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

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

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      Fox News Sanctioned by Judge for Withholding Evidence in Dominion Case

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      Judge Eric Davis also said an investigation was likely into Fox’s handling of documents and whether it had withheld details about Rupert Murdoch’s corporate role.WILMINGTON, Del. — The judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News said on Wednesday that he was imposing a sanction on the network and would very likely start an investigation into whether Fox’s legal team had deliberately withheld evidence, scolding the lawyers for not being “straightforward” with him.The rebuke came after lawyers for Dominion, which is suing for defamation, revealed a number of instances in which Fox’s lawyers had not turned over evidence in a timely manner. That evidence included recordings of the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo talking with former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, which Dominion said had been turned over only a week ago.In imposing the sanction on Fox, Judge Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court ruled that if Dominion had to do additional depositions, or redo any, then Fox would have to “do everything they can to make the person available, and it will be at a cost to Fox.”He also said he would very likely appoint a special master — an outside lawyer — to investigate Fox’s handling of discovery of documents and the question of whether Fox had inappropriately withheld details about the scope of Rupert Murdoch’s role. Since Dominion filed its suit in early 2021, Fox had argued that Mr. Murdoch and Fox Corporation, the parent company, should not be part of the case because Mr. Murdoch, the chair, and other senior executives had nothing to do with running Fox News. But in the past few days, Fox disclosed to Dominion that Mr. Murdoch was a corporate officer at Fox News.Dominion, a voting technology company, accused Fox and some of the network’s executives and hosts of smearing its reputation by linking it to a nonexistent conspiracy to rig voting machines in the 2020 presidential election. Fox had said that it was just reporting on newsworthy allegations from Mr. Trump, who was then the president, as well as his lawyers and supporters, who told Fox’s hosts and producers that they would prove their allegations in court.Fox’s lawyers had only recently disclosed that Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox Corp., was also the executive chair of Fox News, a role that pointed to more responsibility for its broadcasts.Mike Segar/ReutersJury selection starts on Thursday, and the trial is scheduled to begin on Monday. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Dominion would avail itself of the judge’s ruling allowing its lawyers to conduct additional depositions. But it was clear from Judge Davis’s stern reprimand of Fox’s lawyers on Wednesday — and similarly piqued remarks from him during another hearing on Tuesday — that he was losing patience. The judge told Fox’s lawyers to retain all internal communications, starting from March 20 of this year, that related to Mr. Murdoch’s role at Fox News. That was the date the lawyers submitted a letter to Judge Davis asking that Mr. Murdoch and other Fox Corporation executives not be forced to testify at the trial in person, saying they had “limited knowledge of pertinent facts.” The letter did not mention that Mr. Murdoch was also a Fox News executive.Judge Davis said he would weigh whether any additional sanctions should be placed on Fox.He also said he was very concerned that there had been “misrepresentations to the court.”“This is very serious,” Judge Davis said.Davida Brook, a lawyer for Dominion, told the court that they were still receiving relevant documents from Fox, with the trial just days away.“We keep on learning about more relevant information from individuals other than Fox,” she said. “And to be honest we don’t really know what to do about that, but that is the situation we find ourselves in.”She pointed to one email that had recently been handed over, between Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Powell on Nov. 7, 2020. In the email, Ms. Powell was forwarding evidence to Ms. Bartiromo that Dominion said was proof Fox had acted recklessly: an email from a woman Ms. Powell relied on as a source who exhibited signs of delusion, claiming, for instance, that she was aware of voter fraud because she had special powers, including the ability to time travel.“I just spoke to Eric and told him you gave very imp info,” Ms. Bartiromo wrote back to Ms. Powell, most likely referring to Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s son.Ms. Brook also played two recordings for the court of pre-interviews, which are preliminary conversations before an on-air interview, conducted by Ms. Bartiromo that Ms. Brook said were received only after they were revealed in legal complaints filed by Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer who is suing the network.The evidence included recordings of the Fox News host Maria Bartiromo talking with former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesIn one of the recordings, on Nov. 8, 2020, Ms. Bartiromo asks Mr. Giuliani about Dominion’s software. In it, he admits that he doesn’t have hard evidence to back up the claim that the software could be manipulated, saying it was “being analyzed right now.” When Ms. Bartiromo asks about a conspiracy theory circulating at the time that claimed Dominion was connected to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, Mr. Giuliani says: “Yeah, I’ve read that. I can’t prove that yet.”A Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement on Wednesday: “As counsel explained to the court, Fox produced the supplemental information from Ms. Grossberg when we first learned it.”Justin Nelson, another lawyer for Dominion, told Judge Davis that had Fox Corporation, the parent company, been quicker to share the information about Mr. Murdoch’s role as an officer of Fox News, the universe of documents Dominion could have obtained during discovery from him and other Fox Corporation executives would have been much larger. He also said that Fox might have failed to produce relevant documents.