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      Fact-Checking Trump on CNN’s Town Hall

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      Former President Donald J. Trump misleadingly and wrongly described his own record, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, his handling of classified documents, foreign policy and the economy.Former President Donald J. Trump almost immediately began citing a litany of falsehoods Wednesday night during a town hall-style meeting in New Hampshire broadcast on CNN.After incorrectly characterizing the 2020 presidential election as “rigged,” Mr. Trump repeated a number of other falsehoods that have become staples of his political messaging. He misleadingly and wrongly described his record, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, his handling of classified documents, foreign policy, immigration policy, the economy and a woman whom a jury found he sexually abused.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What WAS Said“We got 12 million more votes than we had — as you know — in 2016.”This is misleading. Mr. Trump received 74 million votes in the 2020 presidential election, 12 million more than he received in the 2016 election. But, of course, President Biden received even more votes in 2020: 81 million.Mr. Trump then repeated his lie that the 2020 election was rigged. As the CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins noted, no evidence has surfaced to support his false claims of an army of people voting multiple times, dead people voting and missing ballots.What WAS Said“I offered them 10,000 soldiers. I said it could be 10, it could be more, but I offered them specifically 10,000 soldiers.”This is false. Mr. Trump was referring to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when his loyalists stormed the Capitol in a bid to stop the certification of Mr. Biden’s election victory. There is no evidence that Mr. Trump ever made a request for 10,000 National Guard troops or that the speaker of the House at the time, Nancy Pelosi, rejected such a demand. The speaker does not control the National Guard.Mr. Trump also claimed that the acting defense secretary at the time, Christopher C. Miller, backed up his account. Vanity Fair reported in 2021 that Mr. Trump had floated the 10,000 figure to Mr. Miller the night of Jan. 5. But in 2022, Mr. Miller told a House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 that he was “never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature.”There is no record of Mr. Trump making such a request either. The Pentagon’s timeline of events leading up to the riot notes that the Defense Department reviewed a plan to activate 340 members of the District of Columbia’s National Guard, “if asked.” But the timeline makes no mention of a request for 10,000 troops by Mr. Trump. Nor did a Pentagon inspector general report on the breach, which instead referred to suggestions by Mr. Trump that his rally on Jan. 6 had been conducted safely. A Pentagon spokesman also told The Washington Post that it had “no record of such an order being given.”What WAS SaidFormer Vice President Mike Pence “should have put the votes back to the state legislatures, and I think we would have had a different outcome.”This is false. The vice president does not have the power or legal authority to alter the presidential election, as Mr. Pence has repeatedly and correctly noted.A House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol found that John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who was the chief architect of Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, had admitted to Mr. Trump two days before Jan. 6 that his plan to have Mr. Pence to halt the vote certification process was illegal.What WAS Said“This woman, I don’t know her. I never met her. I have no idea who she is.”This is false. A Manhattan jury on Tuesday found that Mr. Trump had sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, a writer. Regardless of whether Mr. Trump remembers meeting Ms. Carroll, there is clear evidence that the two have met: a black-and-white photo of the two along with their spouses at the time.What WAS Said“We created the greatest economy in history. A big part of that economy was I got you the biggest tax cuts in the history of our country, bigger than the Reagan cuts.”This is false. Average growth, even before the coronavirus pandemic battered the economy, was lower under Mr. Trump than under Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan.Nor were the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 the “biggest” ever. According to a report from the Treasury Department, the 1981 Reagan tax cut is the largest as a percentage of the economy (2.9 percent of gross domestic product) and by the reduction in federal revenue (a 13.3 percent decrease). The Obama tax cut in 2012 amounted to the largest cut in inflation-adjusted dollars: $321 billion a year. By comparison, Mr. Trump’s 2017 tax cut was about $150 billion annually and amounted to about 0.9 percent of gross domestic product.Mr. Trump also claimed to have presided over “zero” inflation. Although some months had zero inflation or even price declines as the coronavirus pandemic hit, the Consumer Price Index increased 1.2 percent overall in 2020, the last full year he was in office, and had risen at a 1.4 percent annual rate in January 2021, his last month as president.What WAS Said“If you look at Chicago, Chicago has the single toughest gun policies in the nation. They are so tough you can’t breathe, New York, too, and other places also. All those places are the worst and most dangerous places so that’s not the answer.”This is misleading. Opponents of firearm restrictions