied creature of establishment Washington often wonder what happened to him. Twenty years ago, he was a preppy Beltway habitué and impishly libertarian magazine writer; a wryly affectionate account of Al Sharpton in Liberia that he wrote for Esquire was nominated for a National Magazine Award. Now he’s the sneering, conspiracy-obsessed host of what The New York Times called possibly “the most racist show in the history of cable news.”As The Times wrote, there’s a long-running debate about “whether Mr. Carlson’s show is merely lucrative theater or an expression of his true values.” By most accounts, Carlson shares Donald Trump’s deep cultural resentments. But as an explosive new court filing in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News demonstrates, in trying to explain why Carlson and many of his colleagues do what they do, we shouldn’t underestimate simple greed.The brief, a motion for summary judgment in a case stemming from Fox’s egregiously false claims of Dominion-abetted election fraud, offers a portrait of extravagant cynicism. It reveals how obsessed Carlson and other leading Fox News figures were with audience share, and their fear of being outflanked by even further-right outlets like Newsmax.“It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” Bill Sammon, a Fox senior vice president until 2021, is quoted as saying. It’s a line that would fall flat on “Succession” because it’s too absurdly on the nose.As the Dominion filing lays out, there was panic at Fox News over viewer backlash to the network correctly calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. Despite its accuracy, the call was viewed, internally, as a catastrophe.“Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience?” Carlson texted his producer. He added, “An alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.” Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”Hyping false claims about election fraud was a way for Fox to win its audience back. While the Arizona call was “damaging,” Fox News C.E.O. Suzanne Scott wrote in a text to Fox executive Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, “We will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”When Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked Trump’s wild claims about Dominion on Twitter, Carlson was enraged and tried to get her fired. “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight,” he texted Hannity. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” (Heinrich kept her job but deleted the tweet.)The network knew, of course, that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell, a chief promoter of Dominion conspiracy theories, was a delusional fantasist. The legal brief reveals that some of her claims about Dominion were based on an email Powell had received from someone who claimed to be capable of “time travel in a semiconscious state.” On Nov. 18, 2020, Carlson told Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a “complete nut.”But according to the Dominion brief, an analysis by Ron Mitchell, the senior vice president for prime-time programming and analytics, found that “Fox viewers were switching the channel specifically to watch Sidney Powell as a guest” on Newsmax. A few days after this analysis, Powell was a guest on Hannity’s show.At one point, Carlson did express skepticism of Powell on-air, noting on Nov. 19 that she had never produced evidence for her claims. “Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened, and precisely who did it,” he said, adding, “We are certainly hopeful that she will.”Even this gentle note of doubt produced viewer pushback, though most of a message about it from Fox executive Raj Shah is redacted. Afterward, Carlson seems to have given up trying to steer his audience away from total credulity about Trump’s stolen election claims, even though he privately called Trump a “demonic force.” On Jan. 26, Carlson hosted MyPillow founder Mike Lindell on his show and let him sound off about Dominion without resistance. In fairness, Carlson may have had a motive for indulging Lindell besides grubbing for ratings. As Media Matters for America pointed out, MyPillow at the time was Carlson’s single biggest advertiser.It’s certainly true that all cable news shows program with ratings in mind. MSNBC — where, full disclosure, I’m a contributor — pays much closer attention to various Trump scandals than to climate change or the war in Ukraine because it’s catering to its audience. But there is no analogue for the way Fox treats its viewers.In addition to MSNBC, in the past I’ve appeared a number of times on CNN. Sometimes hosts are a little saltier when the cameras aren’t rolling, but I don’t recall ever hearing any daylight between the views they express on-air and off. Fox News is unique in its bad faith.“Respecting this audience whether we agree or not is critical,” Hannity texted on Nov. 24. It’s a version of respect indistinguishable from contempt.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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    Fox Stars Privately Expressed Disbelief About Trump’s Election Fraud Claims