“We have been litigating based upon this false premise that Rupert Murdoch wasn’t an officer of Fox News,” he said.The question of whether Mr. Murdoch made decisions as a corporate officer of Fox News cuts to the heart of Dominion’s case. It has tried to prove — and Fox has repeatedly denied — that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, were closely involved in overseeing Fox News coverage of the 2020 election. Their decisions, Dominion has argued, directly affected what Fox broadcast about the voting technology company and, more broadly, fed a climate inside the network where hosts and producers amplified misinformation as part of a plan to win back viewers who had stopped watching after Mr. Trump’s loss.Proving so would mean that the larger Fox Corporation — not just Fox News — could also be found liable for defaming Dominion.Mr. Nelson argued that the case should be split in two so that Dominion lawyers could separately pursue action against Fox Corporation now that Dominion could obtain more information from executives. Judge Davis declined, but he expressed concern that Fox’s legal team had not been forthcoming with the information, despite being asked multiple times whether Mr. Murdoch was a corporate officer for Fox News.“I need people to tell me the truth,” he said. “And by the way, omission is a lie.”Dan K. Webb, a lawyer for Fox, pushed back on the assertion from Dominion, saying that both he and even Mr. Murdoch didn’t realize he also held the executive chair role at Fox News.“On a day-to-day basis, Mr. Rupert Murdoch had nothing to do with making decisions with what goes on the air on Fox News,” Mr. Webb said.In an emailed statement, a Fox News spokeswoman said: “Rupert Murdoch has been listed as executive chairman of Fox News in our S.E.C. filings since 2019 and this filing was referenced by Dominion’s own attorney during his deposition.”Judge Davis admonished Fox’s lawyers, saying he had previously asked for clarity on who had corporate responsibilities at Fox News but had not heard back.“What do I do with attorneys that aren’t straightforward with me?” he asked. More

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      How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmOn the evening of Nov. 19, 2020, Rupert Murdoch was watching TV and crawling the walls of his 18th-century mansion in the British countryside while under strict pandemic lockdown. The television hosts at Murdoch’s top cable network, Fox News, might have scoffed at such unyielding adherence to Covid protocols. But Jerry Hall, his soon-to-be fourth ex-wife and no fan of Fox or its conservative hosts, was insisting that Murdoch, approaching his 90th birthday, remain cautious.The big story that day, as it had been every day in the two weeks since the election, was election theft, and now Rudolph W. Giuliani was giving a news conference at the Republican National Committee. With Sidney Powell, the right-wing attorney and conspiracy theorist, at his side, Giuliani, sweating profusely, black hair dye dripping down the side of his face, spun a wild fantasy about Joe Biden’s stealing the election from President Donald J. Trump. Dizzying in its delusional complexity, it centered on a supposed plot by the Clinton Foundation, George Soros and associates of Hugo Chávez to convert Trump votes into Biden votes by way of software from Smartmatic and voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.Murdoch wasn’t pleased. He had built the most powerful media empire on the planet by understanding what his audience wanted and giving it to them without fear or judgment. But Trump now appeared to be making a serious bid to overturn a legitimate election, and his chaos agents — his personal lawyer Giuliani chief among them — were creating dangerous new appetites. Now Murdoch was faced with holding the line on reporting the facts or following his audience all the way into the land of conspiracy theories. Neither choice was necessarily good for business. At 5:01 p.m. London time, he sent an email to his friend Saad Mohseni — an Afghan Australian media mogul sometimes referred to as the Afghan Rupert Murdoch — from his iPhone. “Just watched Giuliani press conference,” he wrote. “Stupid and damaging.” Shortly after, he sent another email, this one to his Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott: “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear. Probably hurting us, too.”Murdoch had for weeks — for years, really — avoided making a choice. Trump and his supporters were already furious at Fox News for being the first network to call Biden the victor in Arizona, and two newer cable networks were offering them a version of reality more fully on Trump’s terms. One of them, Newsmax, was moving up in the ratings while refusing to call Biden the winner. When Murdoch’s own paper, The Wall Street