frequently cite Chicago as a case study of how tough gun laws do little to prevent homicides. This argument, however, relies on faulty assumptions about the city’s gun laws and gun violence.There were more gun murders in Chicago than in any other city in the United States in 2020, fueling the perception that it is the gun violence capital of the country. But Chicago is also the third-largest city in the country. Adjusted by population, the gun homicide rate was 25.2 per 100,000, the 26th highest in the country in 2020, according to data compiled by the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety.The three cities with the highest gun homicide rates — Jackson, Miss., Gary, Ind., and St. Louis — had rates double that of Chicago’s. All are in states with more permissive gun laws than Illinois.Chicago’s reputation for having the strictest gun control measures in the country is outdated. The Supreme Court nullified the city’s handgun ban in 2010. An appeals court also struck down a ban on carrying concealed weapons in Illinois in 2012, and the state began allowing possession of concealed guns in 2013, as part of the court decision.Today, Illinois has tougher restrictions than most states, but it does not lead the pack, ranking No. 7 in Everytown’s assessment of the strength of state gun control laws, and No. 8 in a report card released by the Giffords Law Center, another gun control group. Conversely, the state ranked No. 41 in an assessment on gun rights from the libertarian Cato Institute.Gun control proponents have also argued that the patchwork nature of gun laws in the country makes it difficult for a state like Illinois with tough restrictions on the books to enforce those in practice. A 2017 study commissioned by the City of Chicago found, for example, that 60 percent of guns used in crimes and recovered in Chicago came from out of state, with neighboring Indiana as the primary source.What WAS Said“I built the wall. I built hundreds of miles of wall and I finished it.”This is false. The Trump administration constructed 453 miles of border wall over four years, and a vast majority of the new barriers reinforced or replaced existing structures. Of that, about 47 miles were new primary barriers. The United States’ southwestern border with Mexico is over 1,900 miles, and during his campaign, Mr. Trump had vowed to build a wall across the entire border and make Mexico pay for it. Mexico did not pay for the barriers that had been constructed.What WAS Said“I got with NATO — I got them to put up hundreds of millions of dollars that they weren’t paying under Obama and Bush and all these other presidents.”This is misleading. Under guidelines for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, members agreed to commit a minimum of 2 percent of G.D.P. on their own defense, but few nations actually do so. They do not “pay” the alliance directly.NATO members agreed that nations currently not meeting the 2 percent goal would do so in the next decade, and that nations meeting it would continue to do so — but they made this pledge in September 2014, years before Mr. Trump became president.“And the reason for this is not Donald Trump — it’s Vladimir Putin, Russia’s actions in Crimea and aggressive stance,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a NATO ambassador under President Barack Obama, previously told The New York Times.What WAS Said“You know who else took them? Obama took them.”This is false. Mr. Trump has repeatedly and wrongly compared his handling of classified documents with that of his predecessor.After his presidency, Mr. Trump took a trove of classified documents — including some marked top secret — to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate.In contrast, the National Archives and Records Administration, which preserves and maintains records after a president leaves office, has said in a statement that Mr. Obama turned over his documents, classified and unclassified, as required by law.The agency has also said it is not aware of any missing boxes of presidential records from the Obama administration.Mr. Trump then falsely claimed that Mr. Biden “took more than anybody,” about 1,800 boxes. But that number refers to a collection of documents Mr. Biden had donated to the University of Delaware in 2012 from his tenure as a senator representing the state from 1973 to 2009. Unlike presidential documents, which must be released to the National Archives once a president leaves office, documents from members of Congress are not covered by the Presidential Records Act. It is not uncommon for senators and representatives to give such items to research or historical facilities.The university agreed not to give the public access to Mr. Biden’s documents from his time as senator until two years after he retired from public life. But the F.B.I. did search the collection in February as part of a special counsel investigation and in cooperation with Mr. Biden’s legal team. The Times reported at the time that the material was still being analyzed but did not appear to contain any classified documents.What WAS Said“I didn’t ask him to find anything. If this call was bad — I said you owe me votes because the election was rigged. That election was rigged.”This is false. In a taped January 2021 call, Mr. Trump said the words “find 11,780 votes” as he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia to overturn election results in his state.“All I want to do is this,” he said in the call. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”Mr. Trump also accused Mr. Raffensperger of “not reporting” corrupt ballots and ballot shredding (there is no evidence that this happened in Georgia), and told him that “that’s a criminal offense.” More

