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      Fox Settlement Is a Victory for Dominion. But the Misinformation War Continues.

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      False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said.There are 787 million reasons to consider Fox News’s settlement of the defamation lawsuit a stunning victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the millions of dollars that Fox is paying to Dominion will put to rest false claims about the 2020 presidential election or help deter misinformation more broadly remains far less clear.In the blinkered information bubbles where the lies about Dominion’s rigging the vote were fabricated and spread, conspiracy theories about the company continue to thrive — at least among those resistant to overwhelming evidence, including new disclosures about Fox News and its most famous hosts that Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.And Dominion is only one part of a broader conspiracy theory that the American electoral system is corrupt. That view, despite all the proof to the contrary, is still cheered on by former President Donald J. Trump, who remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.“Part of the strength of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different strands that yield the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy one thread or one strand, and you’d still have enough strands to sustain it,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of FactCheck.org.The $787.5 million settlement, one of the largest ever for a defamation case, undoubtedly has a punitive effect on Fox, even though it allowed the company to avoid a potentially embarrassing trial. Like the verdicts last year against Alex Jones, the broadcaster who defamed the families of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School and was ordered to pay them more than $1.4 billion, the outcome showed that lies can be costly for those who spread them.Alex Jones was found liable for defamation after spreading falsehoods about the Sandy Hook school shooting.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYet Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news site, while employing legal strategies that could help him evade some of the financial penalty.For researchers who study disinformation, the abrupt end to the lawsuit against Fox dashed hopes that a lengthy trial — with testimony from hosts who repeated accusations against Dominion they knew to be false — would do more to expose the dangerous consequences of pushing falsehoods and conspiracies.Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, was among those expressing disappointment. She said that the settlement — for half of what Dominion originally sought — reflected Fox’s “desire to avoid further damning facts coming out during trial.”“Yet money alone won’t bring us accountability, and it doesn’t correct the ongoing harms Fox News causes to democracy,” she said. “If $787.5 million is the cost to tell a lie, repeatedly, what’s the cost of curing that lie?”Fox was spared extended and potentially damaging testimony. The network did not have to issue an apology on air. Instead, in a carefully crafted statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and touted its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”While the major news networks pivoted to cover the trial’s abrupt end on Tuesday, Fox devoted just six minutes and 22 seconds to the topic across three segments. None of its prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had once bolstered the voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in Dominion’s lawsuit, mentioned the case.Instead, Mr. Carlson began his show with a segment about violence in Chicago, airing video clips largely showing Black Chicagoans during a weekend of violence. “This is why we used to shoot looters,” he said. That was followed with an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter.“So what would you be thinking about when you’re watching Tucker Carlson?” Ms. Jamieson said. “Not the Fox settlement, but crime in the cities, interesting interview with Musk. And now our media diet for the day has told you what matters.”None of Fox’s prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, mentioned the settlement on air.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA similar phenomenon unfolded in other news organizations on the political right in the wake of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a site known for pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted one 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not updated.Far more words were expressed in comments left by readers, where nearly 4,000 missives raised fresh conspiracy theories. Among them was a tale that Fox News’s settlement was actually a shrewd maneuver that would help Dominion extract debilitating sums from Fox competitors, including the conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, which have also been sued by Dominion.In the two hours following the settlement’s announcement, there was a significant spike in references online to the discredited film “2000 Mules,” which spun an elaborate theory of people delivering thousands of ballots in drop boxes, according to Zignal Labs, a company that tracks activity online. The references surged again on Wednesday after a prominent commentator on Twitter, Rogan O’Handley, chided those “cheering over” the settlement. “We know it was rigged,” he wrote.On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app,users claimed without evidence that the deal was a way for Fox to launder money; that the network was in cahoots with Dominion to engineer an election coup; that Dominion was trying to avoid a trial that would expose its corrupt practices; and that the judicial system was controlled by the Mafia.Even if the Dominion victory makes news organizations think twice before reporting lies about election technology vendors in the future, the damage has already been done.Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the settlement would do little to protect election workers who were abused by anonymous conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false narratives about ballot fraud.“Lies about our elections have really inundated our society, and I don’t think that’s changing,” he said. “Not all of those lies involve the potential for a defamation suit; it’s really the extreme cases where people are going to be able to collect monetary damages.”Legal experts said that the Dominion case against Fox had several important characteristics that set it apart. The voting technology company had compiled evidence suggesting that some Fox hosts had shared the false election fraud narrative with viewers despite privately expressing serious misgivings about the claims. The company had also submitted filings claiming that the election lies repeated by Fox caused Dominion to lose business.In fact, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark in the fight against false information, and not only in extreme cases focused on defamation, like those involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after court rejected legal challenges to the balloting in 2020 for lack of evidence. This week, an arbitration court ordered Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who claimed among other things that China had rigged the vote, to pay a $5 million reward to a software engineer who debunked the claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest.The legal traditions that allowed Dominion’s lawyers to receive the damning emails of Fox executives and anchors and make them part of the public record were essential in proving the allegations were baseless as a matter of record.“Before we give up on the capacity of the system to work to determine what constitutes knowable fact in the moment, we should say the courts have worked well up to this point,” Ms. Jamieson said.Election misinformation will almost certainly remain a problem heading into the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it will be difficult, but not hopeless, Mr. Norden said. While some hard-core conspiracy theorists may never be convinced of the legitimacy of the vote, many people are simply unfamiliar with the mechanics of American elections and can have more faith in the system if exposed to accurate information.“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity ahead of the next election to build more resilience against that with most of the public,” Mr. Norden said. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem through defamation suits alone, but there’s a lot that we can be doing between now and November 2024.” More

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      Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch Were Right