Journal, reported a few days before Giuliani’s news conference that Trump allies were considering pouring money into Newsmax to help it mount a stiffer challenge to Fox, Murdoch alerted Scott to the piece. Fox would have to play this just right, he said in an email. Take Giuliani with “a large grain of salt,” he wrote, but also be careful not to “antagonize Trump further.”The network’s coverage of the Giuliani news conference showed just how impossible this balancing act would be. Immediately afterward, a Fox News White House correspondent, Kristin Fisher, went to the network’s camera position outside the West Wing and fact-checked the allegations. “So much of what he said was simply not true,” she told Fox viewers. Giuliani, she said, provided no hard proof for a claim that “really cuts to the core of our democratic process.” Fox’s opinion hosts, who had been broadcasting the Giuliani-Powell Dominion fantasies to varying degrees themselves — some appearing to endorse them outright — had been complaining internally that the news division’s debunking efforts were alienating the core audience. An executive at the Fox Corporation, the network’s parent company, had recently started a brand protection effort to, among other tasks, “defend the brand in real time.” After Fisher’s segment, the group sent an alert to top news executives. In a follow-up email, Scott vented to a deputy. “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories,” she wrote. “We have damaged their trust and belief in us.” One of Fisher’s bosses told her that she needed to do a better job of “respecting our audience,” and Fisher later complained of feeling sidelined. More

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      Trump and Fox News, Twin Titans of Politics, Hit With Back-to-Back Rebukes

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      Donald Trump’s criminal indictment and Fox News’s civil trial have nothing in common, but, combined, they delivered a rare reckoning for two forces that have transformed politics.For the better part of a decade, Donald J. Trump and his allies at Fox News have beguiled some Americans and enraged others as they spun up an alternative world where elections turned on fraud, one political party oppressed another, and one man stood against his detractors to carry his version of truth to an adoring electorate.Then this week, on two consecutive days, the former president and the highest-rated cable news channel were delivered a dose of reality by the American legal system.On Thursday, Mr. Trump became the first former president in history to be indicted on criminal charges, after a Manhattan grand jury’s examination of hush money paid to a pornographic film actress in the final days of the 2016 election.The next day, a judge in Delaware Superior Court concluded that Fox hosts and guests had repeatedly made false claims about voting machines and their supposed role in a fictitious plot to steal the 2020 election, and that Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network should go to trial.A lawyer for Fox News, Dan Webb, center, leaving the first hearing for the Dominion v. Fox case in Wilmington, Del., on March 21.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesBoth defendants dispute the claims. Still, the back-to-back blows against twin titans of American politics landed as a reminder of the still-unfolding reckoning with the tumult of the Trump presidency.For the left, the seismic week delivered an “I told you so” years in the making. Democrats who have long wanted Mr. Trump criminally charged got the satisfaction of watching a prosecutor and a grand jury agree.A day later, after years of arguing that Fox News was hardly fair and balanced, they could read a judge’s finding that Fox had not conducted “good-faith, disinterested reporting” on Dominion. Fox argues that statements made on air alleging election fraud are protected by the First Amendment.While the two cases have nothing in common in substance, they share a rare and powerful potential. In both, any final judgments will be rendered in a courtroom and not by bickering pundits on cable news and editorial pages.“There will always be a remnant, no matter how the matter is resolved in court, who will refuse to accept the judgment,” said Norman Eisen, a government ethics lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “But when you look at other post-upheaval societies, judicial processes reduce factions down to a few hard-core believers.”He added, “A series of court cases and judgments can break the fever.”That, of course, could prove to be a Democrat’s wishful thinking.In this moment of constant campaigning and tribal partisanship, even the courts have had difficulty puncturing the ideological bubbles that Mr. Trump and Fox News pundits have created. The legal system produced a $25 million settlement of fraud charges against Trump University, dismissed dozens of lies about malfeasance in the 2020 election, pressed for the search for missing classified documents and ruled numerous times that Dominion’s machines did not in fact change votes.Yet hundreds of thousands of Americans remain devoted to both defendants.Embarrassing and damaging material has already come out through both cases, with little immediate sign of backlash..