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      Stunning Rupert Murdoch deposition leaves Fox News in a world of trouble

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      Stunning Rupert Murdoch deposition leaves Fox News in a world of troubleMedia mogul’s admission in Dominion Systems election case that he let cable network broadcast falsehoods stuns observersIn his 71 years as a media executive, Rupert Murdoch has proved himself to be a grand master in the arts of survival. He has weathered bruising battles with British trade unions, the phone hacking scandal, countless ratings wars and a volatile private life, all the while growing his News Corp empire into global colossus.It was against this seven-decade backdrop of seeming invincibility that news of Murdoch’s deposition in the $1.6bn Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News Networks and its parent company Fox Corp dropped like a bomb. Not only did he admit that he knew that Fox News hosts spread lies about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from Donald Trump, but he confessed that he had allowed them to keep on doing so on air to millions of viewers.Rupert Murdoch testified that Fox News hosts ‘endorsed’ stolen election narrativeRead moreTo say that the 91-year-old’s statement astounded close Murdoch watchers would be an understatement. “I was shocked,” said Angelo Carusone, president of the watchdog Media Matters for America. “It is stunning, as it not only exposes a lot about how Fox works, it opens them up to potentially cascading litigation and liability.”Fox News and its parent company now face escalating damage on two fronts: to its reputation as a journalism outlet that ostensibly pays lip service to truth and accuracy – and to the financial health of the operation. Media and legal experts told the Guardian that, partly as a result of his stunning testimony, Murdoch can now expect potentially severe injury to both.A former Republican strategist who co-founded the anti-Donald Trump Lincoln Project, Rick Wilson, said that the reputational damage was self-evident. “This is so profoundly cynical, and deeply corrosive to the role of the largest cable news network in the country,” Wilson remarked. “They admittedly engaged in fraud and lied to their audience.”Wilson predicted that there would be fallout for Fox News in terms of defections from viewers angered by the admission as much as the substance of it. He said: “There’s been worry at Fox for some time now that they’re losing their iron grip on their audience. We are going to see a migration now of Fox News viewers to even further-right outlets like Newsmax and OANN.”Brian Stelter, the former anchor of CNN’s media show Reliable Sources who is now a media and democracy fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, told the Guardian that Fox News would be cushioned by its financial success. “It’s a license to print money,” he said. “It is facing large potential damages which may be a major blow, but not a death blow.”What would hurt most, Stelter suggested, would be the realization among the Fox News base that they had been served a dishonesty. “The most damning headlines to come so far are about the gap between what Fox News hosts say in public and private,” he said. “Even if a little of that seeps into the Fox bloodstream, it still has an impact.”In his deposition, Murdoch – whose newspaper holdings include the Sun in the UK and the Wall Street Journal – made an admission that could have dire consequences, not only reputationally but also to the Dominion lawsuit on which a lot of money is riding.Under heavy pressure from Dominion’s lawyers, he admitted that several Fox News hosts – Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity – had endorsed the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and handed to Joe Biden.“Some of our commentators were endorsing it,” he said. “Yes. They endorsed.”Murdoch tried to make a distinction between the hosts – “commentators” he called them – who were making false claims of election fraud and Fox itself. But in other parts of his devastating testimony, he admitted that he chose not to keep election deniers such as Rudy Giuliani off the air even though he had the power to do so.He also tried to justify allowing Mike Lindell, an avid conspiracy theorist, to run MyPillow ads on the network as a purely financial decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green,” he said.In a statement, Fox accused Dominion of attempting to “publicly smear Fox for covering and commenting on allegations by a sitting president of the United States”.The company called the argument put forward in the lawsuit a “blatant violation of the first amendment” right to free speech and said it represented “an extreme, unsupported view of defamation law that would prevent journalists from basic reporting”.The word “endorsed” in Murdoch’s deposition could be critical. Under the first amendment’s protection of free speech, Dominion would have to prove “actual malice” in its defamation case against Fox. “It has to show they not only knew these claims were false, but continued to push them with a reckless disregard for the truth,” Carusone said. “‘Endorsement’ neutralizes one of the most important defenses Fox could have used.”The Media Matters president added that, in his view, Murdoch’s extraordinary deposition – so out of kilter with his previous consummate survivor’s record – could be