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      Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch Were Right

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      If you missed the previous newsletter, you can read it here.Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial next week, and we’ll be reminded once again of the profoundly destructive lies that the network’s carnival barkers sold. Hour after hour, night after night, they peddled Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. And they knew or at least suspected that they were wrong, to go by documents already released during the legal proceedings.In this much, however, Fox’s fabulists were right: If they didn’t hawk Trump’s hooey, many of their viewers would just move on to a circus that did. The documents also show that they genuinely believed that. It’s no justification for their laundering of his conspiracy theories — they surely wouldn’t have lost all their audience, and they could have tried to chip away at the dangerous delusions of the many viewers who remained. That they chose differently is a betrayal of journalistic principle and a damning indictment of them. But it says something troubling about the rest of us, too.Thanks to the sprawling real estate of cable television and the infinite expanse of the internet, we live in an age of so many information options, so many “news” purveyors, that we have an unprecedented ability to search out the one or ones that tell us precisely what we want to hear, for whatever reason we want to hear it. We needn’t reckon with the truth. We can shop for it instead.And many of us — maybe even most of us — do. That’s one of the morals of Dominion’s suit, correctly called “seismic” by my Times colleague Jim Rutenberg in his excellent and essential recent article about Fox News’s descent down the rabbit hole. Rutenberg tells the tale of that network’s spectacularly cynical dealings with its particular audience. But a larger story hovers over it, one about every audience’s relationship with reality today.The unscrupulous behavior of Tucker Carlson and his fellow entertainers (let’s call them what they really are) at Fox Phantasmagoria (let’s call it what it really is) reflects the strange new wonderland we inhabit, in which diverging continents of facts — or of recklessly harvested factoids and fictions — leave us without the common ground we need for a sane and civil society.Rutenberg chronicles the concern of senior Fox officials — and of Rupert Murdoch, the chair of Fox Corporation — not to alienate their audience, even if that meant diluting or disregarding an accurate version of events. Following Election Day 2020, Murdoch and Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive, grew worried about competing outlets that wholly bought into Trump’s bogus claims. “One of them, Newsmax, was moving up in the ratings while refusing to call Biden the winner,” Rutenberg writes, adding that when The Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch owns, reported that allies of Trump’s might invest in Newsmax to help it pull closer to Fox, “Murdoch alerted Scott to the piece. Fox would have to play this just right, he said in an email.” He warned that it was important not to inflame Trump.Carlson wrote to a colleague: “With Trump behind it, an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”So Carlson played along with Trump, even while admitting in a text message to an acquaintance “I hate him passionately” and privately expressing disgust and disbelief — “It’s insane,” he texted Laura Ingraham — about the fantastical accusations coming from Team Trump.Carlson sought to undermine those on the network who didn’t fall in line. After the reporter Jacqui Heinrich cast doubt on what Trump and his enablers were saying, Carlson texted Ingraham and Sean Hannity: “It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of viewers who relied on Carlson & Co. labeled themselves Republicans or said they leaned that way. That lopsidedness isn’t unique: The same survey found that 95 percent of viewers who relied on MSNBC belonged to or sympathized with the Democratic camp. While there’s absolutely no equivalence between the two networks, there’s also no doubt that both consider the interests and inclinations of their loyalists when they’re appointing their hosts, inviting their guests, choosing their stories, calibrating their tones. They are, to varying degrees, giving people what they want. They’re businesses, after all. So is The Times, whose readers are hardly a perfectly heterogeneous snapshot of America.And that compels customers who care about getting a full and nuanced picture not to buy from just one merchant, not in the media marketplace of this moment. We can’t change or redeem the Murdochs and the Carlsons of the world — such perversions of ambition, greed and vanity will always be with us. But we can be better, smarter, more keen-eyed and more open-minded ourselves. We can refuse to confirm and reward their assessments of us.Words Worth SideliningGetty ImagesPerhaps no subspecies of journalist gravitates toward jargon with the frequency and zest of the political journalist, who can’t resist cant. I noted as much in a newsletter last October, when I pleaded for the retirement of “deep dive,” “wake-up call” and “under the bus,” among other annoyances, and said that I’d probably produce at least one follow-up glossary of similarly exhausted phrases. So here’s another batch. May we please, please say goodbye to:Clown car. That’s the favored term for any campaign or political operation of transcendent incompetence or inanity — which is to say, many campaigns and political operations. I smiled the first time I spotted this reference. And the hundredth. No more. I just did a “Donald Trump” “clown car” search on Google, which returned more than 45,000 results. That’s appropriate for the bozo in question but a failure of originality nonetheless.Dumpster fire. A clown car in flames — or any political debacle. At this point, so many developments have been deemed dumpster fires that the designation has burned itself out. It’s an ember of its former blaze.Walk and chew gum at the same time. Pundits love, love, love this expression to convey how easy it should be for a politician to accomplish two goals at once. Mid-perambulation mastication is indeed multitasking at its most mundane; the metaphor was surely as invigorating as a just-unwrapped stick of wintergreen Trident once upon a toothy time. But it lacks all flavor now. Time to spit it out.Drank the Kool-Aid. How this reference to the mass suicide of hundreds of Jim Jones’s followers became an all-purpose knock on what any excessively credulous politician or overly obedient voter has done is beyond me.That dog won’t hunt. Because it’s a Shih Tzu? A bichon frise?Put on your big-boy pants. Pundits tell timid, oversensitive politicians to do this and then wonder why so many Americans find us snotty. That’s the epitome of immaturity.Thanks to Karen Simonsen of Sisters, Ore., Sheri Sidwell of Alton, Ill., and Bill Blackburn of Austin, Tex., among others, for suggesting one or more of the above. “Words Worth Sidelining” is a recurring newsletter feature.For the Love of SentencesGetty ImagesThe Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus was pithy and pointed in her take on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s lavish maritime getaways with a billionaire Republican donor: “Beware new friends bearing yachts.” (Thanks to Tom Morman of Leipsic, Ohio, and Bonnie Ross of Sarasota, Fla., for nominating this.)Also in The Post, Ron Charles examined an alliteratively named publisher of “pro-God” children’s stories: “The Brave Books website says, ‘It take courage to stand up for the truth.’ It take grammar, too, but God works in mysterious ways.” (Pam Gates, Rockville, Md., and Cynthia Bazinet, Upper Port La Tour, Nova Scotia)And David Von Drehle took issue with a right-wing Texas jurist’s ruling to block access to the abortion drug mifepristone, asserting that unelected judges “should be as modest and unassuming as a crossing guard in a Mennonite village where all the horses are old and footsore.” (Richard Rampell, Palm Beach, Fla., and Bobbie Steinhart, Berkeley, Calif., among others)In Politico, Rich Lowry contextualized Trump’s appearance at his Waco, Tex., rally with the J6 Prison Choir: “It’d be a little like Richard Nixon running for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination, and campaigning with a barbershop quartet made up of the Watergate burglars.” (Karen Hughes, Tumwater, Wash., and Colleen Kelly, Manhattan)In The New York Times, Jesse Green had advice for theatergoers filing into a new Broadway production: “Bring earplugs. Not just because the songs in ‘Bad Cinderella,’ the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened on Thursday at the Imperial Theater, are so crushingly loud. The dialogue, too, would benefit from inaudibility. For that matter, bring eye plugs: The sets and costumes are as loud as the songs. If there were such a thing as soul plugs, I’d recommend them as well.” (Conrad Macina, Landing, N.J.)Also in The Times, John McWhorter noted the existence, in the dictionary, of fussy and archaic terms that have fallen far from use and survive “more as puckish abstractions than actual words. They remind me of the 32-inch-waist herringbone pants from the 1980s that I have never been able to bring myself to get rid of, along with my compass and my protractor.” (Fred Jacobs, Queens, N.Y.)And James Poniewozik described the look and feel of the Manhattan courthouse in which Trump was arraigned: “The scene was gray, humdrum, municipal, more ‘Night Court’ than Supreme Court. You could practically smell the vending-machine coffee.” (Gil Ghitelman, Westport, Conn., and Adam Eisenstat, Pittsburgh)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m Reading and DoingGretchen Rubin’s new book begins with a scene that had special resonance for me: She visits the eye doctor, who gives her a bit of troubling news that prompts her to take a fresh, different look at the world around her. “In an instant,” she writes, “all my senses seemed to sharpen. It was as if every knob in my brain had suddenly been dialed to its maximum setting of awareness.” Her story from that point on is much different from mine, but it’s characterized by a similar impulse to summon wonder and gratitude, and it showcases her trademark wisdom about making the most of our days. The book, “Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World,” will be available Tuesday.My Times colleague Kate Zernike’s new book, “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science,” is a perfect marriage of compelling material and formidable journalist. In a review in The Times, the “Lessons in Chemistry” author Bonnie Garmus called “The Exceptions,” which was published in late February, “excellent and infuriating,” the latter adjective referring to the injustices Kate chronicles.I’m a big admirer of the writing that Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last do for The Bulwark, so when they asked me to join them last week on their podcast, “The Next Level,” I was delighted. (Sarah Longwell is their partner in the podcast but wasn’t around for our conversation.) We talked about politics, higher education and aging. Also, I guess, personal hygiene and self-indulgence? They titled the episode “Unacknowledged Bubble Baths,” an intriguing allusion to some bit of banter that escapes my memory. You can find “Unacknowledged Bubble Baths” (I just had to repeat it) here.On a Personal NoteHarold M. Lambert/Getty ImagesI relished many of the smart, witty articles about Gwyneth Paltrow’s days in court, but I can’t say whether the authors’ descriptions of her couture and her hauteur jibed with my impressions. I never watched so much as a minute of the proceedings.I saw precisely one short snippet of Alex Murdaugh’s testimony en route to his murder conviction, but that was that. I otherwise sated myself with written accounts of his trial.And while I use links in online articles and on social media to sample politicians’ speeches and public appearances, I don’t see nearly as much of Ron DeSantis or Kyrsten Sinema as a newscast or political talk show would air. That’s because there are few newscasts and political talk shows in my life.Am I guilty of grave professional dereliction? I wonder. I worry. Can I (or anyone else) read the culture intelligently without closely monitoring television, which is an important portal into it, a principal mirror of it and the medium that influences many Americans’ thinking and behavior like no other? Quite possibly not.But I’d like to believe that less television can equal more insight. That pulling back and tuning out — to a degree — are constructive.I’m singling out television, but I’m really speaking about something broader. I’m referring to a kind of indiscriminately rapt, instantly reactive attention to the scandal of the week, the melodrama of the day, the fascination of the hour. Many of those developments and details are ephemeral, disposable — and that’s not clear if you’re twitchily tracking them in real time. The ones with real consequences reach us in ways beyond the breathless exclamations on air. They also reach us multiple times, their repetition and endurance a measure of their import.Besides, is hyper-vigilance any way to live? Is it sustainable? Not for me, not as I get older, not in this addled era of ours.To examine the hurly-burly of our current world from a certain distance, with a certain detachment, is to see things in more accurate proportion, with better perspective — or at least I can make that argument. I think I buy it.But I acknowledge another possibility: I’m just doing what I must to stay several steps ahead of utter exhaustion and thorough disillusionment. That’s reason enough. More

