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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

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      The Week in Business: Fox News Anchors’ Private Messages

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      Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Up? (March 5-11)Tucker Carlson’s Private TextsNew documents released last week revealed the disconnect between the Fox News anchors’ privately held opinions and those they espoused publicly — and shared with millions of viewers — on their television programs. In particular, Tucker Carlson’s views on Donald J. Trump and the outcome of the 2020 presidential race have been shown to contrast sharply with the messaging of his show, which supported Mr. Trump and promoted his unfounded belief that the election had been stolen. Yet at the same time, Mr. Carlson was sending texts to members of his staff about Mr. Trump like “I hate him passionately.” He is not the only Fox employee to be featured in the documents, which are part of the $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by the voting technology company Dominion Voting Systems and include the messages of other network stars like Laura Ingraham. But Mr. Carlson’s texts include some of the starkest language about the former president and drew special attention from the White House in a statement on Wednesday criticizing Mr. Carlson for his on-air portrayal of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as a largely peaceful event.Biden’s Budget ProposalPresident Biden on Thursday unveiled a $6.8 trillion budget that sought to increase spending on the military and a wide range of new social programs while also reducing budget deficits by nearly $3 trillion over a decade. The proposal was meant to address a partisan fight over the country’s national debt. Mr. Biden’s proposal provides for funding for an array of new programs, including billions on guaranteed paid leave for workers, free community college and an expanded child tax credit. The budget plan — which also calls for a new 25 percent minimum tax on billionaires — is widely considered dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Mr. Biden’s proposals were “completely unserious.”Job Growth Holds StrongThe Labor Department reported on Friday that U.S. employers added 311,000 jobs in February. Forecasters had expected to see a figure around 215,000, which would have been more in line with jobs reports from the second half of 2022. But the general downward trajectory of those jobs numbers took an unexpected turn in January, when new jobs surged to 517,000. So while job growth has eased somewhat in the last month, it remains resilient in the face of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow the economy. This latest jobs data also suggests that employer confidence is still relatively high, even as layoffs begin to rise.Giulio BonaseraWhat’s Next? (March 12-18)Next on the Economic CalendarWhen Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, spoke to Congress last week, he largely avoided committing to a strategy for taming inflation. Speaking before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday and the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, Mr. Powell said he and his colleagues were prepared to take a more aggressive tack and raise rates more quickly, if needed. But much of the Fed’s decision-making depended on the inflation and jobs reports. So Fed officials will be paying close attention (as they always do) to the Consumer Price Index data that will arrive on Tuesday. The last reading showed that while overall inflation had cooled, it was only a slight change, and core inflation — which strips out volatile food and fuel costs — remained fast.Shockwaves From a Bank RunIn an ominous sign for global banking, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation last week seized Silicon Valley Bank, a prominent investor in tech start-ups. The bank touched off investor panic when it announced on Wednesday that it had sold off $21 billion of its most liquid investments, borrowed $15 billion and organized an emergency sale of its stock to raise cash. These were urgent and extraordinary measures that banks go to great lengths to avoid. Investors at some venture capital firms urged their clients to move their money from the bank over concerns about its financial solvency. Less than two days later, the F.D.I.C. took control of the bank and created a new one, the National Bank of Santa Clara, to hold customers’ deposits and assets. A Ruling on Gig WorkA court is expected to hand down its ruling this week on Proposition 22, a ballot measure in California that would allow gig economy companies like Lyft and Uber to continue treating drivers as independent contractors. The battle over the status of these workers in the state — who number at least one million — ramped up in 2019, when California legislators passed a law requiring these companies to give their drivers the full protections of employment. But after the ride-hail apps threatened to suspend operations in the state, an appeals court granted them a temporary reprieve and the companies poured millions into getting Prop. 22 on voters’ ballots. A majority of voters approved the measure in November 2020, but it was swiftly challenged by a coalition of ride-hail drivers and labor groups, ruled unconstitutional by a California judge and appealed through the courts.What Else?Walgreens is facing blowback after announcing that it would not dispense abortion pills in 21 states where Republican attorneys general are threatening legal action against pharmacies that distribute the medication. Roger Ng, a former Goldman Sachs banker convicted last year for his role in a money-laundering scheme known as the 1MDB scandal, was sentenced on Thursday to 10 years in prison. And JPMorgan Chase on Wednesday sued James E. Staley, a former top executive, accusing him of failing to fully inform the bank about what he knew about the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. More

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      BBC Suspends Host Gary Lineker Over Immigration Comments

