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      Why Dominion is already the winner of the $1.6bn lawsuit against Fox News

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      As Fox News continued to broadcast lies about Dominion voting systems and the 2020 election, Tucker Carlson, one of its star hosts used one word over and over to describe what the network was doing – “reckless”.Those messages were the first pieces of evidence Justin Nelson, a lawyer representing Dominion, displayed on Tuesday as he began his argument for why a judge should rule the network defamed his client. “Reckless was a meaningful word” – in order to win the case, Nelson has to prove that Fox acted with “actual malice” – that its hosts, producers, and executives knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard to the truth.“Unlike every other single defamation case, we have in their own words the fact that they knew it was false,” Nelson said.It was an example that illustrated how the core of Dominion’s $1.6bn case against Fox are the words that came from the mouths of Fox’s employees. Regardless of what happens in the case going forward, Dominion may have already won: the messages offer a significant historical record of how top officials at one of America’s most powerful media organization aired information they knew was false when American democracy was under attack.The case has received an extraordinary amount of public attention and represents one of the most aggressive efforts to hold a party accountable for efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.There was the Fox employee who reviewed a script for Jeanine Pirro’s show and wrote that it was “rife with conspiracies”. There was the internal fact-checking operation, the Brain Room, which debunked the claims about Dominion and circulated it to Fox employees. There was another Fox employee who joked he was so familiar with fact-checked emails he received from Dominion that he had them “tattooed” on his body. There was the Fox employee who noted that any time Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell came on the network it was “guaranteed gold”, even as the network knew the claims they were pushing were false.Fox’s defamation defenses, while potentially legally potent, will not wipe out what has already been revealed. Erin Murphy, a lawyer representing the network, said in court this week that Fox can’t be held liable because it was merely airing allegations from representatives of the sitting president. Any reasonable viewer, she said, would have understood that they were allegations. Even if top Fox executives were generally aware of what was being broadcast and didn’t believe it, Murphy argued, that’s not enough to hold them liable. Eric Davis, the Delaware judge seemed skeptical of some those arguments.Tucker Carlson’s messages, Murphy pressed on, aren’t really relevant to whether other Fox officials knowingly broadcast false information.A jury will ultimately decide on the liability issues, but seeing one of the network’s most visible stars forcefully disagreeing with what was going on on-air will likely be what endures in the mind of the American public.Undergirding the litigation is also a dueling vision about the power of Fox and the role that it plays in American media. As Murphy, Fox’s lawyer, told it, Fox is just another news network where conservative opinions are sometimes sprinkled in on air. Its decision to air the allegations about Dominion were merely an attempt to help its viewers understand, she said, once comparing their work to C-Span, which strictly airs political proceedings with no commentary or narrative.But Dominion’s lawyers painted a more realistic picture of Fox, emphasizing the immense influence it has among conservatives. When the network chose to air the false claims about Dominion, it wasn’t just airing allegations, the lawyers said, it was pumping it into the veins of the American public. Fox didn’t just give Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani airtime, the network made them household names.There was a “deliberate decision … to release the kraken,” Rodney Smolla, another Dominion lawyer said on Tuesday, referring to Powell.Stephen Shackleford, another Dominion lawyer, made a similar point in his argument on Wednesday. He noted that when Powell began appearing on Fox, she hadn’t been formally hired by Trump and was being shut out of meetings at the White House. Fox still chose to give her a platform.“Sidney was hunting for someone to make her relevant and Fox made her relevant,” said Stephen Shackleford, another lawyer representing Dominion. “While it doesn’t matter legally, the historical record needs to be clear.”The full trial in the case is scheduled to begin on 17 April. More

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      Fox News and Dominion face off in court over 2020 election claims