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      If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial next week, and we’ll be reminded once again of the profoundly destructive lies that the network’s carnival barkers sold. Hour after hour, night after night, they peddled Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. And they knew or at least suspected that they were wrong, to go by documents already released during the legal proceedings.In this much, however, Fox’s fabulists were right: If they didn’t hawk Trump’s hooey, many of their viewers would just move on to a circus that did. The documents also show that they genuinely believed that. It’s no justification for their laundering of his conspiracy theories — they surely wouldn’t have lost all their audience, and they could have tried to chip away at the dangerous delusions of the many viewers who remained. That they chose differently is a betrayal of journalistic principle and a damning indictment of them. But it says something troubling about the rest of us, too.Thanks to the sprawling real estate of cable television and the infinite expanse of the internet, we live in an age of so many information options, so many “news” purveyors, that we have an unprecedented ability to search out the one or ones that tell us precisely what we want to hear, for whatever reason we want to hear it. We needn’t reckon with the truth. We can shop for it instead.And many of us — maybe even most of us — do. That’s one of the morals of Dominion’s suit, correctly called “seismic” by my Times colleague Jim Rutenberg in his excellent and essential recent article about Fox News’s descent down the rabbit hole. Rutenberg tells the tale of that network’s spectacularly cynical dealings with its particular audience. But a larger story hovers over it, one about every audience’s relationship with reality today.The unscrupulous behavior of Tucker Carlson and his fellow entertainers (let’s call them what they really are) at Fox Phantasmagoria (let’s call it what it really is) reflects the strange new wonderland we inhabit, in which diverging continents of facts — or of recklessly harvested factoids and fictions — leave us without the common ground we need for a sane and civil society.Rutenberg chronicles the concern of senior Fox officials — and of Rupert Murdoch, the chair of Fox Corporation — not to alienate their audience, even if that meant diluting or disregarding an accurate version of events. Following Election Day 2020, Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive, grew worried about competing outlets that wholly bought into Trump’s bogus claims. “One of them, Newsmax, was moving up in the ratings while refusing to call Biden the winner,” Rutenberg writes, adding that when The Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch owns, reported that allies of Trump’s might invest in Newsmax to help it pull closer to Fox, “Murdoch alerted Scott to the piece. Fox would have to play this just right, he said in an email.” He warned that it was important not to inflame Trump.Carlson wrote to a colleague: “With Trump behind it, an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”So Carlson played along with Trump, even while admitting in a text message to an acquaintance “I hate him passionately” and privately expressing disgust and disbelief — “It’s insane,” he texted Laura Ingraham — about the fantastical accusations coming from Team Trump.Carlson sought to undermine those on the network who didn’t fall in line. After the reporter Jacqui Heinrich cast doubt on what Trump and his enablers were saying, Carlson texted Ingraham and Sean Hannity: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of viewers who relied on Carlson & Co. labeled themselves Republicans or said they leaned that way. That lopsidedness isn’t unique: The same survey found that 95 percent of viewers who relied on MSNBC belonged to or sympathized with the Democratic camp. While there’s absolutely no equivalence between the two networks, there’s also no doubt that both consider the interests and inclinations of their loyalists when they’re appointing their hosts, inviting their guests, choosing their stories, calibrating their tones. They are, to varying degrees, giving people what they want. They’re businesses, after all. So is The Times, whose readers are hardly a perfectly heterogeneous snapshot of America.And that compels customers who care about getting a full and nuanced picture not to buy from just one merchant, not in the media marketplace of this moment. We can’t change or redeem the Murdochs and the Carlsons of the world — such perversions of ambition, greed and vanity will always be with us. But we can be better, smarter, more keen-eyed and more open-minded ourselves. We can refuse to confirm and reward their assessments of us.Words Worth SideliningGetty ImagesPerhaps no subspecies of journalist gravitates toward jargon with the frequency and zest of the political journalist, who can’t resist cant. I noted as much in a newsletter last October, when I pleaded for the retirement of “deep dive,” “wake-up call” and “under the bus,” among other annoyances, and said that I’d probably produce at least one follow-up glossary of similarly exhausted phrases. So here’s another batch. May we please, please say goodbye to:Clown car. That’s the favored term for any campaign or political operation of transcendent incompetence or inanity — which is to say, many campaigns and political operations. I smiled the first time I spotted this reference. And the hundredth. No more. I just did a “Donald Trump” “clown car” search on Google, which returned more than 45,000 results. That’s appropriate for the bozo in question but a failure of originality nonetheless.Dumpster fire. A clown car in flames — or any political debacle. At this point, so many developments have been deemed dumpster fires that the designation has burned itself out. It’s an ember of its former blaze.Walk and chew gum at the same time. Pundits love, love, love this expression to convey how easy it should be for a politician to accomplish two goals at once. Mid-perambulation mastication is indeed multitasking at its most mundane; the metaphor was surely as invigorating as a just-unwrapped stick of wintergreen Trident once upon a toothy time. But it lacks all flavor now. Time to spit it out.Drank the Kool-Aid. How this reference to the mass suicide of hundreds of Jim Jones’s followers became an all-purpose knock on what any excessively credulous politician or overly obedient voter has done is beyond me.That dog won’t hunt. Because it’s a Shih Tzu? A bichon frise?Put on your big-boy pants. Pundits tell timid, oversensitive politicians to do this and then wonder why so many Americans find us snotty. That’s the epitome of immaturity.Thanks to Karen Simonsen of Sisters, Ore., Sheri Sidwell of Alton, Ill., and Bill Blackburn of Austin, Tex., among others, for suggesting one or more of the above. “Words Worth Sidelining” is a recurring newsletter feature.For the Love of SentencesGetty ImagesThe Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus was pithy and pointed in her take on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lavish maritime getaways with a billionaire Republican donor: “Beware new friends bearing yachts.” (Thanks to Tom Morman of Leipsic, Ohio, and Bonnie Ross of Sarasota, Fla., for nominating this.)Also in The Post, Ron Charles examined an alliteratively named publisher of “pro-God” children’s stories: “The Brave Books website says, ‘It take courage to stand up for the truth.’ It take grammar, too, but God works in mysterious ways.” (Pam Gates, Rockville, Md., and Cynthia Bazinet, Upper Port La Tour, Nova Scotia)And David Von Drehle took issue with a right-wing Texas jurist’s ruling to block access to the abortion drug mifepristone, asserting that unelected judges “should be as modest and unassuming as a crossing guard in a Mennonite village where all the horses are old and footsore.” (Richard Rampell, Palm Beach, Fla., and Bobbie Steinhart, Berkeley, Calif., among others)In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Tex., rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.” (Karen Hughes, Tumwater, Wash., and Colleen Kelly, Manhattan)In The New York Times, Jesse Green had advice for theatergoers filing into a new Broadway production: “Bring earplugs. Not just because the songs in ‘Bad Cinderella,’ the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, are so crushingly loud. The dialogue, too, would benefit from inaudibility. For that matter, bring eye plugs: The sets and costumes are as loud as the songs. If there were such a thing as soul plugs, I’d recommend them as well.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)Also in The Times, John McWhorter noted the existence, in the dictionary, of fussy and archaic terms that have fallen far from use and survive “more as puckish abstractions than actual words. They remind me of the 32-inch-waist herringbone pants from the 1980s that I have never been able to bring myself to get rid of, along with my compass and my protractor.” (Fred Jacobs, Queens, N.Y.)And James Poniewozik described the look and feel of the Manhattan courthouse in which Trump was arraigned: “The scene was gray, humdrum, municipal, more ‘Night Court’ than Supreme Court. You could practically smell the vending-machine coffee.” (Gil Ghitelman, Westport, Conn., and Adam Eisenstat, Pittsburgh)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading and DoingGretchen Rubin’s new book begins with a scene that had special resonance for me: She visits the eye doctor, who gives her a bit of troubling news that prompts her to take a fresh, different look at the world around her. “In an instant,” she writes, “all my senses seemed to sharpen. It was as if every knob in my brain had suddenly been dialed to its maximum setting of awareness.” Her story from that point on is much different from mine, but it’s characterized by a similar impulse to summon wonder and gratitude, and it showcases her trademark wisdom about making the most of our days. The book, “Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World,” will be available Tuesday.My Times colleague Kate Zernike’s new book, “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science,” is a perfect marriage of compelling material and formidable journalist. In a review in The Times, the “Lessons in Chemistry” author Bonnie Garmus called “The Exceptions,” which was published in late February, “excellent and infuriating,” the latter adjective referring to the injustices Kate chronicles.I’m a big admirer of the writing that Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last do for The Bulwark, so when they asked me to join them last week on their podcast, “The Next Level,” I was delighted. (Sarah Longwell is their partner in the podcast but wasn’t around for our conversation.) We talked about politics, higher education and aging. Also, I guess, personal hygiene and self-indulgence? They titled the episode “Unacknowledged Bubble Baths,” an intriguing allusion to some bit of banter that escapes my memory. You can find “Unacknowledged Bubble Baths” (I just had to repeat it) here.On a Personal NoteHarold M. Lambert/Getty ImagesI relished many of the smart, witty articles about Gwyneth Paltrow’s days in court, but I can’t say whether the authors’ descriptions of her couture and her hauteur jibed with my impressions. I never watched so much as a minute of the proceedings.I saw precisely one short snippet of Alex Murdaugh’s testimony en route to his murder conviction, but that was that. I otherwise sated myself with written accounts of his trial.And while I use links in online articles and on social media to sample politicians’ speeches and public appearances, I don’t see nearly as much of Ron DeSantis or Kyrsten Sinema as a newscast or political talk show would air. That’s because there are few newscasts and political talk shows in my life.Am I guilty of grave professional dereliction? I wonder. I worry. Can I (or anyone else) read the culture intelligently without closely monitoring television, which is an important portal into it, a principal mirror of it and the medium that influences many Americans’ thinking and behavior like no other? Quite possibly not.But I’d like to believe that less television can equal more insight. That pulling back and tuning out — to a degree — are constructive.I’m singling out television, but I’m really speaking about something broader. I’m referring to a kind of indiscriminately rapt, instantly reactive attention to the scandal of the week, the melodrama of the day, the fascination of the hour. Many of those developments and details are ephemeral, disposable — and that’s not clear if you’re twitchily tracking them in real time. The ones with real consequences reach us in ways beyond the breathless exclamations on air. They also reach us multiple times, their repetition and endurance a measure of their import.Besides, is hyper-vigilance any way to live? Is it sustainable? Not for me, not as I get older, not in this addled era of ours.To examine the hurly-burly of our current world from a certain distance, with a certain detachment, is to see things in more accurate proportion, with better perspective — or at least I can make that argument. I think I buy it.But I acknowledge another possibility: I’m just doing what I must to stay several steps ahead of utter exhaustion and thorough disillusionment. That’s reason enough. More