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      Mr. Lineker, one of England’s best-known sports personalities, had accused the British home secretary of using language reminiscent of Nazi Germany to promote a plan to stop asylum seekers.One of the premier soccer programs on British television was thrown into turmoil on Friday after the BBC suspended its host, the former English soccer star Gary Lineker, over comments he made criticizing the Conservative government’s plan to stop asylum seekers who arrive on boats across the English Channel.Mr. Lineker, a former captain of England’s national soccer team and the top goal scorer at the 1986 World Cup, ignited a firestorm on the political right after he suggested on Tuesday that the British home secretary, Suella Braverman, was using language reminiscent of Nazi Germany to promote the plan.After several days of debate played out on social media, in the pages of British newspapers and in the halls of Parliament, the BBC said on Friday that Mr. Lineker’s social media activity was “a breach of our guidelines,” and that he had been suspended from hosting “Match of the Day,” a mainstay of the BBC’s schedule since 1964.“The BBC has decided that he will step back from presenting ‘Match of the Day’ until we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media,” the British Broadcasting Corporation said in a statement.“When it comes to leading our football and sports coverage, Gary is second to none,” the statement said. “We have never said that Gary should be an opinion-free zone, or that he can’t have a view on issues that matter to him, but we have said that he should keep well away from taking sides on party political issues or political controversies.”Soon after the BBC issued the statement, two others who host “Match of the Day” with Mr. Lineker, Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, said that they would not appear on the show on Saturday.“Everybody knows what Match of the Day means to me, but I’ve told the BBC I won’t be doing it tomorrow,” Mr. Wright wrote on Twitter. “Solidarity.”Mr. Shearer wrote, “I have informed the BBC that I won’t be appearing on MOTD tomorrow night.”The BBC reported that the program would still be broadcast on Saturday, without hosts. Saturday’s “Match of the Day” will “focus on match action without studio presentation or punditry,” a BBC spokesman was quoted as saying by the BBC.The program, which features highlights from Saturday’s Premier League games, usually draws millions of viewers, according to the BBC.Mr. Lineker, who first appeared on “Match of the Day” as a presenter in 1999, signed a five-year contract in 2020 to remain with the BBC until 2025.After parlaying his hugely successful soccer career into a career as one of Britain’s best-known sports personalities, Mr. Lineker has frequently engaged in debates on social media, most prominently when he supported the campaign for Britain to remain inside the European Union.His comments have sometimes led to criticism from the right and accusations that he is violating the BBC’s guidelines on impartiality.Such was the case with his comments on the government’s plan to stop asylum seekers.Mr. Lineker had responded on Twitter to a video that the Home Office had posted in which Ms. Braverman promoted legislation that would give the office a “duty” to remove nearly all asylum seekers who arrive on boats across the English Channel, even though many are fleeing war and persecution.“Enough is enough,” Ms. Braverman declares. “We must stop the boats.”Mr. Lineker responded with sharp criticism.“This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?” he wrote.The comments were roundly rejected by Ms. Braverman and others on the right, and they set off a debate about the BBC’s impartiality and the comparison to Nazi Germany.“It diminishes the unspeakable tragedy that millions of people went through, and I don’t think anything that is happening in the U.K. today can come close to what happened in the Holocaust,” Ms. Braverman said in an interview this week with the BBC. “So I find it a lazy and unhelpful comparison to make.”In The Daily Telegraph, the journalist Charles Moore accused Mr. Lineker of being “the most famous exemplar of the power of the BBC’s ‘talent’ to trash its impartiality.”“He expresses not the voice of the concerned citizen, but the arrogance of a man of power,” Mr. Moore wrote. “He is the big player who thinks he can defy the ref. The reputation of the entire BBC and its director-general depends on telling him he cannot.”On the political left, others defended Mr. Lineker and expressed dismay that the BBC had pulled him from “Match of the Day.”“This feels like an over reaction brought on by a right-wing media frenzy obsessed with undermining the BBC,” Lucy Powell, a member of Parliament from the Labour and Cooperative Party, wrote on Twitter. More

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      Lachlan Murdoch Defends Fox News’s Chief Executive Amid Defamation Suit