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Thousands of text messages, emails and other internal company documents disclosed to Dominion and released publicly portray high-level figures at the network as bent on maintaining ratings supremacy by giving audiences what they wanted, regardless of the truth.Texts show the star prime time host Tucker Carlson calling Mr. Trump a “demonic force,” and the chairman of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, describing Sean Hannity as “privately disgusted by Trump.”Fox News has said Dominion took private conversations out of context. Its ratings dominance appears untouched by the negative headlines in recent weeks. Data from Nielsen show that in March the 10 top-rated cable shows in America were all on Fox News, led by “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and that 14 of the top 20 were produced by the network.Still, experts believe the case has already resonated.“I’ve never seen a case before where journalists said they didn’t believe the story they were telling but were going to keep telling it because it’s what the audience wanted to hear,” said Lyrissa Lidsky, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Florida and an expert on defamation law. “It’s a shock wave saying it’s time to get serious about accountability.”Democrats, too, could see their illusions fall. Although many have clamored to see Mr. Trump charged, and felt vindicated this week, the risks of failure are considerable.If Mr. Trump’s lawyers file to have the charges simply dismissed as prosecutorial overreach and quickly win, the consequences would almost certainly strengthen Mr. Trump, who will make the case — and possibly others to follow — central to his primary campaign.But in a court of law, the magnetism that Mr. Trump and Fox News have over their audiences may lose some of its power. No matter how many times the former president insists outside the courtroom that he’s the victim of a political prosecution, inside the courtroom his lawyers will have to address the specific charges. They will win or lose based on legal arguments, not bluster.“I’ve been around for 50 years, and I’ve heard the political argument before,” said Stanley M. Brand, a veteran Washington defense lawyer. Mr. Brand cited the “Abscam” bribery case of the 1970s, when the defendants accused President Jimmy Carter of orchestrating the bribery sting, or the investigation of Senator Robert G. Torricelli, which was also surrounded by charges of politics. “It’s never worked in a court of law.”Members of the media and protesters outside Trump Tower in New York City on Thursday.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesJames Bopp Jr., a conservative defense lawyer, said he agreed with virtually all Republicans that the Manhattan district attorney had coaxed his grand jury to bring forward a specious indictment for the political purpose of damaging Mr. Trump.But, he said, Mr. Trump’s lawyers must answer the charges, not grandstand on the politics.“A charge is not automatically dismissible because it’s brought for political purpose,” he said. “The motive of prosecutors may be pertinent to the broader society. It’s not pertinent to a judge.”The exact charges against Mr. Trump may not be known until he is arraigned on Tuesday. The grand jury that brought the indictment was examining payments to Stormy Daniels and the core question of whether those payments were illegally disguised as business expenditures, a misdemeanor that would rise to a felony if those payments could be labeled an illegal campaign expenditure.If past legal skirmishes are an indication, Mr. Trump is likely to drag the proceedings out for months, if not years, with motion after motion as he builds his third presidential campaign around what he called on Friday the “unprecedented political persecution of the president and blatant interference in the 2024 election.”Likewise, Fox News will almost certainly continue to frame the Dominion case as that of a corporation intent on stifling the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press.“This case is and always has been about the First Amendment protections of the media’s absolute right to cover the news,” the network said in a statement Friday.That may be left for a court to decide.Ken Bensinger More

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      Trump’s Return to Fox News Gets a Cool Reception … on Fox News

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      The network used to be a safe space for the former president. But Brian Kilmeade, Jason Chaffetz and others had tough words for his appearance on “Hannity,” his first Fox interview in months.Reunions can be awkward.Former President Donald J. Trump finally returned this week to his old stomping ground, Fox News, after several months away. The chilly reception from some of his onetime media allies underscored his uneasy place at the moment in Republican politics.Yes, Sean Hannity, the Fox News anchor who conducted the interview, listened patiently as Mr. Trump reeled off his usual talking points about the “fake news media” and “horrible” Democrats. The former president said Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination, would be toiling “at a pizza parlor” without his endorsement. And he concluded with the grim assessment that “our country is dead.”But while Fox News and Mr. Trump existed for years in a kind of symbiosis — with on-air personalities effusively praising Mr. Trump, and benefiting from big ratings for his frequent appearances — the network is no longer the all-encompassing Trump safe space it used to be.Rupert Murdoch has used media properties like Fox News to promote Mr. DeSantis as a potential savior of the Republican Party. Until this week, Mr. Trump had not appeared on a Fox News broadcast since declaring his candidacy in November. And minutes after his interview aired, network personalities were taking the former president to task.Laura Ingraham, whose prime-time program directly follows “Hannity,” was once so close to Mr. Trump that she attended his election night party in November 2020. On her Monday show, she allowed the New York Post columnist Miranda Devine to criticize Mr. Trump for “complaining endlessly about the past” and “constantly dwelling on grievance.”When her other guest, the Trump loyalist Stephen Miller, loudly interjected that the former president “has put forward a new policy plan every week,” Ms. Ingraham sounded skeptical of his argument. “Why isn’t he talking about them?” she asked Mr. Miller.The next morning, Jason Chaffetz, a Republican congressman turned Fox News contributor, denounced Mr. Trump’s performance as “absolutely horrific.”