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      Donald Trump to Appear on CNN Town Hall

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      Wednesday’s town hall has already proved divisive — and it could be an unsettling preview for the TV news industry as it prepares to cover a presidential contest that is likely to feature Mr. Trump.Should a leading presidential contender be given the opportunity to speak to voters on live television?What if that contender is former President Donald J. Trump?Mr. Trump is set to appear on CNN on Wednesday night for a town hall in New Hampshire — his first live appearance on a major TV news network (besides those controlled by Rupert Murdoch) since 2020 — and a torrid media debate is swirling.Joy Reid, an anchor on rival MSNBC, derided the event as “a pretty open attempt by CNN to push itself to the right and make itself attractive and show its belly to MAGA.” Her colleague Chris Hayes called the town hall “very hard to defend.” Critics asked why CNN would provide a live platform to someone who defended rioters at the United States Capitol and still insists the 2020 election was rigged.Those objections intensified on Tuesday after Mr. Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll. “Is @CNN still going to do a town hall with the sexual predator twice impeached insurrectionist?” Alexander S. Vindman, the Army colonel who was a witness in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, wrote on Twitter.Mr. Trump is also, at the moment, the highest-polling Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential campaign and the de facto leader of his party. Some veteran TV journalists wonder: What’s the alternative?“So no more live political events, because politicians can be nasty? Because politicians can tell lies?” Ted Koppel, the former “Nightline” anchor, said in an interview. “I’m not sure that news organizations should necessarily be in the business of making ideological judgments. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? You bet.”Wednesday’s town hall, where Mr. Trump will field questions from Republican and undecided voters, is in some ways a stress test — and an unsettling preview — for the television news industry as it prepares to cover a presidential contest that is likely, in its early stages at least, to prominently include Mr. Trump.Any telecast featuring the former president is bound to be divisive. Were anchors too harsh? Too lenient? How quickly did they react to false claims? And foes of Mr. Trump will cringe at seeing him on air at all.But Bob Schieffer, the longtime CBS anchor, said that interviews of important political figures were necessary. “There’s no question he might well get the nomination,” he said of Mr. Trump. “We’re in the business of telling people who’s running for what and what they stand for.”CNN faced criticism in 2016 for granting Mr. Trump hours of unfettered airtime during the Republican primary. Jeff Zucker, the network’s president at the time, later acknowledged he had overdone it.Mr. Trump then spent years vilifying the network, leading chants of “CNN sucks” and barring its correspondent Jim Acosta from the White House. A YouGov poll last month found that CNN was the country’s most polarizing major media source, with the widest gap between the portion of Democrats who trust it and the portion of Republicans who don’t.Mr. Trump last appeared on CNN in 2016, and since then much has changed. CNN was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery, and Mr. Zucker was replaced; his successor, Chris Licht, pledged to broaden the network’s appeal. He is backed by David Zaslav, the Warner chief executive, who has batted away objections to Wednesday’s Trump town hall.“The U.S. has a divided government; we need to hear both voices,” Mr. Zaslav said last week on CNBC, where he was questioned repeatedly about the decision to host Mr. Trump. “When we do politics, we need to represent both sides. I think it’s important for America.”Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has soured on Fox News, irked by Mr. Murdoch’s support for a potential Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. And he has taken notice of Mr. DeSantis’s aversion to appearing on mainstream outlets like CNN.Mr. Trump and CNN are not exactly reconciled. There is the awkward fact that Mr. Trump still has a pending $475 million defamation lawsuit against the network. And in a missive on Truth Social on Tuesday, the former president told fans that CNN was “rightfully desperate to get those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings once again.” He added: “Could be the beginning of a New & Vibrant CNN, with no more Fake News, or it could turn into a disaster for all, including me. Let’s see what happens?”As olive branches go, it felt a bit spindly. But David Chalian, CNN’s political director, shrugged it off. “We never stopped covering him as president despite everything he said about us,” Mr. Chalian said in an interview. “We never stopped doing our jobs.”CNN executives will air Mr. Trump’s remarks live, without any time delay. That means if Mr. Trump makes a false claim, it will be up to the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, or an onscreen graphic to correct him in real time. Mr. Trump’s last three interviews on Fox News were prerecorded. (Fox recently paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems, after several of its anchors amplified Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the company.)In the interview, Mr. Chalian said that CNN was “in the business of live news events — that’s what we do.” He added, “I obviously can’t control what Donald Trump says, but what we can control is our journalism.”CNN did not agree to preconditions for the town hall, Mr. Chalian said — “No question is off the table” — and Ms. Collins has spent several days preparing for the broadcast. Selecting Ms. Collins to moderate is in keeping with Mr. Licht’s emphasis on reporting over punditry; Ms. Collins is best known for day-to-day White House coverage and previously worked at The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet.Mr. Koppel, in the interview, said Ms. Collins was a “tough and able” journalist who could handle Mr. Trump in a live setting. He said CNN had many reasons to go forward with the event.“Has Trump pushed the boundaries of honesty, good taste, decency, humanity, to such a degree that we should not put him on the air at all, unless we’ve had the chance to sanitize what he has to say?” Mr. Koppel said. “I can understand that’s a reasonable question to ask. But it puts a very heavy burden on the shoulders of the people who run our networks. Because it means we are going to let them decide who gets on the air, and who doesn’t.” More

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      Will the Fox-Dominion Settlement Affect Its News Coverage? Don’t Count on It.