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      Misinformation Defense Worked in 2020, Up to a Point, Study Finds

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      Nearly 68 million Americans still visited untrustworthy websites 1.5 billion times in a month, according to Stanford researchers, causing concerns for 2024.Not long after misinformation plagued the 2016 election, journalists and content moderators scrambled to turn Americans away from untrustworthy websites before the 2020 vote.A new study suggests that, to some extent, their efforts succeeded.When Americans went to the polls in 2020, a far smaller portion had visited websites containing false and misleading narratives compared with four years earlier, according to researchers at Stanford. Although the number of such sites ballooned, the average visits among those people dropped, along with the time spent on each site.Efforts to educate people about the risk of misinformation after 2016, including content labels and media literacy training, most likely contributed to the decline, the researchers found. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.“I am optimistic that the majority of the population is increasingly resilient to misinformation on the web,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and the lead author of the report. “We’re getting better and better at distinguishing really problematic, bad, harmful information from what’s reliable or entertainment.”“I am optimistic that the majority of the population is increasingly resilient to misinformation on the web,” said Jeff Hancock, the lead author of the Stanford report.Ian C. Bates for The New York TimesStill, nearly 68 million people in the United States checked out websites that were not credible, visiting 1.5 billion times in a month in 2020, the researchers estimated. That included domains that are now defunct, such as theantimedia.com and obamawatcher.com. Some people in the study visited some of those sites hundreds of times.As the 2024 election approaches, the researchers worry that misinformation is evolving and splintering. Beyond web browsers, many people are exposed to conspiracy theories and extremism simply by scrolling through mobile apps such as TikTok. More dangerous content has shifted onto encrypted messaging apps with difficult-to-trace private channels, such as Telegram or WhatsApp.The boom in generative artificial intelligence, the technology behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot, has also raised alarms about deceptive images and mass-produced falsehoods.The Stanford researchers said that even limited or concentrated exposure to misinformation could have serious consequences. Baseless claims of election fraud incited a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More than two years later, congressional hearings, criminal trials and defamation court cases are still addressing what happened.The Stanford researchers monitored the online activity of 1,151 adults from Oct. 2 through Nov. 9, 2020, and found that 26.2 percent visited at least one of 1,796 unreliable websites. They noted that the time frame did not include the postelection period when baseless claims of voter fraud were especially pronounced.That was down from an earlier, separate report that found that 44.3 percent of adults visited at least one of 490 problematic domains in 2016.The shrinking audience may have been influenced by attempts, including by social media companies, to mitigate misinformation, according to the researchers. They noted that 5.6 percent of the visits to untrustworthy sites in 2020 originated from Facebook, down from 15.1 percent in 2016. Email also played a smaller role in sending users to such sites in 2020.Other researchers have highlighted more ways to limit the lure of misinformation, especially around elections. The Bipartisan Policy Center suggested in a report this week that states adopt direct-to-voter texts and emails that offer vetted information.Social media companies should also do more to discourage performative outrage and so-called groupthink on their platforms — behavior that can fortify extreme subcultures and intensify polarization, said Yini Zhang, an assistant communication professor at the University at Buffalo.Professor Zhang, who published a study this month about QAnon, said tech companies should instead encourage more moderate engagement, even by renaming “like” buttons to something like “respect.”“For regular social media users, what we can do is dial back on the tribal instincts, to try to be more introspective and say: ‘I’m not going to take the bait. I’m not going to pile on my opponent,’” she said.A QAnon flag on a vehicle headed to a pro-Trump rally in October. Yini Zhang, a University of Buffalo professor who published a study about QAnon, said social media companies should encourage users to “dial back on the tribal instincts.”Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesWith next year’s presidential election looming, researchers said they are concerned about populations known to be vulnerable to misinformation, such as older people, conservatives and people who do not speak English.More than 37 percent of people older than 65 visited misinformation sites in 2020 — a far higher rate than younger groups but an improvement from 56 percent in 2016, according to the Stanford report. In 2020, 36 percent of people who supported President Donald J. Trump in the election visited at least one misinformation site, compared with nearly 18 percent of people who supported Joseph R. Biden Jr. The participants also completed a survey that included questions about their preferred candidate.Mr. Hancock said that misinformation should be taken seriously, but that its scale should not be exaggerated. The Stanford study, he said, showed that the news consumed by most Americans was not misinformation but that certain groups of people were most likely to be targeted. Treating conspiracy theories and false narratives as an ever-present, wide-reaching threat could erode the public’s trust in legitimate news sources, he said.“I still think there’s a problem, but I think it’s one that we’re dealing with and that we’re also recognizing doesn’t affect most people most of the time,” Mr. Hancock said. “If we are teaching our citizens to be skeptical of everything, then trust is undermined in all the things that we care about.” More

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

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

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      How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole

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

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      Attacks on Dominion Voting Persist Despite High-Profile Lawsuits