put down largely to hubris. “I think it was hubris,” Carusone said. “He thought he was untouchable.”Carusone pointed to another potential devastating part of the newly released depositions – the testimony of the Republican former US House speaker Paul Ryan. The depositions revealed that Ryan had implored Murdoch to “move on from Donald Trump and stop spouting election lies”.Ryan now sits on the Fox Corp board of directors. “This is catastrophic, frankly,” Carusone said. “It opens the door to litigation from shareholders, given that their own board member tried to stop this.”RonNell Andersen Jones, a media law professor at the University of Utah, said that the deposition could prove highly damaging in the ongoing Dominion case. She said: “It adds some key factual support for the narrative that Fox made a conscious decision to tell a knowing lie and that it did so to win back viewers who were defecting.”She predicted that the revelations would spur “much larger conversations about the stolen election lie and the role Fox and Murdoch played in perpetuating it”.TopicsRupert MurdochUS politicsFox NewsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Rupert Murdoch testified that Fox News hosts ‘endorsed’ stolen election narrative

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      Rupert Murdoch testified that Fox News hosts ‘endorsed’ stolen election narrativeNetwork owner also admitted in $1.6bn defamation lawsuit deposition that Trump’s claims were ‘damaging to everybody’Newly released court documents reveal that Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire owner of Fox News, acknowledged under oath that several Fox News hosts endorsed Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him.The mogul made the admission during a deposition in the $1.6bn defamation lawsuit brought against the network by the voting machine company Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, of maligning its reputation. In his deposition, Murdoch said that the hosts Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro “endorsed” the false narrative promoted by Trump.Will a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit finally stop Fox News from spreading lies? | Margaret SullivanRead more“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” Murdoch said in the deposition, the New York Times reported on Monday.In previous court filings, attorneys for Dominion have argued that Fox News hosts ridiculed Trump’s false claims of a “stolen election” while promoting those lies on television. While Sean Hannity pushed that narrative on his prime-time show, he allegedly wrote that Trump was “acting like an insane person”.Even Murdoch himself dismissed Trump’s claims, describing the former president’s obsession with proving the election was stolen as “terrible stuff damaging everybody”.Murdoch acknowledged in his deposition that he could have ordered the network not to platform Trump lawyers such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on its programs: “I could have. But I didn’t,” he said.Dominion’s defamation case is being described as a “landmark”. A Harvard law professor recently told the Guardian he had “never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues”.How Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’Read moreThe Fox hosts were also privately critical of members of Trump’s team, including Sidney Powell, an attorney who claimed that Dominion’s machines had changed votes cast for Trump to Joe Biden. In a deposition, Hannity said: “That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second”.Still, the network continued to give coverage to proponents of the election fraud narrative as it feared upsetting its viewers. In a conversation about the network’s coverage of the issue on 5 January 2020 – a day before rioters stormed the US Capitol in an attempt to stop the election from being certified – Suzanne Scott, the Fox News media chief executive, and Murdoch debated whether Fox hosts should acknowledge Trump’s defeat and admit that Biden won. “We need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers,” Scott told Murdoch.Dominion sued Fox News and parent company Fox Corporation in March 2021 and November 2021 in Delaware superior court, alleging the cable TV network amplified false claims that Dominion voting machines were used to rig the 2020 election against Trump, a Republican who lost to Democratic rival Biden. Dominion’s motion for summary judgment was replete with emails and statements in which Murdoch and other top Fox executives say the claims made about Dominion on air were false – part of the voting machine company’s effort to prove the network either knew the statements it aired were false or recklessly disregarded their accuracy.In its own filing made public on Monday, Fox argued that its coverage of statements by Trump and his lawyers were inherently newsworthy and that Dominion’s “extreme” interpretation of defamation law would “stop the media in its tracks”.Reuters reported that a Fox spokesperson said that Dominion’s view of defamation law “would prevent journalists from basic reporting”.A trial is scheduled to begin in mid-April.Reuters contributed reportingTopicsRupert MurdochFox NewsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsTV newsTelevision industrynewsReuse this content More

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      January 6 insurrection has proved an obsession for Fox News’s Tucker Carlson