    The comments, by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and others, were released as part of a defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems.Newly disclosed messages and testimony from some of the biggest stars and most senior executives at Fox News revealed that they privately expressed disbelief about President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, even though the network continued to promote many of those lies on the air.The hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as others at the company, repeatedly insulted and mocked Trump advisers, including Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, in text messages with each other in the weeks after the election, according to a legal filing on Thursday by Dominion Voting Systems. Dominion is suing Fox for defamation in a case that poses considerable financial and reputational risk for the country’s most-watched cable news network.“Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Mr. Carlson wrote to Ms. Ingraham on Nov. 18, 2020.Ms. Ingraham responded: “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”Mr. Carlson continued, “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” he added, making clear that he did not.The messages also show that such doubts extended to the highest levels of the Fox Corporation, with Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, calling Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff.”On one occasion, as Mr. Murdoch watched Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell on television, he told Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media, “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.”Dominion’s brief depicts Ms. Scott, whom colleagues have described as sharply attuned to the sensibilities of the Fox audience, as being well aware that Mr. Trump’s claims were baseless. And when another Murdoch-owned property, The New York Post, published an editorial urging Mr. Trump to stop complaining that he had been cheated, Ms. Scott distributed it widely among her staff. Mr. Murdoch then thanked her for doing so, the brief says.The filing, in state court in Delaware, contains the most vivid and detailed picture yet of what went on behind the scenes at Fox News and its corporate parent in the days and weeks after the 2020 election, when the conservative cable network’s coverage took an abrupt turn.Fox News stunned the Trump campaign on election night by becoming the first news outlet to declare Joseph R. Biden Jr. the winner of Arizona — effectively projecting that he would become the next president. Then, as Fox’s ratings fell sharply after the election and the president refused to concede, many of the network’s most popular hosts and shows began promoting outlandish claims of a far-reaching voter fraud conspiracy involving Dominion machines to deny Mr. Trump a second term.What was disclosed on Thursday was not the full glimpse of Dominion’s case against Fox. The 192-page filing had multiple redactions that contain more revelations about deliberations inside the network. Fox has sought to keep much of the evidence against it under seal. The New York Times is challenging the legality of those redactions in court.More on Fox NewsDefamation Case: ​​Some of the biggest names at Fox News are being questioned in the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against the network. The suit could be one of the most consequential First Amendment cases in a generation.Merger Falls Through: Rupert Murdoch has halted his plans to combine News Corp and Fox Corporation, saying that a merger was “not optimal for shareholders.” The prospect had faced significant investor pushback.‘American Nationalist’: Tucker Carlson stoked white fear to conquer cable news. In the process, the TV host transformed Fox News and became former President Donald J. Trump’s heir.Empire of Influence: ​​A Times investigation looked at how the Murdochs, the family behind a global media empire that includes Fox News, have destabilized democracy on three continents.In its defense, which was also filed with the court on Thursday, Fox argued that by covering Mr. Trump’s fraud claims, the network was doing what any media organization would: reporting and commenting on a matter of undeniable newsworthiness. And it noted that many of its programs did not endorse the claim that the election was stolen.“In its coverage, Fox News fulfilled its commitment to inform fully and comment fairly,” its brief said. “Some hosts viewed the president’s claims skeptically; others viewed them hopefully; all recognized them as profoundly newsworthy.”The law shields journalists from liability if they report on false statements, but not if they promote them.Dominion said in its filing that not a single Fox witness had testified that he or she believed any of the allegations about Dominion.In a statement on Thursday, a Fox spokeswoman said, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”The brief shows that Fox News stars and executives were afraid of losing their audience, which started to defect to the conservative cable news alternatives Newsmax and OAN after Fox News called Arizona for Mr. Biden. And they seemed concerned with the impact that would have on the network’s profitability. On Nov. 12, in a text chain with Ms. Ingraham and Mr. Hannity, Mr. Carlson pointed to a tweet in which a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked a tweet from Mr. Trump referring to Fox broadcasts and said there was no evidence of voter fraud from Dominion.