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      Unproven claims about Dominion Voting Systems still spread widely online.With a series of billion-dollar lawsuits, including a $1.6 billion case against Fox News headed to trial this month, Dominion Voting Systems sent a stark warning to anyone spreading falsehoods that the company’s technology contributed to fraud in the 2020 election: Be careful with your words, or you might pay the price.Not everyone is heeding the warning.“Dominion, why don’t you show us what’s inside your machines?” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and prominent election denier, shouted during a livestream last month. He added that the company, which has filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit against him, was engaged in “the biggest cover-up for the biggest crime in United States history — probably in world history.”Claims that election software companies like Dominion helped orchestrate widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been widely debunked in the years since former President Donald J. Trump and his allies first pushed the theories. But far-right Americans on social media and influencers in the news media have continued in recent weeks and months to make unfounded assertions about the company and its electronic voting machines, pressuring government officials to scrap contracts with Dominion, sometimes successfully.The enduring attacks illustrate how Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims have taken root in the shared imagination of his supporters. And they reflect the daunting challenge that Dominion, and any other group that draws the attention of conspiracy theorists, faces in putting false claims to rest.The attacks about Dominion have not reached the fevered pitch of late 2020, when the company was cast as a central villain in an elaborate and fictitious voter fraud story. In that tale, the company swapped votes between candidates, injected fake ballots or allowed glaring security vulnerabilities to remain on voting machines.Dominion says all those claims have been made without proof to support them.“Nearly two years after the 2020 election, no credible evidence has ever been presented to any court or authority that voting machines did anything other than count votes accurately and reliably in all states,” Dominion said in an emailed statement.On Friday, the judge in Delaware overseeing the Fox defamation case ruled that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that Fox News and Fox Business had made false claims about the company — a major setback for the network.Many prominent influencers have avoided mentioning the company since Dominion started suing prominent conspiracy theorists in 2021. Fox News fired Lou Dobbs that year — only days after it was sued by Smartmatic, another election software company — saying the network was focusing on “new formats.” Mr. Dobbs is also a defendant in Dominion’s case against Fox, which is scheduled to go to trial on April 17.Yet there have been nearly nine million mentions of Dominion across social media websites, broadcasts and traditional media since Dominion filed its first lawsuit in January 2021, including nearly a million that have mentioned “fraud” or related conspiracy theories, according to Zignal Labs, a media monitoring company. Some of the most widely shared posts came from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who tweeted last month that the lawsuits were politically motivated, and Kari Lake, the former Republican candidate for governor of Arizona who has advanced voter fraud theories about election machines since her defeat last year.Far-right Americans on social media and influencers in the news media continue to make unfounded assertions about Dominion and its electronic voting machines.Brynn Anderson/Associated PressMr. Lindell remains one of the loudest voices pushing unproven claims against Dominion and electronic voting machines, posting hundreds of videos to Frank Speech, his news site, attacking the company with tales of voter fraud.Last month, Mr. Lindell celebrated on his livestream after Shasta County, a conservative stronghold in Northern California, voted to use paper ballots after ending its contract with Dominion. A county supervisor had flown to meet privately with Mr. Lindell before the vote, discussing how to run elections without voting machines, according to Mr. Lindell. The supervisor ultimately voted to switch to paper ballots.In an interview this week with The New York Times, Mr. Lindell claimed to have spent millions on campaigns to end election fraud, focusing on abolishing electronic voting systems and replacing them with paper ballots and hand counting.