“I voted for Donald Trump twice, I have defended him countless times; I thought he was horrific,” Mr. Chaffetz said. “I think that was the worst interview I’ve seen the president do.” He went on to criticize the former president for “whining,” “complaining” and playing “the victim card.” Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, two of the co-hosts of the morning show “Fox & Friends,” also knocked Mr. Trump’s performance.Nielsen ratings — one of Mr. Trump’s preferred metrics — provided their own kind of tough review. In past years, a Trump interview almost always delivered Fox News’s biggest audience of the day. On Monday, Mr. Trump drew 3.04 million viewers, higher than the average episode of “Hannity” but well below that day’s viewership for “The Five” and “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”With a defamation suit against Fox News filed by Dominion Voting Systems hurtling toward a trial, it was notable that Mr. Hannity’s interview with Mr. Trump was taped. Mr. Trump’s baseless claims about a “rigged” 2020 election are central to the Dominion case; a live appearance by Mr. Trump in which he repeats those claims could be hazardous for the network. It could also put a Fox News anchor in the awkward position of having to contradict Mr. Trump on the air, the kind of exchange that could easily go viral and turn off some of the network’s viewers.Mr. DeSantis, meanwhile, continues to rely on Fox News and other Murdoch properties for his major media appearances, even as his absence from other conservative-friendly outlets like Breitbart News has come under new scrutiny.Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News star who now hosts a successful podcast, revealed to listeners this week that Mr. DeSantis had been ducking her invitations.“I love Piers Morgan, he’s a pal of mine, but why would you go sit with the British guy and not come on this show?” Ms. Kelly said on her program, referring to Mr. DeSantis’s recent interview with the London-based Mr. Morgan.“I will venture to say he’s afraid,” Ms. Kelly added. “I’m just going to put it out there: He’s afraid because he knows the kind of interview that I would give him. He’s not going to get a pass.”The Florida governor avoids most one-on-one interactions with the mainstream media. Other than a recent appearance on Eric Bolling’s Newsmax program, Mr. DeSantis has leaned extensively on venues controlled by Mr. Murdoch, even those based overseas. He gave an interview to The Times of London. Mr. Morgan is based at TalkTV, a British network owned by Mr. Murdoch, although his DeSantis interview aired on the streaming channel Fox Nation and was excerpted by The New York Post.It has not been lost on Mr. Trump’s allies that Mr. DeSantis’s poll numbers have softened when he is enjoying mostly sympathetic coverage from Fox News.And there are subtle signs that Mr. DeSantis may not always be able to bank on the network’s good graces. On Tuesday, Jesse Watters, a co-host of “The Five,” offered some advice to the Florida governor in the wake of Mr. Trump’s attacks.“DeSantis is taking a bruising,” Mr. Watters said. “If I were Ron, I would start talking. Because every day that goes by, Trump draws blood.” He added: “How many more weeks and months is this going to sustain itself? Ron’s got to come out and say something, or else he’s just going to limp into this primary.” More

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      Fox Argues Top Executives Weren’t Involved in Voter Fraud Broadcasts

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      Lawyers for the company, which faces a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, are pushing for a judge to rule in their favor before a trial.WILMINGTON, Del. — Fox Corporation executives, including Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, had no direct involvement in what aired on the company’s cable news channels, and therefore their company should not be found liable in a $1.6 billion defamation case, lawyers for Fox argued Wednesday in a Delaware court.The argument was part of Fox’s request for a pretrial victory. Dominion Voting Systems has accused both Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, of defaming the business. Dominion says Fox’s shows repeatedly linked its voting machines to a vast conspiracy of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.Erin Murphy, a lawyer for both Fox Corporation and Fox News, said there was no evidence that corporate executives were involved in the Fox News shows in question. She said Dominion would need to show that they had directly participated in the broadcasts to meet the high standard needed to prove defamation.Ms. Murphy conceded that some of the executives had the power to bar certain guests from the shows, but said: “It’s not enough for them to show that they have the ability to step in. They have to have been involved.”Fox has asked