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      AnalysisJanuary 6 insurrection has proved an obsession for Fox News’s Tucker CarlsonAdam GabbattWhatever the TV host claims the footage from Kevin McCarthy shows will be worth taking with a generous pinch of saltIn the two years since the US Capitol attack, Tucker Carlson has described the violent assault on American democracy connected to the deaths of nine people as “vandalism” and a “forgettably minor” outbreak of “mob violence”.Kevin McCarthy denounced for giving January 6 tapes to Fox News hostRead moreThe Fox News host has said the attack on Congress by supporters of Donald Trump, which has prompted more than 900 arrests, was a “false flag” operation, part of alleged persecution of conservatives by shady government forces. Carlson even devoted much of a conspiracy-laden TV series to undermining the severity of the attack.It is not difficult to imagine, then, what Carlson might do with the 44,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from January 6 handed to him exclusively by Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker. In fact Carlson gave an indication on his show on Monday night.“Our producers, some of our smartest producers, have been looking at this stuff and trying to figure out what it means and how it contradicts or not the story we’ve been told for more than two years,” Carlson said.He added: “We think already in some ways that it does contradict that story.”The January 6 insurrection has proved an obsession for Carlson.He has devoted countless hours of his nightly show to defending the paticipants, belittling politicians who investigated the attack, and advancing conspiracy theories.In Patriot Purge, a documentary that ran on the Fox Nation streaming service in November 2021, Carlson led a multipronged attack against the accepted version of what happened on January 6.Across the three-part series, which attempted to downplay what actually took place while passing off any violence as not the fault of Trump supporters, Carlson dabbled in conspiracy theories and gave a clue as to what we can expect once his producers are done with the Capitol footage.Carlson used Patriot Purge to claim, without evidence, that the insurrection was actually an FBI-led operation intended to “purge” Trump voters in a “new war on terror”.He hosted guests who claimed, without evidence, that antifascist activists were seen “changing clothes” into “Trump gear” before the attack began. This claim was overlaid, Media Matters reported, with a clip of a man putting on a sweatshirt. It’s likely Carlson will fish out similar clips over the coming weeks.The Fox News host has also repeatedly said police were to blame for hundreds of people illegally entering the Capitol.“Why did authorities open the doors of the Capitol to rioters and let them walk in, usher them in the doors?” Carlson said last year. “That’s utterly bizarre. You saw that live. No one’s ever explained it.”No one has ever explained it because, according to multiple fact checks, it didn’t happen. Whether that will stop Carlson plucking footage to support the lie remains to be seen.Whatever happens, it seems unlikely Carlson’s analysis will produce findings similar to those of the bipartisan House committee which investigated the attack.The committee, which conducted more than a thousand interviews and reviewed much of the footage Carlson has now been given, found that Trump was “was directly responsible for summoning what became a violent mob”, and that the attack was part of an orchestrated “scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Fox News did not respond to a request for comment about Carlson’s access to the January 6 footage.Democrats, as might be expected, responded furiously, a wave of party grandees suggesting McCarthy had made the move to appease the far-right of the Republican party which opposed his bid to be speaker.As targets of many of the January 6 rioters, Democrats are also worried for their safety in future. Jamie Raskin, the Marylander who served on the January 6 committee, called McCarthy’s move an “ethical collapse”.“What security precautions were taken to keep this from becoming a roadmap for 2024 insurrection?” Raskin asked on Twitter.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said the footage would “allow those who want to commit another attack to learn how Congress is safeguarded”.“By handpicking Tucker Carlson, Speaker McCarthy laid bare that this sham is simply about pandering to Maga election deniers, not the truth,” Schumer wrote in a letter to his colleagues.“If the past is any indication, Tucker Carlson will select only clips that he can use to twist the facts to sow doubt of what happened on January 6 and feed into the propaganda he’s already put on Fox News’ air, which based on recent reports he may not even believe himself.”That was a reference to a batch of Carlson’s text messages made public as part of a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News from Dominion Voting Systems, which appeared to show the host’s private views do not always match what he says on air.How Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’Read moreIn one text following the 2020 election Carlson described Trump, who he spent hours praising on his show, as a “demonic force” good at “destroying things.“He’s the undisputed world champion of that,” Carlson wrote. “He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”Other Carlson messages described Sidney Powell, an attorney who claimed Dominion machines flipped votes from Trump to Joe Biden, as “a lunatic”, while conceding “there wasn’t enough fraud to change the outcome” of the election.In all, it suggests that whatever Carlson and his team now dig out of the January 6 security footage, and whatever Carlson claims that footage shows, will be worth taking with a generous pinch of salt.TopicsUS Capitol attackFox NewsUS politicsRepublicansThe far rightanalysisReuse this content More

