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

    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

    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

    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

    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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    Claims of Chinese Election Meddling Put Trudeau on Defensive

    Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada is battling critics and leaked intelligence reports that opponents say show he ignored warnings of Chinese interference in past elections.OTTAWA — The leaked intelligence reports have set off a political firestorm. They describe plans by the government of China and its diplomats in Canada to ensure that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party took power in the last two elections, raising troubling questions about the integrity of Canada’s democracy.But as two prominent Canadian news organizations have published a series of leaks over the past month, Mr. Trudeau has refused calls to launch a public inquiry into the matter, angering political opponents and leading to accusations that he is covering up foreign attempts to undermine his country’s elections.The news reports do not present any evidence that the Chinese carried out any of their plans for meddling or changing election outcomes. And an independent review released this month as part of Canada’s routine monitoring of election interference upheld the integrity of the 2019 and 2021 votes.Even so, the leaks pose a risk for Mr. Trudeau of appearing weak in the face of potential Chinese aggression and indecisive as a leader acting to preserve election integrity. His political opponents have accused him of being disloyal to Canada.As the intelligence leaks have flowed, Mr. Trudeau has shifted from trying to dismiss them and refusing to discuss them because of secrecy laws, to announcing a series of closed-door reviews related to election integrity.Still, he continues to rebuff repeated calls for a public inquiry — which would include not just an independent investigation, but public hearings — arguing that other inquiries are more appropriate. He said he would only establish a public inquiry if one of his other reviews concludes it’s necessary.“Canada has some of the best and most robust elections in the world,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters. “All Canadians can have total confidence that the outcomes of the 2019 and 2021 elections were determined by Canadians, and Canadians alone, at the voting booth.”The Liberals have accused Conservatives of undermining the public’s confidence in Canada’s electoral system by falsely claiming that the government ignored warnings of potential Chinese interference. Liberals have also accused Conservatives of using the leaks to fan fear and suspicion of Chinese-Canadian elected officials, in an effort to discredit them and undermine their participation in electoral politics.The political attacks on Mr. Trudeau have been spearheaded by the leader of the Conservative Party, which says it is raising legitimate threats to Canadian democracy. “He’s covered it up, even encouraged it to continue,” said the leader, Pierre Poilievre, who suggested that “the prime minister is acting against Canada’s interest and in favor of a foreign dictatorship’s interests.”Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party, suggested that Mr. Trudeau was “acting against Canada’s interest.”Blair Gable/ReutersCurrent and past inquiries about recent elections are not transparent and, in some cases, they lack independence from the Liberals, Mr. Poilievre said. “He wants closed and controlled and we want an open and independent inquiry to make sure it never happens again,” Mr. Poilievre said in the House of Commons.Heightened scrutiny of China’s efforts to subvert Canada’s political process — and corresponding pressure on Mr. Trudeau — started in mid-February after the publication of an article in the Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper.According to the newspaper, its reporters had seen unspecified secret and top secret reports from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, commonly called CSIS, that described the intentions of Chinese officials to manipulate the last two elections. The goal, according to the paper’s description of the leaks, was to prevent a win by the Conservative Party, which the Chinese viewed as excessively hard line toward China.A Chinese consular official boasted to her superiors that she had engineered the defeat of two Conservative candidates in 2021, the Globe and Mail reported, though the newspaper provided no evidence to support her claim.The Globe and Mail’s articles and reports on Global News, a broadcaster based-in Canada, said the leaks described orders given to Chinese diplomats based in Canada and, according to the news reports, involved 11 of Canada’s 338 electoral districts.The leaks to both news organizations described illegal cash payments to Liberals and illegal hiring by Chinese officials or their agents in Canada of international students from China, who were reportedly then presented to Liberal campaigns as volunteers. Mr. Trudeau and other Liberals have characterized the reports as “inaccurate.”Some of the supposed plans would have been difficult to execute within Canada’s electoral system, analysts said, because Canada limits and tightly controls campaign spending and fund-raising.