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      Attorneys for Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News will return to court on Wednesday for the second day of a pre-trial hearing previewing many arguments in a closely watched $1.6bn defamation case.Dominion is suing the rightwing network over its decision to repeatedly air false claims about its voting equipment in 2020 as Donald Trump and allies tried to overturn the election.Both sides are asking Eric Davis, a Delaware superior court judge, to rule in their favor ahead of trial.Davis said on Tuesday he had not reached a decision. His ruling will probably set out the scope of issues for a trial scheduled for mid-April.On Tuesday, Justin Nelson, a Dominion lawyer, presented a slew of internal communications from Fox News showing hosts, producers and executives all knew the claims about Dominion were false.That evidence is in service of Dominion’s effort to prove that Fox News committed “actual malice” when it knew the statements were false or recklessly disregarded the truth when it published claims about Dominion.On Wednesday, the hearing will feature the remainder of an argument from Erin Murphy, presenting Fox News’s case to the court.Much of her argument on Tuesday focused on the idea that Fox News was not presenting facts to its audience, but rather what reasonable viewers would have understood to be allegations from Donald Trump and his lawyers.She is expected to focus on why Fox News’s actions did not meet the “actual malice” standard required to prove defamation.Davis peppered both sides with questions on Tuesday and at times seemed skeptical of some of Fox News’s arguments.Part of its argument in the case is that it cannot be held liable for defamation because it was reporting newsworthy events in a neutral and dispassionate way.Davis questioned whether Fox News’s reporting was neutral and dispassionate, pressing Murphy about tweets from the host Lou Dobbs that contained the hashtags “Maga” and “America First”.Abby Grossberg, a Fox News staffer, separately sued the network this week, saying she was coerced by attorneys into giving misleading testimony in the lawsuit. More

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      With $1.6bn at stake, Fox News is suddenly interested in freedom of the press | Margaret Sullivan

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      As it tries to defend itself against the accusation that it knowingly spread lies about the 2020 presidential election, Fox News has touted some lofty notions about the role of journalism in a democratic society.“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners,” said a recent company statement, “but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v Sullivan.”The background, of course, is that Dominion Voting Systems is seeking $1.6bn in damages from the media giant, arguing that Fox News spread damaging falsehoods purporting that the voting machine company rigged the election to defeat Donald Trump. Dominion intends to show that network representatives at the highest levels – right up to Fox News’s founder, Rupert Murdoch – knew that this was utter nonsense, that the election was valid, and that their primary concern was not truth-telling but appeasing their disappointed pro-Trump audience.Don’t get me wrong. I believe press rights belong to a wide spectrum of media organizations, whatever their political leanings.But Fox’s reliance on first amendment protections – while part of a legal strategy that may prove successful in court – is the height of hypocrisy. America’s founders believed it was essential that American citizens be well-informed about the behavior of public officials and other powerful entities, and thus be capable of self-governance.The recent revelations from court filings, however, make it clear that such a noble mission was far from top of mind at Fox, not just in the aftermath of the 2020 election but going back years.Take, for example, one of the network’s biggest stars, Sean Hannity, who ventured far outside the bounds of journalistic norms when he appeared with Trump at a 2018 campaign rally. (Fox brass, normally tolerant of their stars’ excesses, went so far as to reprimand him.)Hannity, who has stated that he’s not a journalist, has played the role of a Trump insider – even an informal adviser to Republican officials. Recall his January 2021 text message to former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Republican congressman Jim Jordan: “Guys, we have a clear path to land the plane in 9 days,” apparently referring to persuading Trump to conclude his presidency peacefully before inauguration day.“When Hannity advised the president about the ongoing insurrection he did not do so as a journalist but as an ally, a confederate, a teammate, rather than an umpire or observer,” the famed first amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams told me last year, characterizing this as “non-journalistic behavior, in fact almost the precise opposite of journalistic behavior”.And given Fox’s clear reliance on the landmark press-rights case Times v Sullivan, why haven’t its journalists grilled their new heartthrob, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, about his newsworthy desire to weaken the journalistic protection it provides?DeSantis wants the courts to revisit Times v Sullivan, but somehow this doesn’t get the attention of Fox News interviewers. His alarming views on that landmark decision, which established a higher bar for defamation lawsuits involving public figures, haven’t provoked a single challenge in his 12 Fox appearances this year, according to a Media Matters for America database.Initially, Fox even forbade its own Howard Kurtz, who hosts a weekly show on the news media, from covering the Dominion case. After Kurtz, to his credit, publicly expressed his disagreement with that prohibition, and after plenty of outside criticism followed, the bosses relented long enough last weekend to let him discuss the case and call it a test of the first amendment.Meanwhile, Fox hosts for years have urged their grievance-hungry audience to despise journalists. (Granted, over the years, Fox has sometimes filed “friend of the court” briefs in support of other media outlets.)Rants against the media are a mainstay for personalities like Laura Ingraham, who drops disparaging phrases like “leftwing media hacks” and “regime media” into her segments.But it took Tucker Carlson – the very face of Fox News – to go further in a 2021 interview, calling mainstream journalists “cringing animals not worthy of respect”.“It just makes me sick. I really hate them,” said Carlson, who more recently has been busy portraying the violent insurrection on 6 January 2021 as a largely peaceful protest or even a friendly tourist visit.Yet somehow, when it comes time to defend the network’s profit-driven willingness to circulate lies, Fox News is eager to claim solidarity with those supposedly despicable cowards. Now, you see, it’s all about journalists standing together, arm-in-arm, on the very underpinnings of American democracy.I’m all for press rights and for applying them broadly. But somehow, I don’t think this was what the founders had in mind.Fox News doesn’t deserve the second word in its name.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Tucker Carlson firestorm over Trump texts threatens to engulf Fox News