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      Landmark Trial Against Fox News Could Affect the Future of Libel Law

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      Jury selection starts on Thursday in Delaware Superior Court, where the proceedings will tackle misinformation and the limits of journalistic responsibility.Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News, which goes to trial in Delaware next week, is expected to stoke hot-button debates over journalistic ethics, the unchecked flow of misinformation, and the ability of Americans to sort out facts and falsehoods in a polarized age.For a particular subset of the legal and media communities, the trial is also shaping up as something else: the libel law equivalent of the Super Bowl.“I’ve been involved in hundreds of libel cases, and there has never been a case like this,” said Martin Garbus, a veteran First Amendment lawyer. “It’s going to be a dramatic moment in American history.”With jury selection set to begin on Thursday in Delaware Superior Court in Wilmington, the case has so far been notable for its unprecedented window into the inner workings of Fox News. Emails and text messages introduced as evidence showed the Fox host Tucker Carlson insulting former President Donald J. Trump to his colleagues, and Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls the Fox media empire, aggressively weighing in on editorial decisions, among other revelations.Now, after months of depositions and dueling motions, the lawyers will face off before a jury, and legal scholars and media lawyers say the arguments are likely to plumb some of the knottier questions of American libel law.Dominion, an elections technology firm, is seeking $1.6 billion in damages after Fox News aired false claims that the company had engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr. The claims, repeated on Fox programs hosted by anchors like Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, were central to Mr. Trump’s effort to persuade Americans that he had not actually lost.Lawyers for Fox have argued that the network is protected as a news-gathering organization, and that claims of election fraud, voiced by lawyers for a sitting president, were the epitome of newsworthiness. “Ultimately, this case is about the First Amendment protections of the media’s absolute right to cover the news,” the network has said.It is difficult to prove libel in the American legal system, thanks in large part to New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 Supreme Court decision that is considered as critical to the First Amendment as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka is to civil rights.The Sullivan case set a high legal bar for public figures to prove that they had been defamed. A plaintiff has to prove not just that a news organization published false information, but that it did so with “actual malice,” either by knowing that the information was false or displaying a reckless disregard for the truth.The question of that motivation is central to the Dominion case. The trial judge, Eric M. Davis, has already concluded in pretrial motions that the statements aired by Fox about Dominion were false. He has left it to the jury to decide if Fox deliberately aired falsehoods even as it was aware the assertions were probably false.Documents show Fox executives and anchors panicking over a viewer revolt in the aftermath of the 2020 election, in part because the network’s viewers believed that it had not sufficiently embraced Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud. Dominion can wield that evidence to argue that Fox aired the conspiracy theories involving Dominion for its own financial gain, despite ample evidence that the claims were untrue. (Fox has responded that Dominion “cherry-picked” its evidence and that the network was merely reporting the news.)Lawyers on their way out of Delaware Superior Court. Fox suffered some setbacks this week before the trial.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesMr. Garbus, the First Amendment lawyer, has spent decades defending the rights of media outlets in libel cases. Yet like some media advocates, he believes that Fox News should lose — in part because a victory for Fox could embolden a growing effort to roll back broader protections for journalists.That effort, led mainly but not exclusively by conservatives, argues that the 1964 Sullivan decision granted too much leeway to news outlets, which should face harsher consequences for their coverage. Some of the leading proponents of this view, like the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, are conservative heroes who are sympathetic to the right-wing views of Fox programming. But if Fox prevails in the Dominion case, despite the evidence against it, the result could fuel the argument that the bar for defamation has been set too high.Not all media lawyers agree with this reasoning. Some even think a loss for Fox could generate problems for other news organizations.Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who teaches media law at the University of Minnesota, said she detected from Fox critics “an intense desire for someone to say definitively that Fox lied.” But she added, “I don’t see a victory for Dominion as a victory for the news media, by any means.”“As an ethicist, I deplore a lot of what we’ve learned about Fox, and I would never hold it up as an example of good journalistic practices,” Ms. Kirtley said. “But I’ve always believed that the law has to protect even those news organizations that do things the way I don’t think they should do it. There has to be room for error.”Ms. Kirtley said she was concerned that the Dominion case might lead to copycat lawsuits against other news organizations, and that the courts could start imposing their own standards for what constituted good journalistic practice.Dominion’s effort to unearth internal emails and text exchanges, she added, could be reproduced by other libel plaintiffs, leading to embarrassing revelations for news outlets that might otherwise be acting in good faith.“It’s an intense scrutiny into newsroom editorial processes, and I’m not sure that members of the public will look at it very kindly,” she said. “Maybe the emails show they’re being jocular or making fun of things that other people take very seriously.”Journalism, she said, “is not a science,” and she said she felt uncomfortable with courts determining what constituted ethical news gathering.Fox suffered some setbacks this week before the trial. On Tuesday, Judge Davis barred the network from arguing that it aired the claims about Dominion on the basis that the allegations were newsworthy, a crucial line of defense. On Wednesday, he imposed a sanction on Fox News and scolded its legal team after questions arose about the network’s timely disclosure of additional evidence. The judge said he would probably start an investigation into the matter; the network said its lawyers had produced additional evidence “when we first learned it.”The trial may feature testimony from high-profile Fox figures, including Mr. Murdoch, Mr. Carlson, Ms. Bartiromo and Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media. More

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      Ron DeSantis Says Protecting Ukraine Is Not a Key U.S. Interest

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      The Florida governor, on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, broke with Republicans to attack President Biden’s foreign policy and align more closely with Donald Trump as he weighs a presidential bid.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has sharply broken with Republicans who are determined to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, saying in a statement made public on Monday night that protecting the European nation’s borders is not a vital U.S. interest and that policymakers should instead focus attention at home.The statement from Mr. DeSantis, who is seen as an all but declared presidential candidate for the 2024 campaign, puts him in line with the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, former President Donald J. Trump.The venue Mr. DeSantis chose for his statement on a major foreign policy question revealed almost as much as the substance of the statement itself. The statement was broadcast on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on Fox News. It was in response to a questionnaire that the host, Mr. Carlson, sent last week to all major prospective Republican presidential candidates, and is tantamount to an acknowledgment by Mr. DeSantis that a candidacy is in the offing.On Mr. Carlson’s show, Mr. DeSantis separated himself from Republicans who say the problem with Mr. Biden’s Ukraine policy is that he’s not doing enough. Mr. DeSantis made clear he thinks Mr. Biden is doing too much, without a clearly defined objective, and taking actions that risk provoking war between the U.S. and Russia.Mr. Carlson is one of the most ardent opponents of U.S. involvement in Ukraine. He has called President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine a corrupt “antihero” and mocked him for dressing “like the manager of a strip club.”“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness with our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” Mr. DeSantis said in a statement that Mr. Carlson read aloud on his show.Mr. DeSantis’s views on Ukraine policy now align with Mr. Trump’s. The former president also answered Mr. Carlson’s questionnaire.Who’s Running for President in 2024?Card 1 of 7The race begins. More

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      Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump

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      Fox hosts and executives privately mocked the former president’s election fraud claims, even as the network amplified them in a frantic effort to appease viewers.“Do we have enough dead people for tonight?”It was a week after the 2020 elections, and Tucker Carlson — along with Fox News executives and other hosts — had watched with panic as Fox viewers, furious and disbelieving at President Donald J. Trump’s defeat, began to turn against the top-rated network. The viewers believed Mr. Trump’s claims that a widespread conspiracy of voter fraud was behind his loss. And as Mr. Carlson’s nightly 8 p.m. hour approached, the host pushed his producers to give the viewers what they wanted.He demanded examples of dead people voting in Nevada or Georgia, even offering to call the Trump campaign personally to ask for help. That night, he trumpeted the evidence, borrowed from a Trump campaign news release: Four allegedly dead Georgians had cast ballots. Within days, though, the campaign’s spoon-fed examples began to fall apart. Three of the dead Georgians were actually alive. And Mr. Carlson was forced to partly retract his allegations, while insisting to viewers that “a whole bunch of dead people did vote.”Mr. Carlson told his viewers on Nov. 11, 2020, that dead people had cast ballots.Mr. Carlson’s frantic effort to appease angry Fox viewers, revealed in texts and emails released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, underscore the central quandary faced both by Fox and the Republican Party in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat and still today, as the former president mounts another campaign for the White House.Like the Republican Party more broadly, Fox wants and needs the support of Trump fans, who both dominate party primaries and form the core of Fox’s viewership. And like the party, Fox has found it difficult to quit Mr. Trump even as his manic efforts to relitigate his defeat have hobbled the party in subsequent elections.Fox News has been the most trusted and watched source of information for conservative America for decades, and its frequent symbiosis with the Republican Party is well established. But the internal documents released in recent days have provided an unprecedented glimpse into network decision-making as its dual imperatives — to keep its base audience of conservatives satisfied and meet its promise to maintain journalistic standards of fairness and factuality — came into conflict as never before.No figure is more central to that conflict than Mr. Carlson. Ever since taking over Fox’s 8 p.m. hour in 2017, Mr. Carlson had maintained a carefully calibrated distance from Mr. Trump, using inflammatory segments about a border invasion and the “replacement” of native-born Americans by immigrants to appeal to Mr. Trump’s base — while minimizing how often he discussed Mr. Trump, whom he regarded as erratic and undisciplined. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Mr. Carlson texted with staff members in early January 2021, adding, “I hate him passionately.”But in the months after the Jan. 6 attacks, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” doubled down on a pro-Trump narrative that both Mr. Carlson and his bosses knew was rooted in a lie. According to a New York Times analysis, in 2021 nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — featured segments downplaying the Capitol riot, casting the insurrectionists as innocent citizens seeking legitimate redress for election fraud, and suggesting the riot itself was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by federal law enforcement to entrap Trump supporters.His efforts to rewrite the events of Jan. 6 again took center stage this week, just as reams of emails, texts and deposition transcripts from the Dominion suit revealed that the network’s hosts and executives knew they were peddling lies to their own viewers.On his show this week, Mr. Carlson once more recast the violent attack that took place in January 2021 as a largely peaceful protest, this time using previously unreleased surveillance footage provided to his show by the new Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. McCarthy, whose campaign for the speakership was backed by Mr. Trump, provided the footage after Mr. Carlson suggested on his show that releasing the tapes would help Mr. McCarthy overcome conservative resistance to his bid.On Mr. Carlson’s show on Monday, he described the Jan. 6 riot as a largely peaceful protest.On air, Mr. Carlson accused a Democratic-led congressional committee of misleading the public about what really happened. “Committee members lied about what they saw, and then hid the evidence from the public,” Mr. Carlson charged.News outlets and fact checkers found the broadcast rife with inaccuracies and false claims. Republicans in the House, among whom loyalty to Mr. Trump remains strong, defended Mr. Carlson’s segment. But Republicans in the Senate — currently controlled by Democrats, after Trump-backed candidates went down to defeat in the 2022 elections — attacked the powerful Fox host in unusually blunt terms.“It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.In the pretrial public relations maneuvering, Fox News has accused Dominion of using its court filings to share selective and out-of-context portions of internal text messages to “smear Fox News,” part of a broader effort to “silence the press” through a winning verdict. In a statement, a network spokeswoman said, “Fox News will continue to fiercely protect the free press as a ruling in favor of Dominion would have grave consequences for journalism across this country.” In defending Mr. Carlson’s coverage of Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims, Fox executives have also pointed to Mr. Carlson’s on-air criticism of a lawyer behind some of the most outrageous voter fraud charges, Sidney Powell.Documents released in the Dominion lawsuit illustrate in vivid detail Fox’s complex relationship with the Republican Party, with the network serving variously as custodian, enforcer and powerful interest group in its own right.Senator Mitch McConnell pushed back against Mr. Carlson’s characterization of the Capitol attack.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressDuring the election, Dominion has alleged, Fox’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, personally gave Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, a preview of at least one Biden campaign ad. After the election, Mr. Murdoch called Mr. McConnell and asked him to lobby other Republican senators to avoid endorsing Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. At moments, Mr. Murdoch and a top editor at the Murdoch-owned New York Post discussed editorials intended to encourage Mr. Trump to accept his defeat gracefully, seemingly in hopes of avoiding further damage to the party.In mid-November 2020, Mr. Murdoch emailed Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, explaining the need for Fox to reorient away from Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and focus on the Georgia special senate elections, with Fox “helping any way we can.”Top Fox personnel agonized over the difficulty of escaping Mr. Trump’s influence over their own audience. “This day of reckoning was going to come at some point — where the embrace of Trump became an albatross we can’t shake right away if ever,” Dana Perino, a prominent Fox host, wrote to a friend in November 2020.Yet the shoals they were trying to navigate had been in no small part laid by Mr. Carlson, one of Fox’s most-watched hosts. Though the newly released messages show Mr. Carlson expressing skepticism in his private emails about the extent of “voter fraud,” he had been an early and energetic promoter of the doubt Mr. Trump was trying to sow.Within 24 hours of the polls closing, he declared that the election had been “seized from the hands of voters,” and that the final results would finally be determined by “lawyers and courts and clearly corrupt, big-city bureaucrats.” Americans “will never again accept the results of a presidential election,” he predicted.After the major networks declared Mr. Biden president-elect, Mr. Carlson reminded his viewers that troubling questions remained: “We don’t know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night; we don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged,” he said. His audience members, he said, were being played for suckers: “They knew you were coming. They laughed at you when you left.”But behind the scenes, Mr. Carlson and his producers were among those scoffing.In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, they discussed their intense hopes that Mr. Trump would soon leave the political scene. They mocked his plans to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s win and raged at how Mr. Trump’s lawyers had undermined their own arguments about fraud with sweeping conspiracy theories and debunked allegations.Two weeks after the election, Mr. Carlson, his executive producer and a top Fox executive named Ron Mitchell traded texts about a news conference at which one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, unspooled a litany of debunked allegations while hair dye dripped down his face. “I don’t see how to cover this,” Mr. Mitchell wrote. (That night, Mr. Carlson devoted his opening monologue to the news conference, carefully asserting that Mr. Giuliani “did raise legitimate questions and in some cases, he pointed to what appeared to be real wrongdoing.”)Mr. Carlson has claimed to “never look at the ratings” for his show. But Dominion texts show Mr. Carlson, his bosses and his fellow hosts obsessing over them. Within weeks of the election, it became clear to them that Fox viewers badly wanted them to focus on supposed evidence of voter fraud.“Tucker wrote me and Laura and said last nights numbers were a disaster,” Sean Hannity wrote to Fox producers in late November 2020, referring to Mr. Carlson and Laura Ingraham. (His executive producer, Robert Samuel, noted that the previous week’s most highly rated programming minutes “were on the voting irregularities.”) Mr. Carlson had also texted the two other hosts about ratings earlier that month, joking that an angry Fox viewer who had ranted against the network on Twitter would get “way better numbers than what we have” and warning Mr. Hannity that “the 7:00 was third last night,” referring to the time slot immediately preceding his own.As Mr. Carlson’s broadcast was coming to an end on Nov. 10, a Fox staff member warned the host that he was being attacked on Twitter for not covering allegations of voter fraud. “It’s all our viewers care about right now,” the staff member wrote. Mr. Carlson replied that it had been a “mistake” but that “I just hate” the topic.That night and the next morning, Mr. Carlson and the unnamed colleague brainstormed how to get into the story, trading links and tweets, eventually seizing on a local news report in Nevada suggesting a woman who had died in 2017 had voted there in November. (An investigation later determined that the woman’s husband, a Republican, had used her ballot to vote twice, then claimed her ballot had been stolen.) They debated whether they could “get up to five examples of specific names of dead people that voted,” and reached out to Jason Miller, a Trump campaign official, asking for evidence that they could then present on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”“Obviously they need to do whatever they can to help us,” Mr. Carlson told his Fox colleague.On the afternoon of Nov. 11, as the next evening’s broadcast approached, the staff member texted Mr. Carlson again.“Have you seen last night’s numbers?” the staff member wrote, adding, “It’s a stupid story but this is all the viewers are into right now.”Mr. Carlson replied: “I noticed.”Julie Tate More