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      There is little reason to think Fox News will adjust its coverage after paying a $787.5 million defamation settlement to Dominion Voting Systems. Its audience won’t let it.After the 2020 election, the talk inside Fox News was all about “a pivot” — a reorienting of its coverage away from former President Donald J. Trump and toward the more conventional Republican politics favored by the network’s founding chairman, Rupert Murdoch.Mr. Murdoch said then that he wanted to make Mr. Trump a “non person.” And as recently as January, when he was deposed as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, his feelings hadn’t changed. “I’d still like to,” Mr. Murdoch said.But Fox’s audience — the engine of its profits and the largest in all of cable — may not let him.Anyone expecting that Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion this week would make the network any humbler or gentler is likely to be disappointed. And there probably won’t be much of a shift in the way the network favorably covers Mr. Trump and the issues that resonate with his followers.“How are you going to make an argument to your hosts to not do things that rate?” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News editor and on-air personality who was fired by the network in 2021 and was lined up to be a witness in the Dominion case. “You can’t tell people, ‘Do anything to get a rating, but don’t cover the most popular figure in the Republican Party.’”After a hiatus from the network that lasted much of 2022, Mr. Trump is back on Fox News. He’s sat for three interviews with the network in less than a month. The most recent one, which was taped earlier this month with Mark Levin, will air on Sunday.Even voter fraud — the issue that resulted in Fox being sued for billions of dollars by Dominion and another voting technology company, Smartmatic — hasn’t entirely gone away. In Mr. Trump’s recent interview with the Fox host Tucker Carlson, he implied that there was good reason to doubt the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory, saying, “People could say he won an election.”Mr. Carlson, for his part, has also dipped back into election denialism recently. “Jan. 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam of my lifetime,” he said on the air on March 14. (His private text messages, revealed as part of Dominion’s suit, show him discussing with his producers how there was no proof the results of the 2020 election were materially affected by fraud.)The Fox host Tucker Carlson with former President Donald J. Trump last year. Mr. Carlson has recently dipped back into election denialism on air.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn the immediate term, Mr. Murdoch seems unlikely to make any major changes at any of his Fox properties. Doing so, said three people who have worked closely with him, would be seen as the kind of acknowledgment of wrongdoing he is loath to make. The Dominion settlement included no apology — just a glancing reference to a judge’s findings that Fox had broadcast false statements about Dominion machines and their role in a fanciful plot to steal the election from Mr. Trump.The $787.5 million payout is huge — itself an acknowledgment of wrongdoing of sorts, as one of the largest settlements ever in a defamation case. But it did not lead to the same degree of personal humiliation as the phone hacking scandal involving Mr. Murdoch’s British newspapers. Then, in 2011, he had to appear before Parliament and atone for how his journalists had illegally hacked the voice mail accounts of prominent figures. He had a foam pie thrown in his face and admitted during his testimony, “This is the most humble day of my life.”But his signature American news channel is showing few signs of humility. It devoted two short segments on Tuesday to news of the Dominion settlement. Its coverage then quickly returned to the same subjects it’s been hammering since Mr. Biden was elected.Its news reports on the surge of migrants at the southern border are presented under the rubric “Biden Border Crisis.” Republican lawmakers’ efforts to pass laws banning transgender girls from school sports teams receive prominent attention — when only a tiny number are actually playing, and sometimes none at all in states where the laws have been fiercely debated. President Biden is variously portrayed as incoherent, corrupt and weak — especially regarding his posture toward China. Footage of criminals ransacking stores, assaulting police officers and attacking unwitting bystanders play on a loop — often with perpetrators who are Black.Even Mr. Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 presidential election have cropped up here and there. Last week, the right-wing commentator Clay Travis appeared on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” which last year replaced a more straight news program at 7 p.m., and declared that Mr. Biden “only won by 20,000 votes after they rigged the entire election, after they hid everything associated with Hunter Biden, with the big tech, with the big media, and with the big Democrat Party collusion that all worked in his favor.”Mr. Watters did not correct or respond to those remarks on the air.The Fox host Jesse Watters did not correct or respond to false statements made on his show about the 2020 presidential election by the right-wing commentator Clay Travis.John Lamparski/Getty ImagesStories of voter fraud, often exaggerated and unsubstantiated, have been part of the network’s D.N.A. well before 2020. In 2012, Roger Ailes, who founded Fox News with Mr. Murdoch, sent a team of journalists to Ohio to investigate still-unproven claims of malfeasance at the polls after former President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there. There are, however, some subtle signs that Fox wishes to move past the Dominion episodes and its embarrassing disclosures of network executives privately belittling the same fraud claims they allowed on the air. It has recently started a promotional campaign highlighting its team of global correspondents in 30-second ads. “We have a mission to be on the ground reporting the big stories,” one says. The tensions between its news division and its prime-time hosts were exposed as part of the Dominion case, with private messages from late 2020 showing that hosts like Mr. Carlson and Sean Hannity had mocked and complained about reporters in the Fox Washington bureau who would fact-check the former president’s fraud claims.And last week, Fox chose not to renew the contract of one of the most vociferous election deniers on its payroll, Dan Bongino, formerly the host of a Saturday evening show.A spokeswoman for Fox News said in a written statement that the network had “significantly increased its investment in journalism over the last several years, further expanding our news gathering commitment both domestically and abroad.” The statement added, “We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists.”In his deposition, Rupert Murdoch, the founding chairman of Fox News, acknowledged referring privately to Mr. Trump as “nuts,” “plain bonkers” and “unable to suppress his egomania.”Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Trump undoubtedly remains one of the biggest stories of the moment, putting the network’s leadership in a position it finds less than ideal. In his deposition, Mr. Murdoch acknowledged referring privately to the former president as “nuts,” “plain bonkers” and “unable to suppress his egomania.” His personal politics are much closer to an establishment Republican in the mold of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader whom Mr. Ailes worked for as a media consultant decades ago.Mr. Trump can still draw high ratings, even if he is no longer the singular figure he once was in the Republican Party. His interview with Mr. Carlson, after his indictment in Manhattan on felony charges, drew an audience of 3.7 million. An interview that Mr. Carlson did several weeks before with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida drew 3.1 million.In the end, the numbers may be the decisive factor about what kind of coverage Fox gives the former president, no matter Mr. Murdoch’s preferences.A former Fox executive, John Ellis, summarized the conundrum the network has with its audience in his newsletter after Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign — an event that Fox News broadcast live. “The power of Fox News to influence the outcomes of GOP primaries can be decisive,” he wrote. Fox’s audience has plenty of Trump supporters, of course, but also many others who may prefer another Republican as the nominee. People who identify as politically independent watch it far more than they do CNN or MSNBC, according to data from Nielsen in January and February.“Trump probably cannot win the 2024 nomination if Fox News is determined to defeat him,” Mr. Ellis added. “But in order to defeat him, Fox News must have the permission of its audience to do so.”Michael M. Grynbaum contributed reporting. More

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      Fox Settlement Is a Victory for Dominion. But the Misinformation War Continues.