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      Tucker Carlson firestorm over Trump texts threatens to engulf Fox News The network is facing a $1.6bn false-claims lawsuit – and its top star’s private texts about the ex-president are causing anguishTucker Carlson was once seen as untouchable. Now the most popular TV host on American cable news is at the center of a firestorm threatening to engulf Fox News and also anger Donald Trump, whose conspiracy theory-laden political cause he has long championed and who his audience loves.Court filings attached to the $1.6bn Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit accuse Fox News of allowing its stars to broadcast false accusations about rigged voting machines in the 2020 presidential election.Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape can be used in civil rape trial, judge rulesRead moreThe documents contained numerous emails detailing the private views and concerns of senior Fox management and its stars, which often seemed at odds with what they were publicly broadcasting to their audience.While anchors Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo have been singled out for pushing false claims of a fraudulent election, the fallout has landed primarily on Carlson.In group chats obtained by Dominion, the network’s biggest names – Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity – appeared to doubt claims of election fraud that were featured prominently on the network. At the same time, Fox owner Rupert Murdoch said in a court deposition that anyone who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast “should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of”.So far, Fox is standing by its stars. On Thursday, Lachlan Murdoch, Murdoch’s eldest son, heir apparent and executive chairman and chief executive of Fox Corporation, voiced support for management, its roster of stars and backed Fox New’s editorial standards.“A news organization has an obligation – and it is an obligation – to report news fulsomely, wholesomely and without fear or favor. That’s what Fox News has always done and that’s what Fox News will always do,” he said.That might not wash with many observers and media critics. But likely of equal concern, especially for Carlson, are some of the private opinions voiced about Trump. The Dominion lawsuit revealed a text from Carlson declaring: “I hate him passionately.”Nor is that the only political fight Carlson became mired in last week. Carlson was directly criticized by the White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates for describing the January 6 rioters as “orderly and meek … sightseers” as he began broadcasting footage from the insurrection handed to him by Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy.Ironically, news of Carlson’s antipathy for Trump broke around the same time the ex-president was praising Carlson as doing a “great job” in his presentation of Capitol security video.Many people – including some Republicans – reacted with outrage to Carlson’s broadcasts, with chimed with a broader far-right push in the US to recast the January 6 attack on the Capitol as an overly enthusiastic demonstration and the hundreds of people jailed for it as political prisoners.The White House, Bates said, “agrees with the chief of the Capitol police and the wide range of bipartisan lawmakers who have condemned this false depiction of the unprecedented, violent attack on our constitution and the rule of law – which cost police officers their lives.”The Guardian contacted Fox for comment but received no reply.Carlson, for his part, has been unapologetic. He claimed the clips offered “conclusive” evidence that Democrats and the select committee that organized last year’s January 6 hearings misinformed the public about what had taken place.Some experts see the current crises at the network as serious, as it seeks to keep a Trump-loving audience glued to its screens – no matter the cost, and no matter what its executives privately think.“They feel that they have to appease a certain audience they’ve trained to expect a certain kind of information flow. And at the same they see that if you take it too far, you risk serious legal and financial liability – to say nothing of embarrassment that comes when internal communications are exposed,” said Bill Grueskin, a faculty professor at Columbia Journalism School.The news-opinion formula worked for Fox News through the Trump presidency, but in the aftermath of Trump’s election fraud claims and the Capitol riot, it is starting to show signs of strain, Grueskin said.If Fox managers and anchors doubted Trump’s election fraud claims and went along with them to maintain ratings dominance, particularly over other emerging rightwing outlets, their anxieties were confirmed when Fox News viewers fled after it declared Arizona for Joe Biden.