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      Kevin McCarthy denounced for giving January 6 tapes to Fox News host

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      Kevin McCarthy denounced for giving January 6 tapes to Fox News hostRepublican House speaker says he promised to release footage of deadly attack as Democrats denounce release to Tucker CarlsonTop Democrats in Washington cried foul after Kevin McCarthy, the new Republican House speaker, released more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from the January 6 US Capitol attack to Tucker Carlson, the far-right Fox News host who has consistently downplayed the deadly riot.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, told colleagues McCarthy’s decision “poses grave security risks” and “needlessly expos[es] the Capitol complex to one of the worst … risks since 9/11”.Democrats condemn McCarthy for handing Capitol attack footage to Tucker Carlson – live Read moreBut McCarthy told the New York Times he had “promised” to release the footage, apparently as part of dealmaking with which he clinched the speakership after far-right rebels forced him through 15 nominating votes.“I was asked in the press about these tapes,” McCarthy added, “and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.”McCarthy said he wanted to give Carlson “exclusive” access to the footage, but could release it to other outlets later.Carlson, a prominent voice in far-right media, has claimed the insurrection was a “false flag” attack and generally tried to downplay it without offering evidence. He told the Times he was taking the footage released by McCarthy “very seriously” and had a large team reviewing it.Nine deaths, including law enforcement suicides, have been linked to the attack on Congress by Trump supporters seeking to block certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, fueled by Trump’s lie about widespread electoral fraud.Trump was impeached for inciting the attack but acquitted when enough Senate Republicans stayed loyal. He continues to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. The US Department of Justice is investigating January 6 but has not yet acted on criminal referrals regarding Trump made last year by a House committee.A possible Republican challenger to Trump, his former vice-president, Mike Pence, is expected to fight a grand jury subpoena as part of the justice department’s January 6 investigation.Pence would be a key witness, offering unique insight into conversations with Trump and the efforts to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election, a process over which Pence ultimately presided.Pence was at a December 2021 meeting at the White House with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win. Pence also spoke to Trump one-on-one on 6 January, when Trump was imploring him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Biden at the joint session of Congress.Those two interactions are of particular investigative interest to the justice department-appointed special counsel, Jack Smith, as his office examines whether Trump sought to unlawfully obstruct certification and defrauded the US by seeking to overturn the 2020 election.However, experts in constitutional law this week told the Guardian that Pence had a good chance of success in his attempt to avoid having to testify by citing the speech or debate clause, the constitutional provision that protects congressional officials from legal proceedings related to their work.On Wednesday, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, followed Schumer in protesting McCarthy’s decision to release January 6 footage to Carlson and Fox News.“The apparent transfer of video footage represents an egregious security breach that endangers the hardworking women and men of the United States Capitol police, who valiantly defended our democracy with their lives at risk on that fateful day,” the New York congressman said.Jeffries noted that the House January 6 committee, a panel consisting of seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans which operated in the last Congress but disbanded when Republicans took control of the chamber, had enjoyed access to the footage McCarthy has now released.The January 6 committee, Jeffries said, was “able to diligently review [the footage] … with numerous protocols in place to protect the safety of the members, police officers and staff who were targeted during the violent insurrection.“There is no indication that these same precautionary measures have been taken in connection with the transmission [to Carlson] of the video footage at issue.“Unfortunately, the apparent disclosure of sensitive video material is yet another example of the grave threat to the security of the American people represented by the extreme Maga Republican majority” – a reference to Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America great again”.In his letter to colleagues, Schumer said the footage showed where cameras are located in the Capitol and other details of security arrangements.The New York senator added: “Giving someone as disingenuous as Tucker Carlson exclusive access to this type of sensitive information is a grave mistake by Speaker McCarthy that will only embolden supporters of the big lie [about voter fraud and the 2020 election] and weaken faith in our democracy.”TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansUS politicsKevin McCarthyDonald TrumpFox NewsnewsReuse this content More