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      Tucker Carlson’s Private Contempt for Trump: ‘I Hate Him Passionately’

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      The Fox host’s private comments, revealed recently in court documents, contrast sharply with his support of conservatives on his show.Documents released in recent weeks as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems have revealed extraordinary private communications and depositions from the network’s star hosts and executives. In those statements, many of them 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.Regardless of the outcome of the case, which is scheduled to go to trial in April, one host in particular — Tucker Carlson — appears to have a tricky road to navigate with his audience. In his private messages, Mr. Carlson, who generally provides strong support of Republicans on the air, repeatedly showed contempt for Mr. Trump and some of his closest aides.In a statement, Fox News said the fact that Dominion was using the contents of the legal filings “to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”Here are five examples of Mr. Carlson’s views on Mr. Trump from the documents:Nov. 6, 20201. On Trump’s Business HistoryAs votes were being counted in the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson texted with his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, fretting about viewers turning away from Fox News after the network called Arizona for President Biden.Alex Pfeiffer: Trump has a pretty low rate at success in his business ventures.Tucker Carlson: That’s for sure. All of them fail. What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that.Nov. 10, 20202. On Trump’s Plan to Skip Biden’s InaugurationA staff member texted Mr. Carlson to say they’d heard Mr. Trump was planning not to attend the inauguration, an important symbol of the peaceful transfer of power.Carlson: I’d heard that about the inauguration. Hard to believe. So destructive.Carlson: It’s disgusting. I’m trying to look away.Nov. 23, 20203. On His Interactions With Trump’s Team Over Sidney Powell, a Trump LawyerMr. Carlson texts with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham about Sidney Powell, a lawyer for Mr. Trump and one of the biggest promoters of the unfounded election fraud claims.Carlson: I had to try to make the WH disavow her, which they obviously should have done long before.Laura Ingraham: No serious lawyer could believe what they were saying.Carlson: But they said nothing in public. Pretty disgusting. And now Trump, I learned this morning, is sitting back and letting them lose the senate. He doesn’t care. I care.Jan. 4, 20214. On His Desire to Move On From TrumpMr. Carlson texts with members of his staff, two months after the 2020 election and two days before the insurrection at the Capitol building, about looking forward to not having to cover Mr. Trump.Carlson: We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.Carlson: I hate him passionately.Jan. 7, 20215. On the Aftermath of the Capitol RiotsAfter the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Mr. Carlson texts with Mr. Pfeiffer about Mr. Trump’s culpability in the insurrection and how to deal with viewers who still support him. It was two weeks before the inauguration of President Biden.Carlson: Trump has two weeks left. Once he’s out, he becomes incalculably less powerful, even in the minds of his supporters.Carlson: He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us. I’ve been thinking about this every day for four years.Pfeiffer: You’re right. I don’t want to let him destroy me either. [REDACTED]. The Trump anger spiral is vicious.Carlson: That’s for sure. Deadly. It almost consumed me in November when Sidney Powell attacked us. It was very difficult to regain emotional control, but I knew I had to. We’ve got two weeks left. We can do this.