“The Murdochs think about this almost exclusively in terms of ratings, audience and money,” said Grueskin. “If they were concerned about Tucker Carlson’s truthfulness, they might have done something about this months or years ago.”And they might be right. After Dominion filed internal Fox News communications last month viewership rose by 2.4%, compared to total viewership for the first full week of February.More so, Carlson likes controversy. He remains hugely powerful, and may be beyond the reach or will of the organization to rein in. He has survived controversies over racist comments and his embracing of tenets of white nationalism.Fox News primetime anchors, particularly Carlson and Hannity, exert so much power in that organization that even the Murdochs have to dance around it, Grueskin said.“It goes beyond Tucker Carlson,” he says. “Rupert Murdoch may be the smartest media person in the world, but you can’t fix this problem they’ve created for themselves.”TopicsFox NewsDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2024US elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      Fox News braces for more turbulence as second defamation lawsuit advances

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      Fox News braces for more turbulence as second defamation lawsuit advancesNew York court greenlights $2.7bn suit against news channel by election company Smartmatic over 2020 presidential election liesAs Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation battles to contain the Dominion lawsuit scandal that has engulfed its top executives and stars, another crisis is building in the wings that has the potential to cause further turbulence for the media empire.‘Lachlan’s in the mire’: Fox News case spells trouble for Murdoch heirRead moreSmartmatic’s lawsuit against Fox News has attracted only a fraction of the attention garnered by the legal action of Dominion Voting Systems. Yet both firms are suing Fox for defamation related to its coverage of Donald Trump’s stolen-election lie, and both pose a serious threat to Fox’s finances and reputation.In fact, on paper Smartmatic’s suit appears to be the more dangerous. It’s demanding damages of $2.7bn, compared with Dominion’s $1.6bn.So far, attempts by Fox lawyers to have the Smartmatic case dismissed have fallen on stony ground. Last week the New York state supreme court in Manhattan gave the green light for the case to proceed against Fox News, the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former business anchor Lou Dobbs and Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani.Smartmatic, a global election technology company headquartered in London, lodged its defamation suit in February 2021. “The Earth is round,” was the complaint’s striking opening sentence. “Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election … ”The complaint goes on to argue that, contrary to these indisputable facts, Fox News broadcast a series of blatant lies in support of Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory. “Defendants did not want Biden to win the election. They wanted President Trump to win re-election … They also saw an opportunity to capitalize on President Trump’s popularity by inventing a story.”To prop up that story, the lawsuit claims, Fox needed a villain. That villain was Smartmatic.Smartmatic claims that more than 100 false statements were broadcast by Fox News hosts and guests. Smartmatic was falsely said to have been involved in 2020 election counts in six battleground states – in fact, it was present only at the count in Los Angeles county.Fox broadcast that Smartmatic shared its technology with Dominion, when in fact the two companies had no communication and regarded each other as rivals. Smartmatic was in cahoots with foreign governments in a conspiracy to rig the vote for Biden, Giuliani said on Bartiromo’s show – a claim that the company disputes as false and defamatory.Fox also described Smartmatic as having been founded in Venezuela at the behest of corrupt dictators. In fact, it was founded by Antonio Mugica and Roger Piñate in 2000 in Boca Raton, Florida, in the wake of the “hanging chad” fiasco, with the aim of using technology to restore people’s faith in election results.The business has since grown around the world. The firm claims that it has lost clients as a result of what it calls Fox’s “disinformation campaign”.Fox News has disputed Smartmatic’s multibillion estimate of its losses, calling it vastly inflated.A spokesperson for the broadcaster told the Guardian: “Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs. There is nothing more newsworthy than covering the president of the US and his lawyers making allegations.”Smartmatic has a very high bar to meet if it is to win the defamation suit at trial. New York state law has a rigorous approach to the first amendment of the US constitution which preserves press freedom.Under it, plaintiffs have to be able to convince a jury that not only did the media outlet put out false information, it did so with “actual malice”. That means that it either knew it was peddling a lie and went ahead anyway, or showed a reckless disregard for the truth.“New York is pretty protective of media rights,” said Roy Gutterman, a media law professor at Syracuse University who was a consultant early on in the Smartmatic case advising a non-party entity. “Every year I read a lot of cases from New York, and it’s hard to be successful in this state.”Despite this tough challenge, so far the wind is in Smartmatic’s sails. David Cohen, the New York supreme court justice presiding over the litigation, has indicated that the company has a strong enough case to go to trial.In last week’s ruling, Cohen found that “at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims” about Smartmatic. “Plaintiffs have pleaded facts sufficient to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice.”TopicsFox NewsUS elections 2020News CorporationRudy GiulianiMedia businessTV newsnewsReuse this content More