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      Alarms raised as McCarthy gives Tucker Carlson access to January 6 footage

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      Alarms raised as McCarthy gives Tucker Carlson access to January 6 footageDemocrats condemn House speaker’s move and warn Capitol security could be endangered if Fox News host airs footageThousands of hours of surveillance footage from the January 6 attack on the US Capitol are being made available to the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a stunning level of access granted by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, that Democrats condemned as a “grave” breach of security.‘A big freaking deal’: the grand jury that investigated Trump election pressureRead moreThe hard-right host said his team was spending the week at the Capitol, preparing to reveal their findings.Granting exclusive access to January 6 security footage to such a deeply partisan figure is a highly unusual move, seen by some critics as essentially outsourcing House oversight to a TV personality who has promoted conspiracy theories about the attack.“It’s a shocking development that brings in both political concerns but even more importantly, security concerns,” said Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who was a chief counsel during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.Many critics warned that Capitol security could be endangered if Carlson aired security footage that details how rioters accessed the building and routes lawmakers used to flee to safety. A sharply partisan retelling of the Capitol attack could accelerate a dangerous rewriting of the history of January 6, when Trump encouraged supporters to attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s election.“It is not lost on anyone that the one person that the speaker decides to give hours and hours of sensitive secret surveillance footage is the person who peddled a bogus documentary trying to debunk responsibility for the January 6 riot from Donald Trump onto others,” Goldman said.“Kevin McCarthy has turned over the security of the Capitol to Tucker Carlson and that’s a scary thought.”McCarthy’s office declined to confirm the arrangement, first reported by Axios.Images and videos from the Capitol attack have been widely circulated by documentarians, news organizations and rioters themselves. But officials have held back much of the surveillance video that offers a detailed view of the grisly scene and brutal beatings of police.The House committee investigating the January 6 attack worked with US Capitol police to review and release segments of the footage as part of public hearings last year.The chief of Capitol police, Tom Manger, said only: “When congressional leadership or congressional oversight committees ask for things like this, we must give it to them.”House Democrats planned to convene on Wednesday for a private call to hear from Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who chaired the January 6 committee, and others. The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, called McCarthy’s decision an “egregious security breach”.“Unfortunately, the apparent disclosure of sensitive video material is yet another example of the grave threat to the security of the American people represented by the extreme Maga Republican majority,” the New Yorker told House colleagues.Zoe Lofgren of California, the former chair of the House administration committee and a member of the January 6 panel, said: “It’s really a road map to people who might want to attack the Capitol again. It would be of huge assistance to them.”Carlson, who produced a documentary suggesting the federal government used the Capitol attack as a pretext to persecute conservatives, confirmed that his team was reviewing the footage.“We believe we have secured the right to see whatever we want to see,” Carlson said on his show on Monday.It’s not clear what protocols Carlson and his team are using to view the material, but he said “access is unfettered”.The January 6 committee, which was disbanded once Republicans took the House, created a secure room for staff to examine more than 14,000 hours of footage. The process took months, according to a person familiar with the investigation.Any clip the committee wanted to use had to be approved by Capitol police. If police had an objection, the committee would engage in negotiations to redact any content that could potentially endanger the force or its protection of the Capitol.Capitol police reported an increase in threats to member safety over the last several years. The number of possible threats against members of Congress rose from about 4,000 in 2017 to more than 9,600 in 2021, then declined last year to 7,501.Republicans said McCarthy’s decision was part of his commitment to create a more transparent House and engage in oversight, as Republicans launch investigations touching many aspects of government.