“I will never back down, ever, ever, ever,” he said in the interview. He added that Dominion’s lawsuit against him, which is continuing after the United States Supreme Court declined to consider his appeal, was “frivolous” and that the company was “guilty.”“They can’t deny it, nobody can deny it,” Mr. Lindell said.Joe Oltmann, the host of “Conservative Daily Podcast” and a promoter of voter fraud conspiracy theories, hosted an episode in late March titled “Dominion Is FINISHED,” in which he claimed that there was a “device that’s used in Dominion machines to actually transfer ballots,” offering only speculative support.“This changes everything,” Mr. Oltmann said.Dominion sent Mr. Oltmann a letter in 2020 demanding that he preserve documents related to his claims about the company, which is often the first step in a defamation lawsuit.In a livestream last month on Rumble, the streaming platform popular among right-wing influencers, Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado who was indicted on 10 charges related to allegations that she tampered with Dominion’s election equipment, devoted more than an hour to various election fraud claims, many of them featuring Dominion. The discussion included a suggestion that because boxes belonging to Dominion were stamped with “Made in China,” the election system was vulnerable to manipulation by the Chinese Communist Party.Mr. Oltmann and Ms. Peters did not respond to requests for comment.The Fox lawsuit has also added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire.Far-right news sites have largely ignored the finding that Fox News hosts disparaged voter fraud claims privately, even as they gave them significant airtime. Instead, the Gateway Pundit, a far-right site known for pushing voter fraud theories, focused on separate documents showing that Dominion executives “knew its voting systems had major security issues,” the site wrote.The documents showed the frenzied private messages between Dominion employees as they were troubleshooting problems, with one employee remarking, “our products suck.” In an email, a Dominion spokeswoman noted the remark was about a splash screen that was hiding an error message.In February, Mr. Trump shared the Gateway Pundit story on Truth Social, his right-wing social network, stoking a fresh wave of attacks against the company.“We will not be silent,” said one far-right influencer whose messages are sometimes shared by Mr. Trump on Truth Social. “Dominion is the enemy!” More

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      Robert Kennedy Jr., a Noted Vaccine Skeptic, Files to Run for President

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      While he has not yet announced his plans, he filed the federal paperwork for a campaign to run as a Democrat.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political activist known most recently for his campaign to discredit coronavirus vaccines, filed paperwork on Wednesday to run for president as a Democrat, offering a potential long-shot challenge to President Biden.Mr. Kennedy, the son and namesake of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated while running for president in 1968, has not made a formal announcement. However, he teased a run at a political gathering in New Hampshire last month, telling a crowd: “I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is, my wife has greenlighted it.” He has set up a website to solicit donations and volunteers for a potential run, and a tweet pinned to his Twitter account says he will run if “I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win.”Mr. Kennedy, 69, was once a top environmental lawyer, but his interests veered away from the Democratic mainstream into conspiracy theories, for which he has earned the public rebuke of some members of his prominent family. A longtime vaccine skeptic, he linked childhood vaccinations to autism, a claim thoroughly rebuked by medical experts. In a recent book, he claimed that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who was President Biden’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus pandemic, and Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, conspired with drug companies to profit from vaccines. Instagram blocked Mr. Kennedy’s account for spreading vaccine misinformation in 2021.If he becomes a candidate, Mr. Kennedy wrote on Twitter, his top priority will be to “end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power.”While many Democrats express concerns about Mr. Biden as a candidate in 2024, when he would be 81 on Election Day, no major party leaders are actively exploring a primary challenge. The only well-known announced challenger to date is the author Marianne Williamson, who also ran in 2020. More