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      McCarthy: January 6 tapes to be ‘slowly’ rolled out to networks besides Fox News

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      McCarthy: January 6 tapes to be ‘slowly’ rolled out to networks besides Fox NewsRepublican House speaker has only let Fox News see the tapes so far, giving access to the primetime host Tucker CarlsonThe Republican speaker of the US House, Kevin McCarthy, said on Sunday he would “slowly roll out” to networks other than Fox News more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the January 6 attack on Congress.Mike Pence: history will hold Donald Trump accountable over Capitol attackRead more“We will slowly roll out to every individual news agency,” McCarthy told Sunday Morning Futures, a show broadcast by Fox News. “They can come see the tapes as well. Let everyone see them to bring their own judgment.”McCarthy has only let Fox News see the tapes so far, giving access to the primetime host Tucker Carlson.The move was blasted by Democrats in Congress and Republican critics of Donald Trump – who incited the Capitol attack in an attempt to overturn his election defeat – even before Carlson showed his first excerpts this week.Carlson claimed the tapes showed “mostly peaceful chaos”, Trump supporters acting like tourists, and that many of more than 1,000 people arrested, some convicted of crimes including seditious conspiracy, had been unjustly targeted.Carlson continued to show the footage even as filings in a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit against Fox News by a voting machine company showed that in private messages, Fox News hosts said Trump was lying about voter fraud in the 2020 election and Carlson himself professed to “passionately hate” the former president.On Sunday, McCarthy claimed he did not “give” the tapes to Carlson.“I didn’t give the tapes,” he said. “I allowed [him] to come see them, just like an exclusive with anybody else. My goal here is transparency.”McCarthy also wielded a common rightwing talking point, likening January 6 – a violent assault linked to nine deaths including law enforcement suicides – to protests for racial justice after the police murder of George Floyd in summer 2020 which sometimes turned violent.McCarthy said: “Why did I watch federal courts, why did I watch cities burn, federal agencies or something, and nobody arrested there? I think we should have equal justice across this country.”Nancy Mace, a relatively moderate Republican from South Carolina, tried to make the same point on CNN’s State of the Union.Though she said the tapes should have been given to “every media outlet”, Mace added: “We saw very few arrests when there were attacks by … members of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. I had my house spray-painted two summers ago and no one’s been held to account for that.”Mace was not pressed by her host. But other Republicans spoke unfavourably of McCarthy’s decision to give the Capitol tapes to Carlson, and how Carlson used them.At a Washington dinner on Saturday night, former vice-president Mike Pence, who the mob targeted on January 6, said: “Make no mistake about it, what happened that day was a disgrace. And it mocks decency to portray it any other way.”On Sunday, speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House homeland security committee, said: “I think the American people deserve to see all the footage from that day, and all the footage is not going to be, you know, tourism at the Capitol.“It’s going to show a very dark, tragic day that I witnessed firsthand, that included our Capitol police being assaulted, 140 of them injured, two pipe bombs. One Capitol police officer killed, and a protester killed. That’s not a good day.”TopicsUS Capitol attackKevin McCarthyFox NewsTV newsnewsReuse this content More

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      Is Fox News finally falling out of love with Trump? It’s complicated

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      Is Fox News finally falling out of love with Trump? It’s complicatedCourt revelations of the network’s private views about the former president suggest no love lost – but experts suggest each needs the other“He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. But he’s not going to destroy us … We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait … I hate him passionately.”These were not the text messages of a liberal journalist feeling their spirit crushed by the Donald Trump era. They were, according to US court papers, the words of Tucker Carlson, one of the former US president’s biggest cheerleaders on the rightwing Fox News network.‘Lachlan’s in the mire’: Fox News case spells trouble for Murdoch heirRead moreA $1.6bn defamation lawsuit, brought by a voting machine maker that claims it was wrongly maligned, has pulled back the curtain on one of the most consequential relationships in modern political history: Trump and Fox News.The private venting of Fox News’s primetime stars, expressing contempt for Trump and his election lies even as they told millions of viewers the opposite, has fueled perceptions that the long-running affair between America’s 45th president and most watched cable news network is on the rocks.However, a glance at Fox News’s output over the last week suggests that, like love, it’s complicated. While Carlson and other primetime hosts may quietly be rooting for the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, to beat Trump to the 2024 Republican primary nomination, they are already dropping hints about a readiness to jump back onboard the Trump train.