“I support Speaker McCarthy’s decision,” said Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, the House administration committee chair.Hard-right figures cheered. “For all of you that doubted we would release the tapes. Here you go!” tweeted Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, now close to McCarthy.Rodney Davis, a former Illinois Republican, said if the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, the film-maker Alexandra Pelosi, was able to film on January 6 and release her footage, McCarthy should be able to grant Carlson access.Others said the two situations are not comparable, as countless hours of footage have been released from many sources.“I think we should remember that the January 6 attack happened in broad daylight,” said Sandeep Prasanna, a former investigative counsel on the January 6 committee.“My concern is that I don’t see how releasing thousands of hours of footage to one handpicked controversial media figure could ever produce the same factual and careful analysis that the committee produced over that year and a half.”TopicsUS Capitol attackFox NewsKevin McCarthyHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      How Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’

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      AnalysisHow Dominion Voting Systems filing proves Fox News was ‘deliberately lying’Charles Kaiser in New York Document makes clear senior Fox News figures knew after 2020 election voter fraud claims were false – and it’s likely a landmark caseThe Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Dominion Voting Systems’ brief requesting summary judgment against Fox News for defamation – and $1.6bn – is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.Fox News hosts thought Trump’s election fraud claims were ‘total BS’, court filings showRead more“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”The case concerns Fox News’s repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.Tribe said the filing “establishes that Fox was not only reckless” but also that producers, owners and personalities were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated”.Filed last week, the 192-page document makes it clear that senior figures at Fox News from Rupert Murdoch down knew immediately after the election that claims of voter fraud, in particular those aimed at Dominion, were false.Tucker Carlson called the charges “ludicrous” and “off the rails”. Sean Hannity texted about “F’ing lunatics”. A senior network vice-president called one of the stories “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”.But none of this knowledge prevented hosts from repeating lies about everything from imaginary algorithms shaving votes from Dominion machines to non-existent ties between the company and Venezuela.Tribe was one of several first amendment experts to call the filing nearly unprecedented.“This is the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation,” said Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and litigator with clients including CBS and the Associated Press.“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of. These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”Horton said Dominion’s case gets “huge benefit” from the way Fox employees “express themselves with a huge measure of hyperbole about absolutely everything”.Tribe agreed: “This is one of the first defamation cases in which it is possible to rule for the plaintiff on summary judgment. This is not a request to go to trial. There is no genuinely disputed fact. The defendants were deliberately lying in a manner that was per se libelous and they clearly knew it.”When the Dominion filing was first reported, Fox News said it “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”.Lawyers for Fox News claim everything their anchors said was protected by the first amendment.Other lawyers are skeptical.“You may have a first amendment right to report on what the president said but you have no right to validate a statement that you know to be false,” said Steven Shapiro, former legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union and counsel or co-counsel on more than 200 supreme court briefs.David Korzenik is a leading libel lawyer whose clients include the Guardian. He said the Dominion case shows it “possible to prove actual malice. If particular people are shown to have believed something to be false, or to have been highly aware of its probable falsehood, and at the same time they made statements endorsing it on air, they are in play.“You’re allowed to be biased … you’re allowed to try to make money. And people should be able to disagree with each other in a newsroom. But if Fox anchors say they don’t believe X and then turn around and endorse X on air after expressing manifest disbelief in it, they have a real problem.“The actual malice standard is very high and it’s supposed to be … it’s a burden that can be overcome in limited but appropriate circumstances.”The biggest irony revealed by the Dominion filing is that Carlson and colleagues quickly decided the greatest threat to their network was one of the only times it reported an accurate scoop: that Arizona had gone for Biden, at 11.20pm on election night.Four days later, another Murdoch property, the New York Post, asked Trump to stop the stolen election claim. Rupert Murdoch thanked the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, for making sure the editorial got wide distribution, according to the Dominion filing.But later that day, as Fox executives realized they were losing viewers, the tide began to shift.“Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch messaged Scott.In a message to his producer, Carlson sounded terrified: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”And so on 8 November Maria Bartiromo featured the Trump adviser Sidney Powell and said: “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”That alternate reality would be repeated for months. Perhaps most devastating of all is Dominion’s account of what happened on 12 November, after the reporter Jaqui Heinrich “correctly factchecked [a Trump] tweet, pointing out that top election infrastructure officials said that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”Carlson was incensed. He messaged Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously what the fuck? Actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”Hannity complained to Scott, who said Heinrich had “serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted”.By the next morning, Heinrich had deleted her tweet.TopicsFox NewsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsUS televisionUS television industryTV newsanalysisReuse this content More

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      Fox News hosts thought Trump’s election fraud claims were ‘total BS’, court filings show

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      Fox News hosts thought Trump’s election fraud claims were ‘total BS’, court filings showComments by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham revealed in $1.6bn Dominion defamation lawsuit Hosts at Fox News privately ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen while simultaneously peddling the same lies on air, according to court filings in a defamation lawsuit against the network.Rightwing personalities Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are among those named in the $1.6bn action brought by Dominion Voting Systems, the seller of electronic voting hardware and software that is suing Fox News and parent company Fox Corporation for maligning its reputation.From colonialism to Putin: what did Tucker Carlson defend in 2022?Read more“He’s acting like an insane person,” Hannity allegedly wrote of Trump in the weeks following the election as the host continued to push the so-called “big lie” during his top-rated prime time show, aided by a succession of election deniers he had on as guests.Even billionaire Fox owner Rupert Murdoch was dismissive of the former president’s false allegations, the filing alleges, calling them “really crazy stuff” in one memo to a Fox News executive, and criticizing Trump’s scattergun approach of pursuing lawsuits in numerous states to try to overturn his defeat.It was “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere”, Murdoch wrote, adding in another note that Trump’s obsession with trying to prove fraud was “terrible stuff damaging everybody”.Meanwhile, Carlson, one of the network’s most prominent and controversial stars, was disdainful of Sidney Powell, a senior Trump attorney who repeatedly claimed Dominion’s machines flipped votes cast for Trump to Joe Biden.“Sidney Powell is lying,” he wrote to a producer, the Dominion lawsuit alleges. He referred to Powell in a text as an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell”.Trump, Carlson said, was a “demonic force” who was good at “destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”Fellow host Ingraham told Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second”, according to Dominion’s filing.Other internal communications revealed that Fox News executives, hosts and researchers used phrases including “mind-blowingly nuts”, “totally off the rails” and “completely BS” to describe the false election theories they were publicly promoting.All were included in a 192-page redacted summary judgment brief filed on Thursday at the Delaware superior court by Dominion’s attorneys. A trial is scheduled to begin in mid-April.The company claims multiple Fox News employees deliberately amplified false claims that Dominion had changed votes in the 2020 election, and that Fox provided a platform for guests to make false and defamatory statements.“From the top down, Fox knew ‘the Dominion stuff’ was ‘total BS’,” the brief states.“Not a single Fox witness testified [in depositions] that they believe any of the allegations about Dominion are true. Indeed, Fox witness after Fox witness declined to assert the allegations’ truth or actually stated they do not believe them.”Top US conservatives pushing Russia’s spin on Ukraine war, experts sayRead moreThe brief highlighted an 8 November 2020 interview on Maria Bartiromo’s show in which Powell insisted Dominion voting machines were used to engage in election fraud.Bartiromo knew what Powell intended to say before the interview, according to the filing, in part because Powell had forwarded an email to her revealing her source came from a woman who got her information from “the wind”.The Fox News executive responsible for Bartiromo’s show, David Clark, admitted in a deposition he “would not have allowed that claim to be aired” if he knew about the “crazy” theory from the email.The filing also shows how Hannity and others were critical of their own network for its early call of Arizona for Biden on election night, which enraged Trump. Hannity texted Carlson and Ingraham that the call “destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable”, while Carlson called it an “act of vandalism”.Attorneys for the cable news station argued in a counterclaim that the lawsuit was an assault on the first amendment. They said Dominion had advanced “novel defamation theories” and was seeking a “staggering” damage figure aimed at generating headlines and chilling protected speech.