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      “Suzanne Scott has done a tremendous job,” Mr. Murdoch said in his first public remarks since damaging revelations about the inner workings of the news network.Lachlan Murdoch, whose family controls the Fox media empire, issued a full-throated show of support on Thursday for Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, as the cable channel faces a $1.6 billion defamation suit that has generated a cascade of unflattering revelations about its inner workings.“I just think Suzanne Scott has done a tremendous job,” Mr. Murdoch said at an investor conference in San Francisco, his first public remarks since Fox News has come under intense scrutiny over its handling of spurious claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.“The brand is incredibly strong. The core business is incredibly strong,” Mr. Murdoch said, pointing to Fox News’s significant ratings advantage over its rivals CNN and MSNBC. “It’s a credit to Suzanne Scott and all of her team there. They’ve done a tremendous job of building this business and running this business.”Ms. Scott’s future at Fox News has been the focus of some recent speculation. The defamation suit, filed by Dominion Voting Systems, argues that Fox News leadership allowed stars like Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs to air rank falsehoods about rigged voting machines that ruined Dominion’s business. Rupert Murdoch said in a deposition that any of his executives who knowingly allowed lies to be broadcast “should be reprimanded, maybe got rid of.”The Murdoch family is loath to make major changes at its media properties in response to public rancor, although there have been occasional exceptions; the family closed its News of the World tabloid following a phone-hacking scandal. Lachlan Murdoch’s remarks on Thursday suggested that Ms. Scott’s position was safe, at least for now. She signed a multiyear contract extension in 2021, shortly after President Biden’s inauguration.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.The documents revealed in the Dominion case showed Ms. Scott, among other executives and some of the network’s hosts, worrying that conservatives would abandon Fox News if its coverage became too critical of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies’ baseless claims of rampant voter fraud.At one point, Ms. Scott privately criticized one of the network’s White House correspondents for describing many of Mr. Trump’s claims as “simply not true” during a live segment. “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories,” Ms. Scott wrote in an internal email.Asked at Thursday’s conference to comment on the Dominion suit, Mr. Murdoch, who is the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, again defended Fox News from its detractors.“A news organization has an obligation — and it is an obligation — to report news fulsomely, wholesomely and without fear or favor, and that’s what Fox News has always done and that’s what Fox News will always do,” Mr. Murdoch said.“I think a lot of the noise that you hear about this case is actually not about the law and is not about journalism and is really about the politics,” Mr. Murdoch continued. “And that’s unfortunately more reflective of our polarized society that we live in today.”Mr. Murdoch’s interlocutor at the investor conference, which was sponsored by Morgan Stanley, did not press him further on the subject.Documents revealed in the Dominion lawsuit showed Suzanne Scott worrying that conservatives would abandon Fox News if its coverage became too critical of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty ImagesMr. Murdoch’s own involvement in Fox News was also captured in the recently released documents.He did not hesitate to contact Ms. Scott directly about aspects of the channel’s coverage, even complaining at one point about an on-air caption along the bottom of Fox News’s screen that, Mr. Murdoch believed, took a needlessly negative tone toward Mr. Trump. Mr. Murdoch also complained to Ms. Scott that a correspondent’s coverage of a pro-Trump rally was too critical, calling it “smug and obnoxious.”In his remarks on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch mused about Fox News’s broader place in the American news media, arguing that its appeal stretched beyond its journalistic output and into a more cultural realm.“If you talk to focus groups, with any of our viewers, they see Fox News as not just a news channel, but a channel that speaks to Middle America and respects the values of Middle America as a media business that is most relevant to them, as opposed to simply a news channel,” Mr. Murdoch said. More

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

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

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      New Fox-Dominion Lawsuit Documents Shed Light on Debate Inside Network