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      False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said.There are 787 million reasons to consider Fox News’s settlement of the defamation lawsuit a stunning victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the millions of dollars that Fox is paying to Dominion will put to rest false claims about the 2020 presidential election or help deter misinformation more broadly remains far less clear.In the blinkered information bubbles where the lies about Dominion’s rigging the vote were fabricated and spread, conspiracy theories about the company continue to thrive — at least among those resistant to overwhelming evidence, including new disclosures about Fox News and its most famous hosts that Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.And Dominion is only one part of a broader conspiracy theory that the American electoral system is corrupt. That view, despite all the proof to the contrary, is still cheered on by former President Donald J. Trump, who remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.“Part of the strength of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different strands that yield the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy one thread or one strand, and you’d still have enough strands to sustain it,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of FactCheck.org.The $787.5 million settlement, one of the largest ever for a defamation case, undoubtedly has a punitive effect on Fox, even though it allowed the company to avoid a potentially embarrassing trial. Like the verdicts last year against Alex Jones, the broadcaster who defamed the families of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School and was ordered to pay them more than $1.4 billion, the outcome showed that lies can be costly for those who spread them.Alex Jones was found liable for defamation after spreading falsehoods about the Sandy Hook school shooting.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYet Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news site, while employing legal strategies that could help him evade some of the financial penalty.For researchers who study disinformation, the abrupt end to the lawsuit against Fox dashed hopes that a lengthy trial — with testimony from hosts who repeated accusations against Dominion they knew to be false — would do more to expose the dangerous consequences of pushing falsehoods and conspiracies.Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, was among those expressing disappointment. She said that the settlement — for half of what Dominion originally sought — reflected Fox’s “desire to avoid further damning facts coming out during trial.”“Yet money alone won’t bring us accountability, and it doesn’t correct the ongoing harms Fox News causes to democracy,” she said. “If $787.5 million is the cost to tell a lie, repeatedly, what’s the cost of curing that lie?”Fox was spared extended and potentially damaging testimony. The network did not have to issue an apology on air. Instead, in a carefully crafted statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and touted its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”While the major news networks pivoted to cover the trial’s abrupt end on Tuesday, Fox devoted just six minutes and 22 seconds to the topic across three segments. None of its prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had once bolstered the voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in Dominion’s lawsuit, mentioned the case.Instead, Mr. Carlson began his show with a segment about violence in Chicago, airing video clips largely showing Black Chicagoans during a weekend of violence. “This is why we used to shoot looters,” he said. That was followed with an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter.“So what would you be thinking about when you’re watching Tucker Carlson?” Ms. Jamieson said. “Not the Fox settlement, but crime in the cities, interesting interview with Musk. And now our media diet for the day has told you what matters.”None of Fox’s prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, mentioned the settlement on air.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA similar phenomenon unfolded in other news organizations on the political right in the wake of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a site known for pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted one 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not updated.Far more words were expressed in comments left by readers, where nearly 4,000 missives raised fresh conspiracy theories. Among them was a tale that Fox News’s settlement was actually a shrewd maneuver that would help Dominion extract debilitating sums from Fox competitors, including the conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, which have also been sued by Dominion.In the two hours following the settlement’s announcement, there was a significant spike in references online to the discredited film “2000 Mules,” which spun an elaborate theory of people delivering thousands of ballots in drop boxes, according to Zignal Labs, a company that tracks activity online. The references surged again on Wednesday after a prominent commentator on Twitter, Rogan O’Handley, chided those “cheering over” the settlement. “We know it was rigged,” he wrote.On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app,users claimed without evidence that the deal was a way for Fox to launder money; that the network was in cahoots with Dominion to engineer an election coup; that Dominion was trying to avoid a trial that would expose its corrupt practices; and that the judicial system was controlled by the Mafia.Even if the Dominion victory makes news organizations think twice before reporting lies about election technology vendors in the future, the damage has already been done.Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the settlement would do little to protect election workers who were abused by anonymous conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false narratives about ballot fraud.“Lies about our elections have really inundated our society, and I don’t think that’s changing,” he said. “Not all of those lies involve the potential for a defamation suit; it’s really the extreme cases where people are going to be able to collect monetary damages.”Legal experts said that the Dominion case against Fox had several important characteristics that set it apart. The voting technology company had compiled evidence suggesting that some Fox hosts had shared the false election fraud narrative with viewers despite privately expressing serious misgivings about the claims. The company had also submitted filings claiming that the election lies repeated by Fox caused Dominion to lose business.In fact, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark in the fight against false information, and not only in extreme cases focused on defamation, like those involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after court rejected legal challenges to the balloting in 2020 for lack of evidence. This week, an arbitration court ordered Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who claimed among other things that China had rigged the vote, to pay a $5 million reward to a software engineer who debunked the claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest.The legal traditions that allowed Dominion’s lawyers to receive the damning emails of Fox executives and anchors and make them part of the public record were essential in proving the allegations were baseless as a matter of record.“Before we give up on the capacity of the system to work to determine what constitutes knowable fact in the moment, we should say the courts have worked well up to this point,” Ms. Jamieson said.Election misinformation will almost certainly remain a problem heading into the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it will be difficult, but not hopeless, Mr. Norden said. While some hard-core conspiracy theorists may never be convinced of the legitimacy of the vote, many people are simply unfamiliar with the mechanics of American elections and can have more faith in the system if exposed to accurate information.“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity ahead of the next election to build more resilience against that with most of the public,” Mr. Norden said. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem through defamation suits alone, but there’s a lot that we can be doing between now and November 2024.” More

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      Fox Settles Dominion Suit, but Smartmatic Case and Others Loom