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      A Campaign Aide Didn’t Write That Email. A.I. Did.

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      The Democratic Party has begun testing the use of artificial intelligence to write first drafts of some fund-raising messages, appeals that often perform better than those written entirely by human beings.Fake A.I. images of Donald J. Trump getting arrested in New York spread faster than they could be fact-checked last week.And voice-cloning tools are producing vividly lifelike audio of President Biden — and many others — saying things they did not actually say.Artificial intelligence isn’t just coming soon to the 2024 campaign trail. It’s already here.The swift advance of A.I. promises to be as disruptive to the political sphere as to broader society. Now any amateur with a laptop can manufacture the kinds of convincing sounds and images that were once the domain of the most sophisticated digital players. This democratization of disinformation is blurring the boundaries between fact and fake at a moment when the acceptance of universal truths — that Mr. Biden beat Mr. Trump in 2020, for example — is already being strained.And as synthetic media gets more believable, the question becomes: What happens when people can no longer trust their own eyes and ears?Inside campaigns, artificial intelligence is expected to soon help perform mundane tasks that previously required fleets of interns. Republican and Democratic engineers alike are racing to develop tools to harness A.I. to make advertising more efficient, to engage in predictive analysis of public behavior, to write more and more personalized copy and to discover new patterns in mountains of voter data. The technology is evolving so fast that most predict a profound impact, even if specific ways in which it will upend the political system are more speculation than science.“It’s an iPhone moment — that’s the only corollary that everybody will appreciate,” said Dan Woods, the chief technology officer on Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign. “It’s going to take pressure testing to figure out whether it’s good or bad — and it’s probably both.”OpenAI, whose ChatGPT chatbot ushered in the generative-text gold rush, has already released a more advanced model. Google has announced plans to expand A.I. offerings inside popular apps like Google Docs and Gmail, and is rolling out its own chatbot. Microsoft has raced a version to market, too. A smaller firm, ElevenLabs, has developed a text-to-audio tool that can mimic anyone’s voice in minutes. Midjourney, a popular A.I. art generator, can conjure hyper-realistic images with a few lines of text that are compelling enough to win art contests.“A.I. is about to make a significant change in the 2024 election because of machine learning’s predictive ability,” said Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s first 2020 campaign manager, who has since founded a digital firm that advertises some A.I. capabilities.Disinformation and “deepfakes” are the dominant fear. While forgeries are nothing new to politics — a photoshopped image of John Kerry and Jane Fonda was widely shared in 2004 — the ability to produce and share them has accelerated, with viral A.I. images of Mr. Trump being restrained by the police only the latest example. A fake image of Pope Francis in a white puffy coat went viral in recent days, as well.Many are particularly worried about local races, which receive far less scrutiny. Ahead of the recent primary in the Chicago mayoral race, a fake video briefly sprung up on a Twitter account called “Chicago Lakefront News” that impersonated one candidate, Paul Vallas.“Unfortunately, I think people are going to figure out how to use this for evil faster than for improving civic life,” said Joe Rospars, who was chief strategist on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 campaign and is now the chief executive of a digital consultancy.Those who work at the intersection of politics and technology return repeatedly to the same historical hypothetical: If the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape broke today — the one in which Mr. Trump is heard bragging about assaulting women and getting away with it — would Mr. Trump acknowledge it was him, as he did in 2016?The nearly universal answer was no.“I think about that example all the time,” said Matt Hodges, who was the engineering director on Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign and is now executive director of Zinc Labs, which invests in Democratic technology. Republicans, he said, “may not use ‘fake news’ anymore. It may be ‘Woke A.I.’”For now, the frontline function of A.I. on campaigns is expected to be writing first drafts of the unending email and text cash solicitations.“Given the amount of rote, asinine verbiage that gets produced in politics, people will put it to work,” said Luke Thompson, a Republican political strategist.As an experiment, The New York Times asked ChatGPT to produce a fund-raising email for Mr. Trump. The app initially said, “I cannot take political sides or promote any political agenda.” But then it immediately provided a template of a potential Trump-like email.The chatbot denied a request to make the message “angrier” but complied when asked to “give it more edge,” to better reflect the often apocalyptic tone of Mr. Trump’s pleas. “We need your help to send a message to the radical left that we will not back down,” the revised A.I. message said. “Donate now and help us make America great again.”Among the prominent groups that have experimented with this tool is the Democratic National Committee, according to three people briefed on the efforts. In tests, the A.I.