that Fox Corporation be dropped from the lawsuit.Dominion must prove that Fox knowingly broadcast false information about the company, or was reckless enough to disregard substantial evidence that the claims were not true. Defamation cases have traditionally proved hard to win because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections. But legal experts say Dominion may have enough evidence to clear that high bar.Dominion, too, is asking for summary judgment; its legal team gave its arguments in Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday. The judge, Eric M. Davis, said he would make his decision by April 11. A jury trial is scheduled to start April 17.Judge Davis told both sides on Wednesday that he preferred for trial witnesses to appear in person rather than over a video link, setting up the possibility that Fox News hosts like Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson could show up. He said Rupert Murdoch might also be compelled to testify in person, though he did not issue any decisions on the matter.Fox lawyers had submitted a letter to the judge on Monday asking that Mr. Murdoch and some other executives not be compelled to testify, saying that it would amount to “hardships” on the witnesses and that their testimony would “add nothing other than media interest.”After Fox finished its arguments, a lawyer for several media outlets, including The New York Times, asked the judge to review redactions that Fox had made to some of the communications it handed over, arguing that Fox kept too much confidential. Judge Davis said he would consider the request.Judge Davis also remarked on a lawsuit filed in Delaware on Monday by a Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg. She argues that Fox lawyers coerced her into providing misleading information in her deposition in the Dominion lawsuit.Judge Davis said the lawsuit had been originally assigned to him but then given to another judge in Delaware Superior Court.Fox News said in a statement on Wednesday: “Despite the noise and confusion that Dominion has generated by presenting cherry-picked quotes without context, this case is ultimately about the First Amendment protections of the media’s absolute need to cover the news.” More

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      Fox and Dominion Urge Judge to Rule on Case

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      At the start of a pretrial hearing for the $1.6 billion defamation trial, the judge said he was still weighing whether to issue a summary judgment.A Delaware judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News said in a pretrial hearing on Tuesday that he was still weighing whether to issue a summary judgment for either side in the case.In a hearing in Wilmington, Del., on Tuesday, lawyers for Fox News and Dominion both pushed the judge, Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court, to rule on the case without a jury. Dominion, an election technology company, is accusing Fox of spreading false claims of widespread vote-rigging in the 2020 presidential election.“I haven’t made a decision,” Judge Davis said.The case centers on Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election, when President Donald J. Trump and his supporters began to spread false claims about widespread voter fraud.On Tuesday, Dominion argued that a trove of internal communications and depositions it had obtained showed that Fox executives and hosts had known that some of the claims about election fraud were false but had given them airtime anyway. Fox asked Judge Davis to dismiss the case outright, saying its actions were protected by the First Amendment.A trial is scheduled to begin on April 17.The lawsuit poses a sizable threat to Fox’s business and reputation. Dominion must prove that Fox knowingly broadcast false information about the company, or was reckless enough to disregard substantial evidence that the claims were not true — a legal standard known as “actual malice.” While defamation cases have traditionally proved hard to win, legal experts say Dominion may have enough evidence to clear that high bar.Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, told the court that it had plenty of evidence that Fox knew what it was doing.Mr. Nelson cited, for example, an excerpt from a deposition by Joe Dorrego, the chief financial officer of Fox News, who was asked whether Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the top executives of Fox News’s parent company, knew that the claims were being aired on the network. Mr. Dorrego answered: “They were certainly aware that the allegations were being reported on Fox News.”“They allowed people to come on the air to make those charges, despite knowing they are false,” Mr. Nelson told the judge.Erin Murphy, a lawyer for Fox, argued in court on Tuesday that a reasonable viewer of Fox News and Fox Business would have understood that the hosts were merely reporting that the president and his lawyers were making the fraud claims, which was newsworthy, and not making factual statements.“We do not think that we are just scot-free simply because a guest said something rather than a host,” Ms. Murphy said. “What we resist is that Dominion’s position seems to be that we are automatically liable because a guest said something.”Ms. Murphy told the judge that there was more context for the shows and statements singled out by Dominion in its complaint that proved the hosts had been merely presenting statements of fact. As an example, she referred to a Dec. 12, 2020, broadcast of “Fox & Friends,” during which the hosts asked Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, about legal challenges relating to voter fraud.“I don’t see how somebody watching that show thinks that by merely asking the president’s lawyer ‘What are you alleging and what evidence do you have to support it?’ the hosts are saying we believe these allegations to be true,” Ms. Murphy said.Ms. Murphy added that there was no evidence that any Fox Corporation executive had been involved in the airing of defamatory statements.Lawyers for Fox are scheduled to finish their arguments before the judge on Wednesday. More