“It’s a toxic relationship,” said Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC). “They are good and bad for each other at the same time. You’ve got to look at it through that prism to understand what’s going on here. Fox can’t do without Trump and Trump ultimately can’t do without Fox because he knows, at the end of the day, that’s the media vehicle through which he will be able to reach the widest audience of his supporters.”The lawsuit has plunged Fox News, the dominant media force among conservatives, into one of the biggest crises in its 26-year history. Dominion Voting Systems argues that the network knowingly broadcast false claims that the election technology company was responsible for fraud in the 2020 presidential election.Publicly released internal documents and depositions have revealed that, while Fox News hosts were promulgating Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election, off air they were messaging their colleagues to say they did not believe a word of it.In one text message exchange, Carlson, who hosts one of the most watched shows on cable news, said Trump has a talent to “destroy things. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”Later, addressing Trump’s four years as president, Carlson texted: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”Yet for years Carlson had been an enthusiastic champion of Trump. In a 2017 conversation with colleague Greg Gutfeld on the network, Carlson agreed that Trump was “the greatest president that ever will be”.The paper trail goes all the way to the top. Rupert Murdoch, chair of Fox Corp, told the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, that hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham maybe “went too far” in pushing Trump’s election fraud claims on the network. Murdoch also called the voter fraud claims “really crazy stuff” in a text message.The documents also paint a portrait of Fox News living in fear of bleeding its audience to even more extreme rivals such as Newsmax and the One America News Network. Bill Sammon, a Fox Washington news executive, is quoted as saying: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”On election night the network called – correctly – that Democrat Joe Biden had beaten Trump in the battleground state of Arizona, prompting a furious backlash from Trump’s supporters. One internal email said: “Holy cow, our audience is mad at the network.” Another noted: “They’re FURIOUS.”Fox News dropped from first to third in the news network ratings between the 3 November 2020 election and Biden’s inauguration on 20 January 2021, according to Nielsen. Thousands of its viewers flocked to the more conservative Newsmax, where primetime viewership shot from 58,000 the week before the election to 568,000 the week after.Carlson wrote to a producer: “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.”Dominion argues that Fox executives decided to push false narratives to entice their audience back. It points to outlandish conspiracy theories promoted by Trump allies such as lawyer Sidney Powell on programs hosted by Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the watchdog group Media Matters, said: “You can see the hosts worried that the network they had helped to build for years was basically going to collapse, that their viewers were turning on them, that executives were scrambling for a way to get the viewers back.”There had effectively been a revolving door between the Trump White House and Fox News; his last press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is a regular on the network. But as the dust settled after the January 6 insurrection and Biden’s inauguration, the relationship cooled. Trump no longer called in to Fox & Friends to ramble at will. The network dropped his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as a contributor, ostensibly because of a ban on political activity.It was a potentially serious blow to the man looking to win back the White House in 2024. Frank Luntz, a consultant and pollster, said: “Donald Trump needs Fox News more than Fox needs Donald Trump because Trump doesn’t have easy access to an uncritical media like he did in 2016. There is no alternative for him. He can’t go to CNN or MSNBC. He does have to go to Newsmax, and that just does not have the reach of these other cable news channels.”Worse still for Trump, Fox News found a new Chosen One. It reportedly asked DeSantis to appear on air 113 times, or nearly once a day, during one four-month spell and was given exclusive access to his signing of a contentious election law. Reelected in a landslide last November, DeSantis is a culture warrior with a flair for “owning the libs”. The attraction was obvious.Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman, explained: “Fox News knows exactly what their audience wants. Their audience wants a guy like Trump. They want a bully. They want a son of a bitch. They want somebody who will go after woke. They want an authoritarian. So Fox is going to give them what they want.