-generated content the D.N.C. has used has, as often as not, performed as well or better than copy drafted entirely by humans, in terms of generating engagement and donations.Party officials still make edits to the A.I. drafts, the people familiar with the efforts said, and no A.I. messages have yet been written under the name of Mr. Biden or any other person, two people said. The D.N.C. declined to comment.Higher Ground Labs, a small venture capital firm that invests in political technology for progressives, is currently working on a project, called Quiller, to more systematically use A.I. to write, send and test the effectiveness of fund-raising emails — all at once.“A.I. has mostly been marketing gobbledygook for the last three cycles,” said Betsy Hoover, a founding partner at Higher Ground Labs who was the director of digital organizing for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. “We are at a moment now where there are things people can do that are actually helpful.”Political operatives, several of whom were granted anonymity to discuss potentially unsavory uses of artificial intelligence they are concerned about or planning to deploy, raised a raft of possibilities.Some feared bad actors could leverage A.I. chatbots to distract or waste a campaign’s precious staff time by pretending to be potential voters. Others floated producing deepfakes of their own candidate to generate personalized videos — thanking supporters for their donations, for example. In India, one candidate in 2020 produced a deepfake to disseminate a video of himself speaking in different languages; the technology is far superior now.Mr. Trump himself shared an A.I. image in recent days that appeared to show him kneeling in prayer. He posted it on Truth Social, his social media site, with no explanation.One strategist predicted that the next generation of dirty tricks could be direct-to-voter misinformation that skips social media sites entirely. What if, this strategist said, an A.I. audio recording of a candidate was sent straight to the voice mail of voters on the eve of an election?Synthetic audio and video are already swirling online, much of it as parody.On TikTok, there is an entire genre of videos featuring Mr. Biden, Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump profanely bantering, with the A.I.-generated audio overlaid as commentary during imaginary online video gaming sessions.On “The Late Show,” Stephen Colbert recently used A.I. audio to have the Fox News host Tucker Carlson “read” aloud his text messages slamming Mr. Trump. Mr. Colbert labeled the audio as A.I. and the image on-screen showed a blend of Mr. Carlson’s face and a Terminator cyborg for emphasis.The right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec pushed out a “deepfake” video last month of Mr. Biden announcing a national draft because of the conflict in Ukraine. It was quickly seen by millions.“The videos we’ve seen in the last few weeks are really the canary in the coal mine,” said Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics. “We measure advances now not in years but in months, and there are many months before the election.”Some A.I. tools were deployed in 2020. The Biden campaign created a program, code-named Couch Potato, that linked facial recognition, voice-to-text and other tools to automate the transcription of live events, including debates. It replaced the work of a host of interns and aides, and was immediately searchable through an internal portal.The technology has improved so quickly, Mr. Woods said, that off-the-shelf tools are “1,000 times better” than what had to be built from scratch four years ago.One looming question is what campaigns can and cannot do with OpenAI’s powerful tools. One list of prohibited uses last fall lumped together “political campaigns, adult content, spam, hateful content.”Kim Malfacini, who helped create the OpenAI’s rules and is on the company’s trust and safety team, said in an interview that “political campaigns can use our tools for campaigning purposes. But it’s the scaled use that we are trying to disallow here.” OpenAI revised its usage rules after being contacted by The Times, specifying now that “generating high volumes of campaign materials” is prohibited.Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for Mr. Obama, dabbled with the A.I. tool from ElevenLabs to create a faux recording of Mr. Biden calling into the popular “Pod Save America” podcast that Mr. Vietor co-hosts. He paid a few dollars and uploaded real audio of Mr. Biden, and out came an audio likeness.“The accuracy was just uncanny,” Mr. Vietor said in an interview.The show labeled it clearly as A.I. But Mr. Vietor could not help noticing that some online commenters nonetheless seemed confused. “I started playing with the software thinking this is so much fun, this will be a great vehicle for jokes,” he said, “and finished thinking, ‘Oh God, this is going to be a big problem.’” More