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      Inside the Panic at Fox News After the 2020 Election

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      “If we hadn’t called Arizona,” said Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive, according to a recording reviewed by The New York Times, “our ratings would have been bigger.”WASHINGTON — A little more than a week after television networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr., top executives and anchors at Fox News held an after-action meeting to figure out how they had messed up.Not because they had gotten the key call wrong — but because they had gotten it right. And they had gotten it right before anyone else.Typically, it is a point of pride for a news network to be the first to project election winners. But Fox is no typical news network, and in the days following the 2020 vote, it was besieged with angry protests not only from President Donald J. Trump’s camp but from its own viewers because it had called the battleground state of Arizona for Mr. Biden. Never mind that the call was correct; Fox executives worried that they would lose viewers to hard-right competitors like Newsmax.And so, on Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and Jay Wallace, the network’s president, convened a Zoom meeting for an extraordinary discussion with an unusual goal, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times: How to keep from angering the network’s conservative audience again by calling an election for a Democrat before the competition.Maybe, the Fox executives mused, they should abandon the sophisticated new election-projecting system in which Fox had invested millions of dollars and revert to the slower, less accurate model. Or maybe they should base calls not solely on numbers but on how viewers might react. Or maybe they should delay calls, even if they were right, to keep the audience in suspense and boost viewership.“Listen, it’s one of the sad realities: If we hadn’t called Arizona, those three or four days following Election Day, our ratings would have been bigger,” Ms. Scott said. “The mystery would have been still hanging out there.”Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, the two main anchors, suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered. “In a Trump environment,” Ms. MacCallum said, “the game is just very, very different.”The conversation captured the sense of crisis enveloping Fox after the election and underscored its unique role in the conservative political ecosystem. The network’s conduct in this period has come under intense scrutiny in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.Court filings in recent days revealed that Fox executives and hosts considered fraud claims by the Trump camp to be “really crazy stuff,” as Rupert Murdoch, the head of the Fox media empire, put it, yet pushed them on air anyway. The recording of the Nov. 16 meeting adds further context to the atmosphere inside the network at that time, when executives were on the defensive because of their Arizona call and feared alienating Mr. Trump and his supporters.In a statement on Saturday, the network said: “Fox News stood by the Arizona call despite intense scrutiny. Given the extremely narrow 0.3 percent margin and a new projection mechanism that no other network had, of course there would be a wide-ranging post-mortem surrounding the call and how it was executed no matter the candidates.”More on Fox NewsRupert Murdoch’s Deposition: The conservative media mogul acknowledged in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit that several Fox News hosts promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen.Privately Expressing Disbelief: Dozens of text messages released in the lawsuit show how Fox hosts went from privately criticizing election fraud claims to giving them significant airtime.‘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 the cross hairs now is Ms. Scott, who joined the network at its inception in 1996 as a programming assistant and worked her way up to become chief executive in 2018. Media analysts have speculated that she may take the fall; Mr. Murdoch testified in a deposition that executives who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast “should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.” But Fox later put out word that she was not in danger.Ms. Scott was among the executives who grew alarmed after the network’s Decision Desk called Arizona for Mr. Biden at 11:20 p.m. on election night on Nov. 3, 2020, a projection that infuriated Mr. Trump and his aides because it was a swing state that could foreshadow the overall result. No other network called Arizona that night, although The Associated Press did several hours later, and the Fox journalists who made the call stood by their judgment.At 8:30 the next morning, Ms. Scott suggested Fox not call any more states until certified by authorities, a formal process that could take days or weeks. She was talked out of that. But the next day, with Mr. Biden’s lead in Arizona narrowing, Mr. Baier noted that Mr. Trump’s campaign was angry and suggested reversing the call. “It’s hurting us,” he wrote Mr. Wallace and others in a previously reported email. “The sooner we pull it even if it gives us major egg. And put it back in his column. The better we are. In my opinion.”Suzanne Scott joined Fox News at its inception in 1996 as a programming assistant and worked her way up to become chief executive in 2018. Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesArizona had never been in Mr. Trump’s column, and the Decision Desk overseen by Bill Sammon, the managing editor for Washington, resisted giving it “back” to a candidate who was losing just to satisfy critics.But on Friday night, Nov. 6, when Mr. Sammon’s team was ready to call Nevada for Mr. Biden, sealing his victory, Mr. Wallace refused to air it. “I’m not there yet since it’s for all the marbles — just a heavier burden than an individual state call,” Mr. Wallace wrote in a text message obtained by The Times.Rather than be the first to call the election winner, Fox became the last. CNN declared Mr. Biden the victor the next day at 11:24 a.m., followed by the other networks. Fox did not concur until 11:40 a.m., some 14 hours after Mr. Sammon’s election team internally concluded the race was over..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.While Mr. Biden held onto Arizona by 10,000 votes, the explosive fallout from the Fox call panicked the network. Viewers erupted. Ratings fell. “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company,” Tucker Carlson told Ms. Scott in a Nov. 9 message released in a court filing. Ms. Scott complained to a colleague that Mr. Sammon did not understand “the impact to the brand and the arrogance in calling AZ” and it was his job “to protect the brand.”On Nov. 16, Ms. Scott and Mr. Wallace convened the Zoom meeting to discuss the Arizona decision. Mr. Sammon and Arnon Mishkin, the director of the Decision Desk, were included. Chris Stirewalt, the political editor who had gone on air to defend the call, was not.Ms. Scott invited Mr. Baier and Ms. MacCallum, “the face” of the network, as she called them, to describe the heat they were taking, according to the recording reviewed by The Times.“We are still getting bombarded,” Mr. Baier said. “It became really hurtful.” He said projections were not enough to call a state when it would be so sensitive. “I know the statistics and the numbers, but there has to be, like, this other layer” so they could “think beyond, about the implications.”Ms. MacCallum agreed: “There’s just obviously been a tremendous amount of backlash, which is, I think, more than any of us anticipated. And so there’s that layer between statistics and news judgment about timing that I think is a factor.” For “a loud faction of our viewership,” she said, the call was a blow.Neither she nor Mr. Baier explained exactly what they meant by another “layer.” A person who was in the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions said on Saturday that Mr. Baier had been talking about process because he was upset the Decision Desk had made the Arizona call without letting the anchors know first.Fox reached its call earlier than other networks because of the cutting-edge system that it developed after the 2016 election, a system tested during the 2018 midterm elections with great success — Fox projected that Democrats would capture the House before its competitors. But now Mr. Wallace was having second thoughts.“We created a new mousetrap,” he said. But he asked, “Was the mousetrap too good?” He added: “Part of me is like: Oh, should we have been more conservative and should we have stuck with N.E.P.,” the National Election Pool used by other networks. “Would that have changed things? Would there still be this ire?”Mr. Mishkin acknowledged that the Arizona call seemed “premature” but noted that “it did land correctly” and that Fox rightly made clear it was “a dogfight in the Electoral College.” Mr. Sammon stood by the call. “If I may defend the Decision Desk for a moment, they got all 50 states right,” he said. “We called Arizona. It was a good call. It held up.”Ms. Scott pressed Mr. Sammon to admit that Arizona “became much closer than even you anticipated it becoming.”He pushed back. “From a statistical standpoint,” he said, “I literally never worried about the Arizona call. From a lot of other standpoints it was very painful for reasons that we’re all aware of. But statistically, I really was very confident in that call. That’s just the truth.”Ms. Scott agreed it was important to be right. “But I think we’re living in a new world in a sense, where half of the voting population doesn’t believe in big corporations, big tech, big media,” she said. “There’s a lack of trust. And when they feel like things are being done behind closed doors in rooms that they can’t understand, it exacerbates the emotion and how they feel about the process.”Tom Lowell, the managing editor for news, said Fox had been left “as the canary in this nasty coal mine,” suggesting other networks had deliberately delayed calls out of malice. “I think some outlets willfully held back calls that they probably could have made to watch us twist in the wind,” he said.An early voting venue in Arizona. Fox News was the first to call the state for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, thanks to its new multimillion-dollar election-projecting system.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesMs. Scott asserted that CNN had delayed to hold viewer attention. “CNN historically I think has always been late because — purely for ratings,” she said. “And I think you have to ask yourself, is that a good enough reason? Trust, public trust, viewership, I mean there’s different parameters.”She added that she was merely “raising the questions” about holding back calls. “There is a philosophy around that.” (Matt Dornic, a CNN spokesman, on Saturday denied holding back calls for ratings, saying its journalists “make calls as soon as we’re confident they’re right.”)The Arizona dispute was not an abstract discussion. Georgia would soon hold runoff elections for two Senate seats that would determine control of the chamber. The question was raised about how to call those races given that Republicans seemed favored to win.“If we’re going to be first to call the Senate for G.O.P. control, that’s OK too,” Mr. Baier said, prompting awkward laughs. (The person in the meeting said Mr. Baier was joking.)What no one said at the meeting was that Ms. Scott would not let Mr. Sammon’s team risk the network’s brand again. She decided to push out Mr. Sammon and Mr. Stirewalt, but fearing criticism for firing journalists who had gotten the call right, opted to wait until after Georgia.Mr. Murdoch was not keen on waiting. On Nov. 20, four days after the Zoom meeting, according to documents filed by Dominion, he told Ms. Scott, “Maybe best to let Bill go right away,” which would “be a big message with Trump people.”Mr. Sammon, who had called every election correctly over 12 years at Fox and had just been offered a new three-year contract, was told that same day that his contract would not be renewed after all. He heard not from Fox but from his lawyer, Robert Barnett. Mr. Stirewalt was out too.Fox would, in the end, wait until after Georgia to announce the purge, without attributing it to the Arizona call. Mr. Sammon, who negotiated a severance package, would call his departure a “retirement,” while Stirewalt’s dismissal was characterized as a “restructuring.”Three weeks later, Fox announced a new multiyear contract extension for Ms. Scott. More