“Fox has made the determination that they don’t think Trump can win in ‘24, which is why they’re pushing DeSantis. Once they realise that Trump is going to be the nominee, then everybody will fall in line like they did last time.”When Trump supporters gathered at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Oxon Hill, Maryland, both DeSantis and Fox News’s big names stayed away. Instead the Newsmax and other fringe rightwing media held sway. Trump ally Steve Bannon accused Fox News of disrespecting the former president, stating: “You’ve deemed Trump’s not going to be president. Well, we deem you’re not going to have a network.”It was, perhaps, the equivalent of a cathartic marital row. A day later, something changed: Fox News carried the whole of Trump’s one hour, 45 minute address to CPAC, a departure from its distinctly tepid response to his 2024 campaign events. “I hope Fox doesn’t turn off, but we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016,” he said pointedly.Then, on Monday, Carlson presented selective excerpts of security footage from the US Capitol attack to spin the false narrative that January 6 was in fact a peaceful protest. He was widely condemned by both Democrats and Republicans – but Trump said on his social media platform, “congratulations to Tucker Carlson on one of the biggest ‘scoops’ as a reporter in US history”.As the week wore on, Carlson praised Trump’s “bold plans” for 2024, telling viewers: “He is saying things that are really interesting, not rehashes at all.” Host Sean Hannity, “privately disgusted” with Trump according to court documents, played clips of an interview Trump had done on his radio show.To observers, it was a sign that the on-off Trump-Fox affair could soon be on again, especially if, as opinion polls currently suggest, the former reality TV star surges ahead the Republican primary.Walsh observed: “If you did a private poll of every conservative media talker and conservative network and every Republican elected official, 80 to 90% of them privately would want Trump gone and want DeSantis to be the guy. Tucker Carlson doesn’t want Trump to run again. Hannity, Trump’s cheerleader, doesn’t want Trump to run again.“That’s how they all feel privately and they’re all hoping that somebody does their dirty work. Fox News is hoping that Trump will implode or get indicted or die or whatever but Fox News, we know, will follow their audience and, if Trump stays in and he’s the man, Fox News will be right there, his biggest cheerleader again.”The bottom line is ratings or, to put it another way, dollars.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Fox have already demonstrated that they will move and calibrate their news coverage based on what the audience demands and, as of right now, the demand still overwhelmingly is for Donald Trump.”Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, added: “This an example of a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship. They need each other, whether they want to admit it or not.”TopicsFox NewsDonald TrumpUS television industryRepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republicans try to reframe January 6 as a sightseeing tour – will it work?

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      Republicans try to reframe January 6 as a sightseeing tour – will it work?Now in control of the House, Republicans are making light of the violence of the day and assailing the investigation into the Capitol attackIt might be thought that Republicans would prefer not to remind Americans of the day their president nearly destroyed US democracy.But the party’s right wing is going all in to rewrite the history of the 6 January 2021 storming of the Capitol by Donald Trump’s supporters, and to make political martyrs of those imprisoned for assaulting police officers and sending politicians fleeing as the mob attempted to stop Congress from endorsing Joe Biden’s election victory.Fox News produced ‘zero’ evidence to back election lie, defamation case hearsRead moreTrump himself has waded in by appearing on a song sung by the “J6 Prison Choir” of men locked up for their part in the insurrection while Republican supporters in Congress are setting up a delegation to visit the prisoners in what will be seen as an act of solidarity.Meanwhile, after taking control of the House of Representatives in January, the Republicans have launched an investigation into the then Democratic-led original congressional investigation of the January 6 Capitol attack which recommended Trump’s prosecution for inciting the riot.But leading the charge in the Orwellian attempt to control the past in the hope that it will lead Republicans to control the future is the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who pressured Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House of Representatives, into releasing to him thousands of hours of video of Trump supporters swarming the Capitol.Carlson presented selected snippets on his nightly show that he claimed proved the rioters were really no more than tourists who “obviously revered the Capitol”.“These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” he said.Carlson, who has claimed that the January 6 attack was a “false flag” operation by the Washington establishment to discredit Trump’s supporters, said the video shows “mostly peaceful chaos”.“Taken as a whole the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim,” he said.Republicans in Washington are not universally happy with this revisionism. Senator Kevin Cramer said that the attack “was not just some rowdy protest of Boy Scouts” and that the Fox News interpretation was “a lie”. Senator Thom Tillis called Carlson’s description of events “bullshit”.Asked if it was a mistake for McCarthy to hand the footage over to Fox News, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the US Senate, distanced himself from the consequences.“My concern is how it was depicted,” he said.McCarthy defended the release of the video in the name of transparency although that did not explain why he gave it only to Fox.Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said McCarthy was driven principally by thirst for power as the Republican right made release of the video a condition of support for his election as speaker in January.