“It does come across as a highly unsophisticated understanding of Canadian politics,” said Lori Turnbull, an associate professor of political science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.An independent review released this month upheld the integrity of the votes in 2019 and 2021.Cole Burston/BloombergAside from originating with the intelligence service, little has been revealed about the exact nature of most of the documents leaked to the two news outlets and it is unclear if the reporters saw them in their entirety. The sources for the information contained in the intelligence reports haves also not been revealed.“It’s not necessarily evidence that a crime took place,” said Stephanie Carvin, a professor of national security studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, and a former Canadian government intelligence analyst. “We frankly don’t know. The way I feel about this issue is that it’s a puzzle. There’s a thousand pieces that the service has and we’re seeing 10 of them.”Even so, Conservatives have been able to push Mr. Trudeau into a corner, while casting doubt on the allegiance of certain Chinese-Canadian elected officials in the Liberal Party, such as Michael Chan, a former Liberal cabinet minister in Ontario’s provincial government.Global News reported last month that CSIS said that at Beijing’s request, Mr. Chan arranged to replace a Liberal member of Parliament from Toronto with a different candidate.Mr. Chan called that report nonsense because he’s never had the authority to orchestrate such a thing. “I don’t know where the heck CSIS gets this information,” he said. Mr. Chan and other Chinese-Canadian officials have been subject to increased scrutiny and what he says are false, racially motivated accusations that he was under the influence of officials in the Chinese consulate in Toronto.He has asked Mr. Trudeau to open an inquiry into “racial profiling” of the Chinese community by the intelligence service. “The informant who informed them just got it wrong, completely wrong,” he said.Michael Chan, a former Liberal cabinet minister in Ontario’s provincial government, has asked Mr. Trudeau to investigate “racial profiling” by CSIS.Galit Rodan/The Canadian Press via, The Associated PressMr. Trudeau initially responded to allegations of Chinese interference in elections by urging the public to wait for the release of a routine review that Canada uses to monitor foreign interference in elections.That report, made public on March 2, concluded that while China, Russia and Iran tried to interfere in the 2019 and 2021 elections, they had no effect on their results. But that did not quell the calls from opposition parties for a public inquiry.Mr. Trudeau recently announced several moves to examine foreign interference. And he committed to holding a public inquiry if it is recommended by a special reviewer who will make recommendations on preventing election subversion.“We all agree that upholding confidence in our democratic process in our elections in our institutions, is of utmost importance,” Mr. Trudeau said. “This is not and should never be a partisan issue.”On Friday, the Globe and Mail published an essay it said was written by its source, who was only described as “a national security official.” The newspaper’s source said that he or she acted because after years of what he or she saw as serious escalation of the threat from foreign interference in votes, “it had become increasingly clear that no serious action was being considered.”The writer lamented that the political debate sparked by the leaks has been “marked by ugliness and division,” and added that he or she does not believe that any foreign power has “dictated the present composition of our federal government.”David J. Bercuson, the director emeritus of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary in Alberta, said he believes that Mr. Trudeau will eventually have to allow a public inquiry.Mr. Trudeau, Professor Bercuson, has yet to “do anything to resolve the growing mistrust.”Mr. Trudeau has committed to holding a public inquiry if it is recommended by a special reviewer.Carlos Osorio/Reuters More

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    Why Fox’s Call on Arizona, Which Was Right, Was Still Wrong

    It was more a risky guess than a sound decision, and easily could have led to a missed call.The Fox News election-night call that Joe Biden would win Arizona in 2020 proved correct but wasn’t based on sound principles.Timothy A. Clary/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIf you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, my guess is you’d be interested in my colleague Peter Baker’s article about the drama at Fox News in the aftermath of its decision to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night.Here’s the short version: Fox News executives, news anchors and pundits were enraged over the call, with messages and a recording showing they thought it hurt ratings and threatened to “impact the brand” by alienating Donald J. Trump’s supporters.Most people would agree that political and branding concerns shouldn’t dictate an election call by a news organization. But