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      Another election technology company, Smartmatic, is suing news outlets, including Fox, over false claims of election fraud, and Dominion has other cases pending.On Tuesday, Fox News hastily agreed to pay $787.5 million to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems — among the largest settlements ever in a defamation case — just hours after the jury for the trial was selected. In addition to the whopping financial settlement, Fox conceded that “certain claims” it had made about Dominion were false.In settling with Dominion, the network avoided the possible embarrassment of a trial that could have exposed its inner workings. Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old Fox News founder, and the Fox host Tucker Carlson were potential witnesses.Dominion sued the cable news network two years ago, after it aired stories falsely claiming that Dominion’s voting machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. that had been cast for Donald J. Trump, who was president.But the settlement with Dominion is not the only legal action that some news outlets are facing after making bogus claims about the 2020 elections.Dominion v. NewsmaxNewsmax apologized in 2021 for spreading false claims that a Dominion employee rigged voting machines.Callaghan O’Hare/ReutersIn 2021, the right-wing news outlet Newsmax formally apologized for spreading false allegations that an employee of Dominion had rigged voting machines. In a statement on its website, Newsmax said it had found “no evidence” that the Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, had manipulated voting machines in an effort to sabotage Mr. Trump’s re-election bid.“On behalf of Newsmax, we would like to apologize for any harm that our reporting of the allegations against Dr. Coomer may have caused to Dr. Coomer and his family,” the statement said.Dominion also sued Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and an outspoken supporter of the former president, and two of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Sidney Powell and Rudy W. Giuliani, for their baseless claims about election fraud. In 2021, a federal judge refused to throw out the suits against them. And in October, the Supreme Court declined to consider Mr. Lindell’s bid to fend off his suit. This month, he told The New York Times, “I will never back down, ever, ever, ever.” The lawsuits are ongoing.Smartmatic v. Fox NewsIn 2021, Fox News was also sued by Smartmatic, which provided voting technology in Los Angeles County for the 2020 election. In its complaint, Smartmatic wrote, “Fox joined the conspiracy to defame and disparage Smartmatic and its election technology and software,” adding, “The story led a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.” The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court, seeks at least $2.7 billion in damages.In February, a New York appeals court denied Fox’s request to dismiss the case, and a New York judge said last month that the case could proceed. A trial date has not been set.“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025,” Fox News said in a statement on Wednesday.Smartmatic v. NewsmaxSmartmatic also brought defamation litigation against Newsmax, accusing it of spreading falsehoods about the company. Judge Eric M. Davis, who was also assigned to the Fox-Dominion trial, will preside. In February, Newsmax lost its bid to end the litigation, and Judge Davis let the case move forward.Smartmatic v. One America NewsThe headquarters of One America News in San Diego.The New York TimesIn 2021, Smartmatic also sued One America News Network, accusing the news organization of airing disinformation about the 2020 election even after the company warned it to stop. In June, a judge denied a request to dismiss the lawsuit.Lou DobbsThis month — days before jury selection began for the Dominion case — Fox News and Lou Dobbs, a former longtime Fox Business host and loyal Trump supporter, settled a defamation case with Majed Khalil, a Venezuelan businessman. Mr. Dobbs and Ms. Powell, a regular guest on Fox News, falsely claimed on the air and in related Twitter posts that Mr. Khalil had been part of a conspiracy to flip votes. One of the tweets said he was “the effective ‘COO’ of the election project.” Fox canceled Mr. Dobbs’s show in February 2021. More

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Makes His White House Run Official

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      Announcing his long-shot bid to challenge President Biden, he spoke to a crowd of people who voiced their shared skepticism about vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry.More than half a century after his father sought the White House to end a calamitous war in Vietnam and to salve the country’s racial wounds, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on re-litigating Covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans’ faith in science.Mr. Kennedy, a California resident, traveled to Boston, once the citadel of his family’s power, to declare that he would challenge President Biden for the Democratic nomination in a long-shot bid for the White House.Appearing at the Park Plaza Hotel — a favorite fund-raising venue of his uncle Ted Kennedy’s — he sought to wrap himself in the Kennedy political luster.The event was saturated, in words and images, with reminiscences of Mr. Kennedy’s father as well as another uncle, President John F. Kennedy.In a rambling speech lasting nearly two hours, Mr. Kennedy, 69, evoked his father’s 1968 campaign and death, and spoke in detail about his career as an environmental lawyer decades ago. He also aimed criticisms at the pharmaceutical industry, big social media companies that he accused of censorship, Mr. Biden’s commitment to the war in Ukraine and former President Donald J. Trump’s “lockdown” of the country early in the pandemic.“This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years,” Mr. Kennedy said, a reference to his complaint that social media platforms and the mainstream media have not given him a fair hearing. “I got a lot to talk about. They shouldn’t have shut me up for that long because now I’m really going to let loose on them for the next 18 months. They’re going to hear a lot from me.”Late in his speech, an alarm sounded and an announcement asked people to evacuate. Nobody moved. “Nice try,” Mr. Kennedy said, and continued to speak.Numerous attendees, who had come from Boston, neighboring New England states and Florida, recounted in interviews their skepticism about vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry.While polls show that up to half of Democrats want someone besides Mr. Biden as their 2024 nominee, no party leader has stepped up with a challenge, and past opponents have rallied to the president’s side. Mr. Kennedy is the latest in a history of fringe presidential aspirants from both parties who run to bring attention to a cause, or to themselves.For Mr. Kennedy, that cause is vaccine skepticism, which he cloaked in terms of truth-seeking and free speech, a crusade that in the past led him to falsely link childhood vaccines to autism. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he sought to undermine public trust in vaccines, comparing government efforts to impose mandates in some places to “Hitler’s Germany.” Both Facebook and Instagram took down accounts of a group he runs for spreading medical misinformation.Family members have accused Mr. Kennedy of sowing distrust in the science behind vaccines. His campaign has appalled members of his famous Democratic clan.“I love my brother Bobby, but I do not share or endorse his opinions on many issues, including the Covid pandemic, vaccinations and the role of social media platforms in policing false information,” Kerry Kennedy, a sister of Mr. Kennedy’s, said in a statement.Bob Shrum, a former aide to Ted Kennedy, said Mr. Kennedy’s attacks on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the federal government’s top medical and scientific agencies would have infuriated his uncle. “It’s contrary to everything his uncle Ted Kennedy ever did,” he said. “He called health care the cause of his life.”In a statement of his own, Mr. Kennedy said he had made a “difficult choice to put my principles ahead of my personal affections” for Mr. Biden. “Some members of my family agree with me and others do not,” he added. “I bear them no ill will.”On Wednesday in Boston, Mr. Kennedy was introduced by his wife, Cheryl Ruth Hines, an actress, and he pointed out his children and grandchildren seated in a balcony of the hotel ballroom. But there was a notable absence of members of his family who have made careers in politics. A number of them affirmed their support for Mr. Biden’s re-election in recent days, part of a decades-long alliance between the Biden and Kennedy families.Ted Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, is Mr. Biden’s ambassador to Austria. Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President Kennedy, is ambassador to Australia. And Joe Kennedy III, a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, is Mr. Biden’s special envoy to Northern Ireland, who flew with him this month to Belfast.Though his campaign is unlikely to pose a serious threat to Mr. Biden, the strength of emotions expressed by his supporters on Wednesday pointed to a group that is angry and distrustful of traditional Democrats when it comes to vaccines. Any link between childhood vaccines and autism has been widely rebuked by peer-reviewed scientific studies. Covid vaccines, which have been administered to millions of Americans, are safe and effective, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Nonetheless, misinformation about vaccines swirls online.Attendees, echoing Mr. Kennedy, took aim at a corrupt alliance of big business and government.“The Covid vaccines are not effective and not safe,” maintained Claire Mortimer, 69, a nurse practitioner who drove from Brooklin, Maine, to hear Mr. Kennedy. “I believe that only Bobby Kennedy Jr. is capable of getting rid of the corruption that is so deeply embedded in every agency of our government.”Andy Migner, 67, who works in regenerative healing in Boston, described herself as a “lifetime Democrat” who now feels politically homeless. She said “our ability to question,” as well as journalism and public debate, “has gone down the tubes.” More