“Everybody knows that McCarthy, who was once very upset about what happened on January 6 and said so, is just using this for his own purposes. This was simply an action designed to get him the final few votes needed to become speaker. He sold out his country. It was absolutely spineless,” Sabato said.“Carlson and McCarthy have given the crazies, the far-right extremists, the neo-Nazi white supremacists who are obsessed with January 6, the counter reality they’ve been looking for of a bunch of patriots taking a tour in the Capitol.”Sabato said Carlson, who is working to shore up his own credibility with Trump’s followers amid revelations that the Fox News host regularly derided the then president and said “I hate him passionately”, was a driving force behind the move.“Tucker Carlson on his own show said that if McCarthy wants these votes to become speaker then show us by releasing all of the information on the film. Everybody knew from the instant Carlson got it he was going to put together snippets that were very misleading, and which excluded all of the real action that day, all of the criminal action that day. It was totally predictable,” he said.While Carlson’s selective interpretation of the video was rapidly derided by some Republicans, as well as by the Capitol police chief and the family of an officer who died after being assaulted as “unscrupulous and outright sleazy”, plenty of others were onboard.The House Republicans’ Twitter account said that Carlson’s take on the footage was a “MUST WATCH”.Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia said the clips were proof of the innocence of the more than 1,000 people charged with crimes as the mob stormed the Capitol. Hundreds have already been convicted including some jailed for violence.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I’ve seen enough. Release all J6 political prisoners now,” Collins tweeted to considerable derision.The attempt to turn the imprisoned rioters into martyrs gained steam after Trump appeared in a song by a choir of men jailed over their involvement in the January 6 attack. They sing the national anthem as the former president recites the pledge of allegiance. Trump has praised the insurrectionists and said that if he were to win the presidency again he would “very, very seriously” consider giving them all pardons.The prisoners’ cause has been taken up by other Republicans.The far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was among those pressing McCarthy to release the January 6 video as a condition for her support for his election as speaker. She is expected to lead a congressional delegation to a Washington DC federal prison where some of the rioters are being held, ostensibly to check on their welfare, as the result of another of her conditions for supporting McCarthy.Meanwhile, after taking control of the House of Representatives in January, the Republicans have launched an investigation of Congress’s original investigation into the events of 6 January 2021, which recommended Trump’s prosecution for inciting the assault.The latest committee to look into the riot will be led by Congressman Barry Loudermilk, who contested Biden’s victory and likened Trump’s impeachment to the crucifixion of Jesus.Loudermilk was found by the earlier House investigation to have a given tours of the Capitol to a group of people the day before the insurrection even though it was closed to visitors. They included at least one man seen photographing corridors and staircases who was later identified outside the Capitol on 6 January making threats against members of Congress.Loudermilk tweeted that he intends to revisit the January 6 investigation because, he said, the earlier inquiry was politicised.“The J6 committee chose to ignore the facts and pursue a particular political narrative. I will not do this. As chairman of the subcommittee on oversight, I’m focused on finding out what really happened on J6 to ensure it never happens again,” he said.Former congresswoman Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans who served on the January 6 committee, and who then lost a primary race against a Trump-backed rival, challenged Loudermilk, who declined to testify at the hearings she helped chair.“If @HouseGOP wants new Jan 6 hearings, bring it on. Let’s replay every witness & all the evidence from last year. But this time, those members who sought pardons and/or hid from subpoenas should sit on the dais so they can be confronted on live TV with the unassailable evidence,” tweeted Cheney, who was hired by Sabato earlier this month as a professor at the Center for Politics.Whether revisiting what many Americans regard as a shameful day for democracy will work in the Republicans’ favor remains to be seen.Opinion polls show that views about what happened on 6 January 2021 have not shifted dramatically in the intervening two years. According to a Quinnipiac university poll in December, 45% of Americans said that Trump bears “a lot” of responsibility for the storming of the Capitol. Just 21% did not blame him at all. The country was almost evenly split over whether the former president committed a crime that day.Polls also show a deep divide over the significance of the January 6 Capitol attack, with 50% of Americans saying it represented an assault on democracy that should not be forgotten while 44% say events are being overstated.Sabato said that while the reimagining of events will play well with hardcore Republicans, it may ultimately not be good for the party as a whole.“This will stir some of the base. But it’s not all positive for Republicans because it helps Trump, the one guy who probably will lose to Biden if it turns out to be Biden versus Trump again,” he said.TopicsUS Capitol attackRepublicansJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsHouse of RepresentativesLiz CheneyKevin McCarthyfeaturesReuse this content More