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      Fox’s P.R. Woes May Not Directly Translate to Legal Ones

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      Some of the unflattering private messages among the network’s hosts and executives may never become evidence when Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News goes to trial.For the past three weeks, a drip, drip, drip of disclosures have exposed widespread alarm and disbelief inside Fox News in the days after the 2020 presidential election, as the network became a platform for some of the most insidious lies about widespread voter fraud. These revelations are the most damning to rattle the Murdoch media empire since the phone hacking scandal in Britain more than a decade ago.The headlines have been attention-grabbing. Tucker Carlson, a professed champion of former President Donald J. Trump’s populist message, was caught insulting Mr. Trump — “I hate him passionately,” he wrote in a text. Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity disparaged colleagues in their network’s news division. And Rupert Murdoch said he longed for the day when Mr. Trump would be irrelevant.These examples and many more — revealed in personal emails, text messages and testimony made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — are embarrassing. But whether they pose serious legal jeopardy for Fox in that case is far less clear.The messages that led to some of the biggest headlines may never be introduced as evidence when the case goes to trial next month, according to lawyers and legal scholars, including several who are directly involved in the case. Fox is expected to ask a judge to exclude certain texts and emails on the grounds they are not relevant.Laura Ingraham disparaged Fox News colleagues in private messages released recently.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesBut the most powerful legal defense Fox has is the First Amendment, which allows news organizations broad leeway to cover topics and statements made by elected officials. In court, Fox’s lawyers have argued that the network was merely reporting on what Mr. Trump and his allies were saying about fraud and Dominion machines — not endorsing those falsehoods.Media law experts said that if a jury found that to be true — not a far-fetched outcome, they said, especially if lawyers for the network can show that its hosts did not present the allegations as fact — then Fox could win.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsDocuments from a lawsuit filed by the voting machine maker Dominion against Fox News have shed light on the debate inside the network over false claims related to the 2020 election.Running Fox: Emails that lawyers for Dominion have used to build their defamation case give a peek into how Rupert Murdoch shapes coverage at his news organizations.Behind the Curtain: Texts and emails released as part of the lawsuit show how Fox employees privately mocked election fraud claims made by former President Donald J. Trump, even as the network amplified them to appease viewers.Tucker Carlson’s Private Contempt: The Fox host’s private comments, revealed in court documents, contrast sharply with his support of Mr. Trump on his show.A Show of Support: In his first public remarks since the recent revelations on Fox News, Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, issued a full-throated show of support for Suzanne Scott, who is at the helm of Fox News Media.“I think the case really will come down to a jury deciding whether the company or the commentators did or didn’t endorse — that really is the key question,” said George Freeman, a former New York Times lawyer who is now executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which assists news organizations with legal issues.“It gives Fox, I think, a fighting chance,” he added.Despite the ways Fox could prevail with a jury, legal scholars say Dominion’s case is exceptionally strong.Lawyers for Dominion argue that the claims made by Fox’s hosts and guests about its machines and their supposed role in a nonexistent conspiracy to steal votes from Mr. Trump was anything but dispassionate, neutral reporting.“Truth and shared facts form the foundation of a free society — even more so here,” its lawyers said in a brief, filed with the court on Thursday. “The false idea that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election undermines the core of democracy.”It is rare for First Amendment lawyers to side against a media company. But many of them have done just that, arguing that a finding against Fox will send an important message: The law does not protect those who peddle disinformation. And it would help dispel the idea, First Amendment experts said, that libel laws should be rewritten to make it easier to win defamation suits, as Mr. Trump and other conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas, have suggested.In its most recent filings, Dominion argued that the law was more than adequate to find Fox liable.