the article has nonetheless rekindled an old debate about whether Fox News was really “right” to call Arizona for Mr. Biden on election night in 2020.This debate can be a little confusing, since Fox was right in the most important sense: It said Mr. Biden would win Arizona, and he ultimately did.But a race call is not an ordinary prediction. It’s not like calling heads or tails in a coin toss. A race call means that a candidate has something like a 99.9 percent chance of winning. As a result, a call can be wrong, even if the expected outcome ends up happening. If you assert that there’s a 99.9 percent chance that a coin flip will come up heads, you’re wrong — regardless of what happens next.Of course, everyone knows heads or tails is a 50-50 proposition. It’s much harder to know whether Mr. Biden had a 50.1 percent or 99.9 percent chance of winning Arizona based on the data available at 11:20 p.m. Eastern on election night, when Fox called the state for Mr. Biden. Most other news organizations didn’t think so; only The Associated Press, a few hours later, joined Fox in making the call so quickly. And in the end, Mr. Biden won Arizona by just three-tenths of a percentage point — a margin evoking a coin flip.Was the Fox call the result of the most sophisticated and accurate modeling, or more like being “right” when calling heads in a coin flip? It appears to be the latter — a lucky and dangerous guess — based on a review of televised statements by the Fox News decision team and publicly available data about the network’s modeling.The Fox team believed Mr. Biden would win Arizona by a comfortable margin at the time the call was made, based on erroneous assumptions and flawed polling. While it worked out for Fox in the end, similarly risky decisions could have easily led to a missed call, with potentially dire consequences for trust in American elections.I should disclose that I’m not an entirely disinterested party. Here at The Times, we rejected the A.P. call on Arizona (The Times usually accepts A.P. calls, but we independently evaluate A.P. projections in very important races) because we couldn’t rule out a Trump victory based on the available data. I believe we were right about that decision. But much as the Fox team has an incentive to argue its case, readers may believe that I have an incentive to argue against the Arizona call. I should also disclose that I know and like the Fox News decision desk director Arnon Mishkin.In a recording of a Fox Zoom meeting two weeks after the election obtained by The Times, Mr. Mishkin acknowledged that the Arizona call appeared “premature” but that “it did land correctly.”A Fox spokesperson on Sunday said that “Fox News continues to stand by its decision desk’s accurate call of Arizona.”Still, there is a compelling body of publicly available evidence suggesting that Fox, when it called the state, fundamentally misunderstood the remaining votes. It did not imagine that Mr. Trump could come so close to winning.Why Fox made the callAt the time Fox called Arizona, Mr. Biden led Mr. Trump by 8.5 percentage points, with an estimated 73 percent of the expected vote counted. The tabulated votes were mainly mail ballots received well ahead of the election. To win, Mr. Trump needed to take about 61 percent of the remaining votes.In addition to the tabulated vote, the Fox decision desk also had the Fox News Voter Analysis, otherwise known as the A.P. VoteCast data — a pre-election survey fielded by The Associated Press and NORC at the University of Chicago. The AP/NORC data showed Mr. Biden ahead by six percentage points in Arizona.A person with knowledge of how the call was made, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the Fox team believed that the early returns confirmed the Fox News Voter Analysis. Indeed, Mr. Biden’s early lead seemed to match the survey’s findings among early voters, who broke for Mr. Biden by 10 points in the survey, 54 percent to 44 percent. The implication was that Mr. Biden was on track for a clear victory.When asked on election night on Fox to explain the Arizona call, Mr. Mishkin rejected the notion that Mr. Trump would do well in the outstanding ballots. Instead, he said he expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote:“We’ve heard from the White House that they need to get just 61 percent of the expected vote and they’ll be getting that.” He added: “But the reality is that’s just not true. They’re likely to only get 44 percent of the outstanding vote.” These figures were repeated by Daron Shaw, a Republican pollster on the Fox decision desk, and Mr. Mishkin in subsequent appearances. At the various times these statements were made, Mr. Biden would have been on track to win the state by between four and nine percentage points if the outstanding vote had gone so heavily in his favor.Through a Fox News spokesperson, Mr. Mishkin said he “misspoke on election night” when he said Fox expected Mr. Biden to win the remaining vote. If Mr. Mishkin did misspeak, there was still no indication that the Fox team expected Mr. Trump to win the remaining votes by a meaningful margin — let alone an overwhelming margin.On air on election night, Mr. Mishkin offered two main reasons to expect Mr. Biden to fare well in the remaining vote:“Yes, there are some outstanding votes in Arizona. Most of them