“Dominion brought this lawsuit to punish FNN [Fox News Network] for reporting on one of the biggest stories of the day – allegations by the sitting president of the United States and his surrogates that the 2020 election was affected by fraud,” the counterclaim states. “The very fact of those allegations was newsworthy.”Fox responded to the new claims in a statement to ABC News. “There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech.”Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsFox NewsRupert MurdochSean HannityDonald TrumpUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Carlson and Hannity among Fox hosts who didn’t believe election fraud claims – court filings

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      Carlson and Hannity among Fox hosts who didn’t believe election fraud claims – court filingsNumber of conservative political commentators expressed doubts about claims being aired on their network Hosts at Fox News did not believe the allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election that were being aired on their programmes by supporters of former president Donald Trump, according to court filings in a $1.6bn (£1.34bn) defamation lawsuit against the network.“Sidney Powell is lying” about having evidence for election fraud, Tucker Carlson wrote in a message on 16 November 2020, according to an excerpt from an exhibit that remains under seal.The internal communication was included in a redacted summary judgment brief filed on Thursday by attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems.Is Dominion’s $1.6bn defamation lawsuit a death blow for Murdoch and Fox News?Read moreCarlson also referred to Powell in a text as an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell”. Fellow host Laura Ingraham told Carlson that Powell was “a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy”, referring to the former New York mayor and Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani.Sean Hannity, meanwhile, said in a deposition “that whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second”, according to Dominion’s filing.Dominion, which sells electronic voting hardware and software, is suing Fox News and parent company Fox Corporation. Dominion says some Fox News employees deliberately amplified false claims that Dominion had changed votes in the 2020 election, and that Fox provided a platform for guests to make false and defamatory statements.Attorneys for the cable news station argued in a counterclaim that the lawsuit was an assault on the first amendment. They said Dominion had advanced “novel defamation theories” and was seeking a “staggering” damage figure aimed at generating headlines, chilling protected speech and enriching Dominion’s private equity owner, Staple Street Capital Partners.“Dominion brought this lawsuit to punish FNN for reporting on one of the biggest stories of the day – allegations by the sitting president of the United States and his surrogates that the 2020 election was affected by fraud,” the counterclaim states. “The very fact of those allegations was newsworthy.”Fox attorneys also said Carlson repeatedly questioned Powell’s claims in his broadcasts. “When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her,” Carlson told viewers on 19 November 2020.Fox attorneys say Dominion’s own public relations firm expressed scepticism in December 2020 as to whether the network’s coverage was defamatory. They also point to an email from just days before the election, in which Dominion’s director of product strategy and security complained that the company’s products were “just riddled with bugs”.In their counterclaim, Fox attorneys wrote that when voting technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials, while some Fox News hosts offered protected opinion commentary about Trump’s allegations.Fox’s counterclaim is based on New York’s “anti-Slaap” law. Such laws are aimed at protecting people trying to exercise their first amendment rights from being intimidated by “strategic lawsuits against public participation”, or Slapps.“According to Dominion, FNN had a duty not to truthfully report the president’s allegations but to suppress them or denounce them as false,” Fox attorneys wrote. “Dominion is fundamentally mistaken. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press would be illusory if the prevailing side in a public controversy could sue the press for giving a forum to the losing side.”Fox attorneys warn that threatening the company with a $1.6bn judgment would cause other media outlets to think twice about what they report. They also say documents produced in the lawsuit show Dominion has not suffered any economic harm and do not indicate that it lost any customers as the result of Fox’s election coverage.A trial is set to begin in mid-April.TopicsFox NewsSean HannityFoxUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More