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      This Is Trump’s ‘Magic Trick’

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      In his effort to outflank Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida — his most potent challenger-in-waiting for the Republican presidential nomination — Donald Trump goes only in one direction: hard right.At the start of this year, Trump announced his education agenda, declaring that he would issue mandates to “keep men out of women’s sports,” end teacher tenure and cut federal aid to any school system that teaches “critical race theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto our children.”“As the saying goes,” Trump declared, “personnel is policy and at the end of the day if we have pink-haired communists teaching our kids we have a major problem.”Later in January, Trump revealed his “Plan to Protect Children from Left-Wing Gender Insanity,” in which he promised to bring a halt to “gender-affirming care,” to punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and to pass legislation declaring that “the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female and they are assigned at birth.”“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender,” Trump declared. “Under my leadership, this madness will end.”At one level, these pronouncements reflect Trump’s determination to prevent DeSantis from outflanking him. On a larger scale, they reveal a predicament facing not only the former president as he seeks renomination in 2024, but the conservative movement in general, including white evangelicals, the Republican Party and Fox News.Trump’s strategy requires him to continue his equivocation on white supremacism and his antisemitic supporters and to adopt increasingly extreme positions, including the “termination” of the Constitution in order to retroactively award him victory in the 2020 election. The more he attempts to enrage and invigorate his MAGA base in the Republican primaries, the more he forces his fellow partisans and conservatives to follow suit, threatening Republican prospects in the coming general election, as demonstrated by the poor showing of Trump clones in the 2022 midterm contests.Questions about the pandemicCard 1 of 4When will the pandemic end? More