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      What Next for Dominion After Its $787.5 Million Fox Settlement

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      The election technology company has several more defamation lawsuits pending against public figures and news outlets.Dominion Voting Systems did more on Tuesday than settle its lawsuit against Fox News for $787.5 million: It also set the tone for the many related defamation cases it has filed. Legal experts say the settlement with Fox News, one of the largest defamation payouts in American history, could embolden Dominion as it continues to defend its reputation, which it says was savaged by conspiracy theories about vote fraud during the 2020 election. The company has several cases pending against public figures including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive, and news outlets such as Newsmax.The targets of Dominion’s remaining lawsuits, few of which have deep pockets and legal firepower at Fox’s level, will likely take a cue from Dominion and Fox’s face-off, legal experts said.“Even though it was a settlement, it certainly was a victory for Dominion,” said Margaret M. Russell, a law professor at Santa Clara University. “For other possible defendants, I don’t think this will make them double down; it will make them fearful.”Dominion is the second-largest election technology company operating in the United States, where there are few other major players. The company, whose majority owner is the private equity firm Staple Street Capital, was made “toxic” by the false fraud narratives in 2020, one of Staple Street’s founders said in court documents. At one point, Dominion estimated that misinformation cost it $600 million in profits.Fox said in its court filings that Dominion did not have to lay off employees, close offices or default on any debts, nor did it suffer any canceled business contracts as a result of the news network’s coverage. Fox said in one filing that Dominion had projected $98 million in revenue for 2022, which would make Tuesday’s settlement the equivalent of eight years of sales.Dominion’s customers are largely officials who oversee voting in states and counties around the country; the company served 28 states, as well as Puerto Rico, in the 2020 election. The false stories about fraud that were directed at the company were embraced by some local election officials.In court documents, an expert enlisted by Dominion said that the company had very low early contract termination rates and very high contract renewal rates before the 2020 election, but blamed the preoccupation with the false fraud claims for prompting some clients to exit deals after the vote.Now, Dominion has emerged from its tussle with Fox in a stronger position to win back any skittish clients or score new business, legal experts said.Last month, the judge in Dominion’s case against Fox reviewed evidence of the false claims and wrote that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” effectively confirming that the company was aboveboard.The secretary of state of New Mexico, Maggie Toulouse Oliver, applauded Tuesday’s settlement.“The harm done by election lies/denialism since 2020 is immeasurable, but this settlement against Fox News provides accountability & sends a strong message we’re happy to see,” Ms. Toulouse Oliver wrote on Twitter. During the midterm primaries last year, she blamed “unfounded conspiracy theories” when she sued officials in Otero county who had cited concerns about Dominion machines in their refusal to certify election results.Fox acknowledged in a statement on Tuesday that some of the claims it had made about Dominion were false, saying that the admission “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”John Poulos, Dominion’s founder and chief executive, said in a statement on Tuesday that Fox caused “enormous damage” to his company and “nothing can ever make up for that.” He also thanked the election officials who make up Dominion’s clientele, and nodded to Staple Street’s support. “Lies have consequences,” a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems said during a news conference.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesDominion drew some complaints that by settling, it had given up the opportunity to extract an apology from Fox or force it through a potentially embarrassing trial. An opinion article in the Daily Beast bemoaned that the voting technology company had “decided to step out of the ring with a bag of money instead of vanquishing one of the country’s most destructive and influential peddlers of hate and disinformation.”Mr. Poulos called the settlement “a big step forward for democracy” in an interview with ABC News broadcast on Wednesday.Legal experts noted that even if Dominion had prevailed in a jury verdict, it would have risked years of expensive battles over appeals from Fox.“The tort of defamation is not about saving democracy from liars,” said Enrique Armijo, a professor and First Amendment expert at Elon University School of Law. “It’s about saving the reputation of the people who have been lied about and making those liars compensate them for the harms to their reputations.”Fox still faces other legal challenges, including a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit from another election technology company, Smartmatic. Fox said it planned to defend freedom of the press in the case and called Smartmatic’s damages claims “outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis.” Smartmatic said in a statement that, after the Dominion settlement, it “will expose the rest” of the “misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign.”Dominion, too, has more cases pending, including against the pro-Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and One America News Network. Although the lawsuits involve similar false claims of election fraud, the facts of each case vary, experts said.Attorneys for Mr. Lindell and Mr. Giuliani did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did Newsmax or OAN.For the individuals and smaller companies facing legal claims, for whom a substantial jury judgment could be an “existential” threat, settlement may seem more attractive after Tuesday, Mr. Armijo said.“They’re not going to be able to put up the same level of defense that Fox did; they just don’t have the resources to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to see the other defamation defendants in the remaining cases getting any further than Fox did, which, as we saw, is not very far.” More