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      Online Troll Named Microchip Tells of Sowing ‘Chaos’ in 2016 Election

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      The defendant in the unusual trial, Douglass Mackey, and the pseudonymous witness collaborated to beat Hillary Clinton. They met for the first time in a Brooklyn courtroom.The two social media influencers teamed up online years ago.Both had large right-wing followings and pseudonyms to hide their real identities. One called himself Ricky Vaughn, after a fictional baseball player portrayed in a movie by Charlie Sheen. The other called himself Microchip.In 2016, prosecutors say, they set out to trick supporters of Hillary Clinton into thinking they could vote by text message or social media, discouraging them from the polls.“Ricky Vaughn,” whose real name is Douglass Mackey, was charged in 2021 with conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote, and on Wednesday the men met face to face in court for the first time.Mr. Mackey sat at the defense table in Federal District Court in Brooklyn wearing a sober gray suit. He watched as Microchip, clad in a royal-blue sweatsuit and black sandals, approached the witness stand, where he was sworn in under that name and began testifying against him.This month, a federal judge overseeing the case, Nicholas G. Garaufis, ruled that Microchip could testify without revealing his actual name after prosecutors said anonymity was needed to protect current and future investigations.The sight of a witness testifying under a fictional identity added one more odd element to an already unusual case that reflects both the rise of social media as a force in politics and the emergence of malicious online mischief-makers — trolls — as influential players in a presidential election. This week’s trial could help determine how much protection the First Amendment gives people who spread disinformation.Microchip’s testimony appeared intended to give jurors an inside view of what prosecutors describe as a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters. It also provided a firsthand account of crass, nihilistic motives behind those efforts.“I wanted to infect everything,” Microchip said, adding that his aim before the 2016 election had been “to cause as much chaos as possible” and diminish Mrs. Clinton’s chances of beating Donald J. Trump.Evidence presented by prosecutors has shown how Mr. Mackey and others, including Microchip, had private online discussions in the weeks before the election, discussing how they could move votes.While Mr. Mackey made clear that he wanted to help Mr. Trump become president, Microchip testified that he was driven mainly by animus for Mrs. Clinton, testifying that his aim had been to “destroy” her reputation.In the fervid and fluid environment surrounding the 2016 election, Mr. Mackey, whose lawyer described him as “a staunch political conservative,” and Microchip, who told BuzzFeed that he was a “staunch liberal,” became allies.Online exchanges and Twitter messages entered into evidence by prosecutors showed the men plotting their strategy. Mr. Mackey saw limiting Black turnout as a key to helping Mr. Trump. Prosecutors said that he posted an image showing a Black woman near a sign reading “African Americans for Hillary” and the message that people could vote by texting “Hillary” to a specific number.Microchip testified that Mr. Mackey was a participant in a private Twitter chat group called “War Room,” adding that he was “very well respected back then” and “a leader of sorts.”Prosecutors introduced records showing that Microchip and Mr. Mackey had retweeted one another dozens of times.Mr. Mackey’s particular talent, according to Microchip, was coming up with ideas and memes that resonated with people who felt that American society was declining and that the West was struggling.Microchip testified that he was self employed as a mobile app developer. He said he had pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge related to his circulation of memes providing misinformation about how to vote. Because of his anonymity the details of that plea could not be confirmed. And he added that he had signed a cooperation agreement with prosecutors agreeing to testify against Mr. Mackey, and to help with other cases.Under cross-examination, Microchip said he had begun working with the F.B.I. in 2018. He also acknowledged telling an investigator in 2021 that there was no “grand plan around stopping people from voting.”His time on the stand included a tutorial of sorts on how he had amassed Twitter followers and misled people who viewed his messages.He testified that he had built up a following with bots, and used hashtags employed by Mrs. Clinton in a process he called “hijacking” to get his messages to her followers. He aimed to seduce viewers with humor, saying, “When people are laughing, they are very easily manipulated.”Microchip said that he sought to discourage voting among Clinton supporters “through fear tactics,” offering conspiratorial takes on ordinary events as a way to drive paranoia and disaffection.One example he cited involved the emails of John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, which were made public by WikiLeaks during the campaign.There was nothing particularly surprising or sinister among those emails, Microchip said, yet he posted thousands of messages about them suggesting otherwise. “My talent is to make things weird and strange, so there is controversy.”Asked by a prosecutor whether he believed the messages he posted, Microchip did not hesitate.“No,” he said. “And I didn’t care.” More