are coming from Maricopa, where Biden is currently in a very strong position. And many of them are mail-in votes, where we know from our Fox News Voter Analysis that Biden has an advantage.”On their face, these arguments weren’t outlandish. Mr. Biden won Maricopa County, which is the home of Phoenix and a majority of Arizona voters. He won the mail vote in Arizona as well.In the end, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of the remaining vote, all but erasing Mr. Biden’s advantage.What Fox missedHow could a group of mostly mail-in and mostly Maricopa ballots break for Mr. Trump by such a wide margin? The reason was foreseeable before election night.While “mail” votes sound monolithic, there can be important differences between mail ballots counted before and after the election. That’s because Arizona counts mail ballots in roughly the order in which they are received, and different kinds of voters return their ballots at different times.Ahead of the election, it was clear that Democrats were turning in their ballots earlier than Republicans. As a result, the mail ballots counted on election night — those received at least a few days before the election — were likely to break for Mr. Biden by a wide margin.The flip side: The voters who received mail ballots but had not yet returned them were very Republican. If they ultimately returned their ballots, these so-called “late” mail ballots counted after the election would break heavily for Mr. Trump.It wasn’t inevitable, of course, that Mr. Trump would win these ballots by as wide a margin as he ultimately did. It was possible that many of these Republicans would simply vote on Election Day. In the midterms last November, for instance, Republicans failed to decisively win the “late” mail vote under fairly similar circumstances.But in 2020, whether the late ballots would be overwhelmingly Republican was nonetheless “the big question,” as I wrote before the election. As a result, we never contemplated the possibility of a call in Arizona on election night; it was an easy decision for us to reject the A.P. call without knowing exactly how the “late” mail ballots would break.When asked on television the day after the election if the so-called late mail voters could back Mr. Trump with more than 60 percent support, Mr. Mishkin dismissed the possibility, saying it could happen “if a frog had wings.”Mr. Mishkin said he did not “ascribe any significance” to whether mail voters turned in their ballots on Election Day. Instead, he expected the “late” ballots would “confirm” their call. He was confident the late data “would look like the data we’ve noticed throughout the count in Arizona,” which to that point had shown Mr. Biden with a clear lead.Similarly, Mr. Shaw said in a radio interview the day after the election that “we don’t have any evidence” that “late” early voters would break for Mr. Trump.In fairness to Fox News and The A.P., it was hard to anticipate the difference between early and late mail ballots ahead of the election. It required marrying a detailed understanding of absentee ballot returns with an equally deep understanding of the mechanics of how Arizona counts mail ballots.The Fox News Voter Analysis was a factor here again as well. The survey offered no indication that mail voters surveyed near the election were likelier to back Mr. Trump, according to the person with knowledge of the call. And previously, late-arriving mail ballots in Arizona had benefited Democrats.But the ballot return data showed that this time could be very different. In the end, it was.Models and polls that missed the markAnalytical and research failures are inevitable. No one can perfectly anticipate what will happen on election night, especially in the midst of a pandemic. What matters is whether these failures yield a bad projection, and here the quality of statistical modeling — and especially whether the model properly quantifies uncertainty — becomes an important factor.Fox’s statistical modeling was highly confident about its Arizona call. On election night, Mr. Mishkin said, “We’re four standard deviations from being wrong” in Arizona. This implied that the Fox model gave Mr. Trump a 1-in-10,000 chance of victory.It’s hard to evaluate why the model was so confident. What’s clear is that it provided a basis for Fox to call the race, even as there were mounting nonstatistical reasons to begin to doubt the estimates.By the time of the Arizona call, it was already clear that the AP/NORC survey data — along with virtually all pre-election polling — had overestimated Mr. Biden. In North Carolina, for example, Mr. Trump had already taken the lead after AP/NORC data initially showed Mr. Biden ahead by five points. The same data initially showed Mr. Biden ahead by seven points in Florida, where Mr. Trump was by then the projected winner.As a result, there was already reason to be cautious about estimates showing great strength for Mr. Biden. But rather than become a source of uncertainty, Mr. Biden’s positive numbers in the AP/NORC data appeared to become a source of confidence — as Mr. Biden’s strength in the early vote appeared to confirm expectations.One indication that Fox’s modeling was prone to overestimate Mr. Biden was its publicly available probability dials, which displayed the likelihood that Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump would win the key battleground states.At various points, these estimates gave Mr. Biden at least an 87 percent chance of winning Ohio and at least a 76 percent chance of winning Iowa; Mr. Trump ultimately won both by nearly 10 points.Maybe most tellingly, Fox gave Mr. Biden a 95 percent chance to win North Carolina — even at a point when it was quite obvious that Mr. Trump would win the state once the Election Day vote had been counted.Through a Fox News spokesperson, Mr. Mishkin said, “The program that translated the decision desk’s numbers into the probability dials was not working properly at times.” Fox stopped using the probability dials on air, though they remained available online.But even if the dials were erroneously overconfident or otherwise not exactly to Fox’s liking, they nonetheless erred in almost exactly the same way as the Arizona call. In all four states, including Arizona, the AP/NORC data greatly overestimated Mr. Biden; the early vote count leaned heavily toward Mr. Biden; and the Fox estimates confidently swung toward Mr. Biden.Whether it was inaccurate AP/NORC data, misunderstanding the “late” mail vote, technical issues or overconfident modeling, there’s not much reason to believe that there was a factual basis for a projection in Arizona. It came very close to being wrong. If it had been, it could have been disastrous.The public’s confidence in elections would have taken another big hit if Mr. Trump had ultimately taken the lead after a call in Mr. Biden’s favor. It would have fueled the Trump campaign’s argument that he could and would eventually overturn the overall result. After all, he would have already done so in Arizona. More

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    Tucker Carlson Is No Less Dangerous

    Gail Collins: Bret, we have all kinds of deeply important issues to tackle. But let’s start with Tucker Carlson. We’ve learned he didn’t really believe all the stuff he said on TV about a “stolen” election. Shocking!Bret Stephens: They say that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, but in this case it’s the tribute that cynicism pays to cowardice.Gail: Since you’re in charge of that side of our world, I really want to hear your opinion.Bret: I sometimes think of Carlson in the same mold as Father Coughlin, but worse: At least Coughlin was an honest-to-God fascist, a sincere bigot, whereas Carlson only plays one on TV for the sake of ratings.Gail: Wow, been a while since I heard a Father Coughlin comparison.Bret: As for Fox, the way in which they are trying to “respect” their viewers is to lie to them. I can only wish Dominion Voting Systems well in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network for claiming that their voting machines played a role in Trump’s loss. I believe in strong protections against frivolous lawsuits, but knowingly and recklessly spreading falsehoods about the subject of one’s reporting is the very definition of — dare I say it — fake news.Gail: Glad we can come together on the importance of not making up the news.Bret: But Gail, let’s move on to weightier things. Like President Biden’s dead-on-arrival $6.8 trillion budget. Your thoughts?Gail: Yippee! Whenever I wonder if we’re ever going to have a serious fight again, government spending rears its head.So let’s have at it. Obviously, Biden knows his plans aren’t going anywhere with a Republican-sort-of-controlled House. But he’s laying his cards down, and I think the cards look great.Bret: Explain.Gail: He’s ready to raise taxes on the rich. Good for him! Right now the Republicans seem to be claiming we can keep taxes as they are, or lower, plus protect Social Security and Medicare, plus protect or increase military spending. Which would, I believe, cut the rest of the budget by 70 percent.Bret: To steal a line from “Pride and Prejudice,” “My feelings are so different. In fact, they are quite the opposite.”Gail: Love that you’re bringing up Jane. Even if it’s to disagree with me.Bret: Ten years ago, federal spending was $3.45 trillion. Biden’s budget request is double that, and he has the chutzpah to suggest he wants to reduce the deficit — achieved almost entirely by huge tax increases instead of spending discipline.Gail: I will refrain from referring at length to a super-deficit-exploder named Donald Trump. Who was very much with his party’s program in one sense — pretending to be anti-deficit without proposing anything difficult to reduce it. Of course, the gang is OK with cutting back on, say, child care. Which makes it tougher for single parents to go to work and create a better future for the whole family.Bret: I too will refrain from noting that, godawful as Trump was, his final pre-Covid 2019 budget request was around $4.75 trillion, which is still $2 trillion less than Biden’s current request. I’m also not too thrilled by Biden’s proposal for higher taxes, including a nakedly unconstitutional tax on the appreciated assets of very rich people. It won’t pass, which I guess is the point, since the budget is less of a serious proposal and more of a campaign platform.Speaking of platforms: Your thoughts on the administration’s reported decision to approve an $8 billion oil-drilling project in the Alaskan wilderness?Gail: I’m horrified, actually. We’re supposed to be worrying about