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      Analysis: Fox News’s $787.5 Million Settlement Is the Cost of Airing a Lie

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      Fox News’s late-stage agreement with Dominion Voting Systems came with a rare acknowledgment of broadcasting false claims by the conservative media powerhouse.In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false?But the $787.5 million settlement agreement — among the largest defamation settlements in history — and Fox’s courthouse statement recognizing that the court had found “certain claims about Dominion” aired on its programming “to be false” — at the very least amount to a rare, high-profile acknowledgment of informational wrongdoing by a powerhouse in conservative media and America’s most popular cable network.“Money is accountability,” Stephen Shackelford, a Dominion lawyer, said outside the courthouse, “and we got that today from Fox.”During a news conference, a lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems said, “lies have consequences.”Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThe terms of the agreement, which was abruptly announced just before lawyers were expected to make opening statements, did not require Fox to apologize for any wrongdoing in its own programming — a point that Dominion was said to have been pressing for.Shortly after the agreement was reached, Fox said it was “hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”The settlement carries an implicit plea of “no contest” to several pretrial findings from the presiding judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, that cast Fox’s programming in exceptionally harsh light. In one of those findings, the judge sided with Dominion in its assertion that Fox could not claim that its airing of the conspiracy theory — generally relating to the false claim that its machines “switched” Trump votes into Biden votes — fell under a legally protected status of “news gathering” that can shield news organizations when facts are disputed. The judge wrote, “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”In another finding, the judge wrote that the “evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”Through those findings, the judge seriously limited Fox’s ability to argue that it was acting as a news network pursuing the claims of a newsmaker, in this case, the president of the United States, who was the lead clarion for the false Dominion narrative.In those heady days before the first day of trial, Fox had been indicating that if it were to lose at trial, it would work up an appeal that would, at least partly, argue with those judicial rulings. Now they stand undisputed. By the end of the day on Tuesday, it was clear that Fox’s lawyers were engaged in an urgent calculus to take the financial hit rather than risk losing at trial. As so many legal experts before the trial had argued, Dominion had managed to collect an unusual amount of internal documentation from Fox showing that many inside the company knew the Dominion election conspiracy theory was pure fantasy. That extended to the network’s highest ranks — right up to Mr. Murdoch himself.Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants could have faced a drawn-out trial that would have forced them to acknowledge why they broadcast conspiratorial claims that knew to be false.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressThat evidence appeared to bring Dominion close to the legal threshold in defamation cases known as “actual malice” — established when defamatory statements are “made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard of whether it was true or not.” (That bar, however, is not always easy to meet, and there are no guarantees in front of a jury.)“Dominion Voting had elicited much critical evidence that Fox had acted with actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth, which it could have proved to a jury, so the only question remaining would have been damages,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. “Trial of the case also might have undermined the reputation of Fox when the evidence was presented in open court.”It was less surprising that Fox settled than that it did so at such a late stage on Tuesday. A trial would have seen Fox News personnel and Mr. Murdoch parrying with lawyers over the knowledge of falsity they held and why they did not take any action to stop it. The answers would have further unmasked the internal modus operandi of an organization that has long guarded its internal operations.The one question that only time will answer is whether the settlement was enough to cause Fox News to change the way it handles such incendiary and defamatory conspiracy content. The amount is huge — $787.5 million. Fox News certainly doesn’t want to see a similar settlement anytime soon as other legal cases loom, notably a $2.7 billion suit from another election technology company, Smartmatic.But Fox did manage to escape Dominion’s goal of an on-air admission or apology, meaning it did not have to force either on its audience, which did not hear much about the case on Fox’s shows to begin with.“It’s hard to say how damaging a decision against Fox would have been for the company beyond the financial cost of the verdict because their audience is very loyal and bought into the polarized perspective their opinion hosts present,” Michelle Simpson Tuegel, a trial lawyer, said in a statement. “But the reputational harm of having executives, including Chairman Rupert Murdoch, and hosts take the stand seems to have moved the parties towards a resolution.” More