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      Messages and depositions from stars like Tucker Carlson revealed serious misgivings about claims of fraud even as some hosts told millions of viewers a very different story.It had been more than a week since the news networks projected that Joseph R. Biden Jr. would become the next president. And Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were at a loss about what to say on the air.“What are we all going to do tmrw night?” Ms. Ingraham, the host of the 10 p.m. show on Fox News, asked her colleagues in a text message chain on Nov. 16, 2020.Mr. Carlson responded that he planned to devote a significant chunk of his program to a little-known voting technology company that had become a target of Trump supporters who suspected the election had been rigged: Dominion Voting Systems.“Haven’t said a word about it so far,” Mr. Carlson said, acknowledging that the conspiracy theories about Dominion’s purported role in a fictitious plot to siphon away votes from President Donald J. Trump were making him uneasy.“The whole thing seems insane to me,” he wrote. “And Sidney Powell won’t release the evidence. Which I hate.” Ms. Powell, a legal adviser to the Trump campaign, was “making everyone paranoid and crazy, including me,” Mr. Carlson added.Text messages like these, released on Tuesday evening as part of Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, offer some of the clearest evidence yet about the serious misgivings that many inside the network expressed to one another even as they told their audiences of millions a very different story of fraud and malfeasance at the polls.Some Fox hosts and guests have continued to air claims about widespread election fraud and advance a revisionist account of what happened during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — few more so than Mr. Carlson, whose evolution from skeptic to election denier was on full display in the newly disclosed messages.This week, the host broadcast selectively edited footage, given to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, that tried to recast the attack as little more than what Mr. Carlson said was an “orderly and meek” procession of curious sightseers who were rightfully upset with how the election had been conducted.Mr. Carlson — who ridiculed claims about a plot to steal the election as “shockingly reckless” and “absurd” in his November 2020 text messages — also continued to give credence to lies about widespread voter fraud this week.“The protesters were angry,” he said on his Monday program. “They believed that the election they had just voted in had been unfairly conducted, and they were right.”Inside the Media IndustryThe Cost of a Movie Seat: As the film business changes rapidly, multiplexes are experimenting with pricing in ways that may seem shocking to theatergoers.Rupert Murdoch: The conservative media mogul acknowledged in a deposition in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit that several Fox News hosts promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen.Dropping ‘Dilbert’: Hundreds of newspapers across the country will stop running the comic strip after its creator, Scott Adams, said that Black people were “a hate group.”Carlos Watson: The founder of the troubled digital start-up Ozy Media was arrested on fraud charges, punctuating one of the more precipitous falls in the annals of online journalism.He added, without providing any specifics: “In retrospect, it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy. Given the facts that have since emerged about that election, no honest person can deny it.”Texts by Tucker Carlson and other Fox News hosts were released on Tuesday evening as part of the defamation lawsuit that Dominion filed against Fox News.Jason Koerner/Getty ImagesSome Republicans, who often take pains to avoid appearing critical of powerful pro-Trump figures like Mr. Carlson, rebuked the host on Tuesday for his comments about election fraud and the attack on the Capitol. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said he stood by a statement issued by the chief of the Capitol Police, who called the host’s comments “offensive and misleading” and based on footage that was “conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments” of the 41,000 hours of tape.Senator Mitch McConnell rebuked Mr. Carlson on Tuesday.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press“With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on Jan. 6,” Mr. McConnell said. Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, the Republican nominee for president in 2012, called Mr. Carlson’s broadcast “dangerous and disgusting.”A Fox News spokeswoman said in a statement on Tuesday that Dominion had used “distortions and misinformation” in its recent filings by misattributing quotes and leaving out context in an attempt to smear the network.“We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale,” the spokeswoman said.Some of Mr. Carlson’s private remarks about Mr. Trump are difficult to square with the praise he has lavished on the former president publicly. At times, the host and his producers were gleeful about what a news cycle without Mr. Trump would look like. And they cheerfully predicted his waning power as a political force.“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Mr. Carlson wrote to members of his staff on Jan. 4, 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”One producer replied, “I want nothing more.”Then Mr. Carlson responded, “I hate him passionately.”The new documents show how Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corp, was also harshly critical of Mr. Trump — to the point of being disdainful at times. Mr. Murdoch said during his deposition in the Dominion lawsuit that he believed the former president was a sore loser.And asked whether he had ever believed that there was “massive fraud” in the 2020 election, Mr. Murdoch replied unequivocally.“No. I have never even studied it,” he said.At one point, according to the full text of an email made public on Tuesday, Mr. Murdoch asked the chief executive of Fox News Media, Suzanne Scott, whether some hosts had been too willing to accept false accusations of fraud. Mr. Murdoch complained on Jan. 21, 2021, that Fox was “still getting mud thrown at us!” for inflaming the rhetoric that helped spur the Jan. 6 assault.Then Mr. Murdoch conceded, referring to Mr. Hannity and Ms. Ingraham, “Maybe Sean and Laura went too far.”The messages also show how Fox hosts like Mr. Carlson and Ms. Ingraham were furious at their colleagues on the Fox News decision desk, the group that calls elections for the network, whose early prediction that Mr. Biden would win Arizona angered Mr. Trump and his supporters.Ms. Ingraham said the work of the decision desk was an inside job, intended to sabotage conservative hosts like her. “We are all officially working for an organization that hates us,” she fumed.Dominion’s lawsuit poses a serious threat to Fox’s business and reputation. Although libel cases against media organizations are historically hard to win, the recent documents show the mounting evidence Dominion has so far gathered to persuade a jury of its central claim: that Fox knew the election fraud claims were false but recklessly promoted them anyway.But it is not a full picture. Fox lawyers redacted the documents extensively, leaving much of what people said to one another under seal. The New York Times and several other media outlets are challenging the legality of those redactions.Lawyers for Fox say the network was merely reporting on newsworthy events, covered by the First Amendment, by airing Mr. Trump’s allegations, and have provided some examples where hosts pushed back on the claims or added a caveat that evidence of the fraud had not yet been produced.They have also argued that Dominion’s business wasn’t meaningfully hurt and that the $1.6 billion damages claim is not justified. A Fox News spokeswoman pointed to an email in the latest cache of documents sent by John Poulos, the chief executive of Dominion on Dec. 4, 2020. Mr. Poulos, responding to another executive’s concerns that Dominion was not speaking out enough publicly against the false claims, said: “No customer cares about the media. It’s just more words from their perspective.”The revelations from the documents have reverberated among some conservatives who have long mistrusted Fox News, though conservative media has largely stayed far away from reporting on the specifics of the case. Mr. Trump has taken aim at Mr. Murdoch on multiple occasions in the past week on his social app, Truth Social, labeling him and his supporters “MAGA Hating Globalist RINOs.” (RINO stands for “Republican in name only.”)In a post on March 2, Mr. Trump said: “Rupert Murdoch should apologize to his viewers and readers for his ridiculous defense of the 2020 Presidential election.” He added, “He should also apologize to those anchors who got it right, and fire the ones who got it wrong, or were afraid to speak up (of which there were many!)”The sanitizing of the events of Jan. 6 on shows like Mr. Carlson’s for the last two years seems all the more glaring given his words on Jan. 7, 2021. The new documents contain a text message chain that the host had with his producers that morning.When Mr. Carlson again predicts that Mr. Trump’s clout will fade as he “becomes incalculably less powerful” out of office, one of his producers frets that the last weeks of Mr. Trump’s presidency could bring even more chaos and danger.“The Trump anger spiral is vicious,” the producer tells his boss.“That’s for sure,” Mr. Carlson responds.“Deadly,” the host adds. “We’ve got two weeks left. We can do this.” More