global warming and Biden is approving a plan that, as our story pointed out, will have an effect equivalent to adding almost two million more cars a year on the roads.Bret: OK, so now it’s my turn to cheer Biden while you jeer. We’re going to need oil for decades to come no matter how many electric vehicles we build, and the oil has to come from somewhere. Europe has discovered the price of relying on Russia for its energy, and I’d much rather have our gas come from a remote corner of Alaska, extracted by American workers, under American regulations, than from, say, Venezuela or Iran.But I’m really curious to see how this will play out within the Democratic Party. To me it looks like a crucial test of whether the party will again reach out to its old blue-collar manufacturing base or move further into the orbit of knowledge-industry workers with, well, coastal values. What do you think?Gail: The Biden administration is obviously going along with labor, lower-cost energy and all the other stuff you think of when you’re running for re-election. Democrats who worry about the environment may be rightfully horrified, but I doubt it’ll cost Biden votes. When the elections roll around, they’ll realize the other side is worse.Bret: Smart political advice.Gail: Still, the least the oil-drilling forces could do would be to apologize in advance to the kids who are currently in kindergarten and will have to live with the results.Bret: Also known as jobs and energy security.Gail: Hey, talking about youth reminds me of … oldth. I was so sorry to hear Mitch McConnell had fallen and been hospitalized with a concussion. He’s 81 and you can’t help wondering if he’s coming to the end of his career as the Senate Republican leader. Any predictions?Bret: First of all, we’ve got to petition the O.E.D. to make “oldth” a word as the appropriate antonym of youth. Second, I wish the senator a speedy recovery.His bigger problems, though, aren’t his physical stumbles but his political ones. He let Biden score his unexpected political wins last year. He’s fallen between two stools when it came to Trump: not Trumpy enough for Trump and his crowd, but not brave enough to stand up to them and move the party past them — like when he lambasted Trump after Jan. 6 but refused to vote to convict him during his second impeachment trial. And he’s been the Republican Senate leader forever, or at least it feels that way.Gail: So who’s next?Bret: He’d probably be wise to step aside for his whip, South Dakota’s John Thune, except that the Trumpians hate Thune for his anti-denialist position when it came to the 2020 election.Gail: Well, if you want to see the kind of leader that can crawl between the regular Republicans and the Trumpians, there’s … Kevin McCarthy. Senators would be better off with a hospitalized McConnell.Bret: A very good point. Since we’re speaking of Trump, your thoughts on his potential indictment?Gail: So many to choose from! Are we talking about the secret government documents he piled up at Mar-a-Lago, or his attempt to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 ballot counting, or the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, the ex-lover Trump wanted to keep quiet? Although possibly as much about his sexual ineptitude as his marital sins? Pick one, Bret.Bret: My general view with most of these legal efforts is that, merited though they may be, they are more likely to help Trump than to hurt him. The weakest case seems to be the one that may be closest to an actual indictment — the alleged hush money payments to the alleged paramour Stormy Daniels. Problem there is that the star witness, the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, is an ex-felon with a big-time ax to grind against his former boss.Gail: Well, when your witnesses have to be people who spent a lot of quality time with Donald Trump, the options will almost always be depressing.Bret: The stronger case is the one in Georgia. Then again, is a jury in Georgia going to vote unanimously to convict the former president? Color me skeptical. At this point, the most realistic way for the country to be done with Trump is if Ron DeSantis or some other Republican defeats him, fair and square, in the race for the G.O.P. nomination. Which is why you’re strongly rooting for DeSantis to jump in the race, am I right?Gail: Oh, Bret, it’s so hard to admit I’d rather see Trump as the nominee than DeSantis, but it’s true. I would. Rather have a terrible Republican with no real fundamental values than one who has strong but terrible commitments and is a genuine obsessive on social issues like abortion rights.Bret: That sound you just heard was my jaw hitting the floor. But I’m giving you full points for total honesty.Gail: Plus, if we have to live through two years of presidential politics featuring Joe Biden on one side, I’d rather have the awful, wrong-thinking Republican who isn’t also incredibly boring. Is that shallow?Bret: Other than for the entertainment value, do you prefer to have Trump as the nominee because you think he has no chance of winning the election? You could very well be right. Then again, I remember how that worked out in 2016.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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

    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