“Please get her fired,” Mr. Carlson said. He added: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Ms. Heinrich had deleted her tweet by the next morning.The details offer more than dramatic vignettes from inside a news organization where internal disputes rarely spill into public view. They are pieces of evidence that a jury could use to weigh whether to find Fox liable for significant financial damages. Dominion is asking for $1.6 billion as compensation for the damage it says it suffered as Fox guests and hosts claimed, for instance, that Dominion’s voting machines had been designed to rig elections for the Venezuelan autocrat Hugo Chavez and were equipped with an algorithm that could erase votes from one candidate and give them to another.Fox Corporation has about $4 billion cash on hand, according to its latest quarterly earnings report.The burden in the case falls on Dominion to prove that Fox acted with actual malice — the longstanding legal standard that requires Dominion to prove that either Fox guests, hosts and executives knew what was being said on the air was false and allowed it anyway, or that people inside Fox were recklessly negligent in failing to check the accuracy of their coverage.That burden is difficult to meet, which is why defamation cases often fail. But legal experts said Dominion’s arguments were stronger than most.“This filing argues a fire hose of direct evidence of knowing falsity,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. “It gives a powerful preview of one of the best-supported claims of actual malice we have seen in any major-media case.”Many defamation suits are quickly dismissed because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections. If they do go forward, they are usually settled out of court to spare both sides the costly spectacle of a trial. The Dominion case has proceeded with a speed and scope that media experts have said is unusual.For eight months, Dominion lawyers have taken depositions from dozens of people at all levels of the network and its parent company. Mr. Murdoch was deposed last month. (Dominion’s brief was written before that deposition and does not reflect its contents, which remain under seal.) Mr. Hannity, one of the most popular prime-time hosts and a close Trump ally, has been deposed twice. And the personal phones and emails of many midlevel employees have been searched as part of the discovery process, which people inside the company have said has created an atmosphere of considerable unease.Both sides appear dug in and confident of victory. The judge has scheduled jury selection to begin in mid-April.Fox has contested how Dominion arrived at the amount it is seeking in damages, arguing that the company has vastly overstated its valuation and the reputational harm it suffered.In papers filed with the court on Thursday, lawyers for Fox called the $1.6 billion sum “a staggering figure that has no factual support and serves no apparent purpose other than to generate headlines, chill First Amendment-protected speech.”Fox’s lawyers added that Staple Street Capital Partners, the private equity firm that owns a majority share in Dominion, had paid about $38 million for its 76 percent stake in the company in 2018 and had never estimated Dominion’s financial value to be worth “anywhere near $1.6 billion.” Fox has made a counterclaim against Dominion seeking to recover all its costs associated with the lawsuit.Dominion’s goal, aside from convincing a jury that Fox knowingly spread lies, is to build a case that points straight to the top of the Fox media empire and its founding family, the Murdochs.“Fox knew,” the Dominion filing declares. “From the top down, Fox knew.”The brief cites senior executives and editors responsible for shaping Fox’s coverage behind the scenes who weren’t buying the election denial, either.“No reasonable person would have thought that,” said the network’s politics editor at the time, Chris Stirewalt, referring to the allegation that Dominion rigged the election. Bill Sammon, Fox’s managing editor in Washington, is quoted as saying, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”Fox pushed out both journalists after the 2020 election.Ron Mitchell, a senior Fox executive who oversaw the Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham shows, texted privately with colleagues that the Dominion allegations were “the Bill Gates/microchip angle to voter fraud,” referring to false claims that microchips were injected into people who received Covid-19 vaccines.At times, Fox employees are described as disparaging one another. The president of the network, Jay Wallace, is quoted at one point criticizing the former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs — one of the biggest megaphones for Mr. Trump’s lies. “The North Koreans do a more nuanced show” than Mr. Dobbs, the brief says.On Nov. 6, 2020, three days after Election Day, as Mr. Biden pulled into the lead, Mr. Murdoch told Ms. Scott in an email that it was going to be “very hard to credibly cry foul everywhere,” and noted that “if Trump becomes a sore loser, we should watch Sean especially,” referring to Mr. Hannity. More