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      Inside the Panic at Fox News After the 2020 Election

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

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      Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News

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      Even in today’s highly partisan media world, experts said, the lack of coverage about the private comments of Fox’s top executives and hosts stands out.Fox News and its sister network, Fox Business, have avoided the story. Newsmax and One America News, Fox’s rivals on the right, have steered clear, too. So have a constellation of right-wing websites and podcasts.Over the past two weeks, legal filings containing private messages and testimony from Fox hosts and executives revealed that many of them had serious doubts that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election through widespread voter fraud, even as those claims were made repeatedly on Fox’s shows. The revelations, made public in a defamation lawsuit against Fox brought by Dominion Voting Systems, have generated headlines around the world.But in the conservative media world? Mostly crickets.On 26 of the most popular conservative television news networks, radio shows, podcasts and websites, only four — The National Review, Townhall, The Federalist and Breitbart News — have mentioned the private messages from Fox News hosts that disparaged election fraud claims since Feb. 16, when the first batch of court filings were released publicly, according to a review by The New York Times.The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff. (Some of those 18 published wire stories originally written by The Associated Press or other services.)Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.“These results are shocking,” one article asserted.The Gateway Pundit did not respond to requests for comment.Even in a media world often divided along partisan lines, the paucity of coverage stands out, media experts said. And it means that many of the people who heard the conspiracy theories about election fraud on Fox’s networks may not be learning that Fox’s leaders and on-air stars privately dismissed those claims.The Spread of Misinformation and FalsehoodsCutting Back: Job cuts in the social media industry reflect a trend that threatens to undo many of the safeguards that platforms have put in place to ban or tamp down on disinformation.A Key Case: The outcome of a federal court battle could help decide whether the First Amendment is a barrier to virtually any government efforts to stifle disinformation.A Top Misinformation Spreader: A large study found that Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast had more falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims than other political talk shows.Artificial Intelligence: For the first time, A.I.-generated personas were detected in a state-aligned disinformation campaign, opening a new chapter in online manipulation.“Choosing not to do stories is a form of bias,” said Tom Rosenstiel, a veteran press critic and a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. “The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Mr. Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”Who Is Covering Dominion’s Lawsuit?A review of 26 conservative news and opinion sources showed little coverage of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News. More