“If this case does not qualify as defamation, then defamation has lost all meaning,” Dominion argued in a legal filing made public on Thursday.But legal experts said that the case would rise or fall not based on how a jury considered lofty concerns about the health of American democracy. Rather, they said, Dominion’s challenge will be to persuasively argue something far more specific: that Fox News either knowingly broadcast false information or was so reckless that it overlooked obvious evidence pointing to the falsity of the conspiracy theories about Dominion.Though the coverage of the case has largely focused on the disparaging comments the network’s star hosts and top executives made in private — about Mr. Trump, his lawyers and one another — those remarks could only help Dominion’s case if they pointed to a deeper rot inside Fox, namely that it cynically elevated false stories about Dominion machines because its ratings were suffering.The one episode of Mr. Carlson’s show that Dominion cited as defamatory included an interview with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.Fox News“When I see the headlines that are primarily about Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, those are conversations that the litigation was designed to spur,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at the University of Utah.“At least some of that evidence is going to be important atmospherically,” Ms. Andersen Jones added. But what will be more important to the outcome of the case, she said, is “what drove the narrower decisions at the individual shows.”Fox’s lawyers could ask the judge, for instance, to keep the jury from seeing most of Mr. Murdoch’s deposition on the grounds that he was the chairman of the company and played no direct role in decision-making at the show level. However, during his deposition, Mr. Murdoch did concede a key point of Dominion’s. He acknowledged that some Fox hosts had endorsed false claims of malfeasance during the election. And when Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, presented Mr. Murdoch with examples of how Fox went beyond merely providing a platform for election deniers, the Fox chairman agreed. “I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that,” Mr. Murdoch testified.Fox also plans to argue that the network’s coverage of the aftermath of the 2020 election needs to be considered as a whole, including the hosts and guests who insisted that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.And the more Fox lawyers can show instances in the coverage where its hosts rebutted or framed the allegations as unproven, the stronger their case will be.A lawyer working on Fox’s defense, Erin Murphy, said Dominion did not “want to talk about the shows where there was a lot of commentary coming from different perspectives.”Especially when those shows were ones “that had higher viewership and were the more mainstream,” Ms. Murphy added.Dominion would be on the strongest legal footing, defamation experts said, whenever it could point to specific examples when individual Fox employees responsible for a program had admitted the fraud claims were bogus or overlooked evidence that those claims — and the people making them — were unreliable.Dominion cites only a single episode each from Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hannity as defamatory: Mr. Carlson’s interview of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive, on Jan. 26, 2021, and Mr. Hannity’s interview of Sidney Powell, a lawyer who made some of the most outrageous fraud allegations, on Nov. 30, 2020.Dominion’s defamation claims against three far more obscure shows with much lower ratings are more substantial and extensively documented: “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” and the now-canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” both of which ran on Fox Business in 2020; and “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” which was Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday evening talk show on Fox News before the network canceled it and promoted Ms. Pirro to a regular slot on “The Five,” a weekday round-table talk show.Some of the most damning evidence to emerge involves Maria Bartiromo, legal experts say.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesEspecially damaging, legal experts said, is the evidence against Ms. Bartiromo. Dominion has accused her of recklessly disregarding evidence that a key source for Ms. Powell, who appeared several times on Ms. Bartiromo’s show, was mentally unstable — a “wackadoodle” by the source’s own admission.In an email, the full text of which was released last Tuesday along with thousands of pages of depositions and private messages of Fox employees, is from someone who claims to be a technology analyst named Marlene Bourne. Ms. Powell forwarded Ms. Bourne’s email to Ms. Bartiromo on the evening of Nov. 7, and Ms. Bartiromo forwarded it to her producer.In the email, Ms. Bourne describes numerous conspirators in a plot to discredit Mr. Trump, including some who had been dead for years like Roger Ailes, the former chief executive of Fox News. She writes that she is capable of “time-travel in a semiconscious state” and that when she is awake she can “see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear.” She also says she has been decapitated and that “it appears that I was shot in the back” once after giving the F.B.I. a tip.“If we’re really zeroing in on where the strongest evidence is,” Ms. Andersen Jones said, “it’s the wackadoodle email. Because the real question is whether you had subjective awareness of the likely falsity of the thing you were platforming on your show.” More