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    Inside Fox’s Legal and Business Debacle

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    In August 2021, the Fox Corporation board of directors gathered on the company’s movie studio lot in Los Angeles. Among the topics on the agenda: Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against its cable news network, Fox News.The suit posed a threat to the company’s finances and reputation. But Fox’s chief legal officer, Viet Dinh, reassured the board: Even if the company lost at trial, it would ultimately prevail. The First Amendment was on Fox’s side, he explained, even if proving so could require going to the Supreme Court.Mr. Dinh told others inside the company that Fox’s possible legal costs, at tens of millions of dollars, could outstrip any damages the company would have to pay to Dominion.That determination informed a series of missteps and miscalculations over the next 20 months, according to a New York Times review of court and business records, and interviews with roughly a dozen people directly involved in or briefed on the company’s decision-making.The case resulted in one of the biggest legal and business debacles in the history of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire: an avalanche of embarrassing disclosures from internal messages released in court filings; the largest known settlement in a defamation suit, $787.5 million; two shareholder lawsuits; and the benching of Fox’s top prime-time star, Tucker Carlson.And for all of that, Fox still faces a lawsuit seeking even more in damages, $2.7 billion, filed by another subject of the stolen-election theory, the voting software company Smartmatic, which can now build on the evidence produced in the Dominion case to press its own considerable claims.In the month since the settlement, Fox has refused to comment in detail on the case or the many subsequent setbacks. That has left a string of unanswered questions: Why did the company not settle earlier and avoid the release of private emails and texts from executives and hosts? How did one of the most potentially prejudicial pieces of evidence — a text from Mr. Carlson about race and violence — escape high-level notice until the eve of the trial? How did Fox’s pretrial assessment so spectacularly miss the mark?Repeatedly, Fox executives overlooked warning signs about the damage they and their network would sustain, The Times found. They also failed to recognize how far their cable news networks, Fox News and Fox Business, had strayed into defamatory territory by promoting President Donald J. Trump’s election conspiracy theories — the central issue in the case. (Fox maintains it did not defame Dominion.)When pretrial rulings went against the company, Fox did not pursue a settlement in any real way. Executives were then caught flat-footed as Dominion’s court filings included internal Fox messages that made clear how the company chased a Trump-loving audience that preferred his election lies — the same lies that helped feed the Jan. 6 Capitol riots — to the truth.It was only in February, with the overwhelming negative public reaction to those disclosures, that Mr. Murdoch and his son with whom he runs the company, Lachlan Murdoch, began seriously considering settling. Yet they made no major attempt to do so until the eve of the trial in April, after still more damaging public disclosures.At the center of the action was Mr. Dinh and his overly rosy scenario.Mr. Dinh declined several requests for comment, and the company declined to respond to questions about his performance or his legal decisions. “Discussions of specific legal strategy are privileged and confidential,” a company representative said in a statement.Defenders of Mr. Dinh, a high-level Justice Department official under President George W. Bush, say his initial position was sound. Because of the strength of American free speech protections, Dominion needed to clear a high bar. And unfavorable rulings from the Delaware judge who oversaw the case hurt Fox’s chances, they argue.“I think Viet and Fox carried out just the right strategy by moving down two paths simultaneously — first, mounting a strong legal defense, one that I think would have eventually won at the appellate stage, and, second, continuously assessing settlement opportunities at every stage,” said William P. Barr, the former attorney general under Mr. Trump who worked with Mr. Dinh earlier in his career. Of course, the case would have been difficult for any lawyer. As the internal records showed, executives knew conspiracy theories about Dominion were false yet did not stop hosts and guests from airing them.That placed Fox in the ultimate danger zone, where First Amendment rights give way to the legal liability that comes from knowingly promoting false statements, referred to in legalese as “actual malice.”An Unanswered LetterMaria Bartiromo was the first Fox host to air the Dominion conspiracy theory.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesThe fall of 2020 brought Fox News to a crisis point. The Fox audience had come to expect favorable news about President Trump. But Fox could not provide that on election night, when its decision desk team was first to declare that Mr. Trump had lost the critical state of Arizona.In the days after, Mr. Trump’s fans switched off in droves. Ratings surged at the smaller right-wing rival Newsmax, which, unlike Fox, was refusing to recognize Joseph R. Biden’s victory.The Fox host who was the first to find a way to draw the audience back was Maria Bartiromo. Five days after the election, she invited a guest, the Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell, to share details about the false accusations that Dominion, an elections technology company, had switched votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.Soon, wild claims about Dominion appeared elsewhere on Fox, including references to the election company’s supposed (but imagined) ties to the Smartmatic election software company; Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator who died in 2013; George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor; and China.On Nov. 12, a Dominion spokesman complained to the Fox News Media chief executive, Suzanne Scott, and the Fox News Media executive editor, Jay Wallace, begging them to make it stop. “We really weren’t thinking about building a litigation record as much as we were trying to stop the bleeding,” Thomas A. Clare, one of Dominion’s lawyers, said recently at a post-mortem discussion of the case held by a First Amendment advocacy group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.As Fox noted in its court papers, its hosts did begin including company denials. But as they continued to give oxygen to the false allegations, Dominion sent a letter to the Fox News general counsel, Lily Fu Claffee, demanding that Fox cease and correct the record. “Dominion is prepared to do what is necessary to protect its reputation and the safety of its employees,” the letter warned.It came amid more than 3,600 messages that Dominion sent debunking the conspiracy theories to network hosts, producers and executives in the weeks after the election.Such letters often set off internal reviews at news organizations. Fox’s lawyers did not conduct one. Had they done so, they may have learned of an email that Ms. Bartiromo received in November about one of Ms. Powell’s original sources on Dominion.The source intimated that her information had come from a combination of dreams and time travel. (“The wind tells me I’m a ghost but I don’t believe it,” she had written Ms. Powell.)Dan Novack, a First Amendment lawyer, said that if he ever stumbled upon such an email in a client’s files, he would “physically wrest my client’s checkbook from them and settle before the police arrive.”Fox, however, did not respond to the Dominion letter or comply with its requests — now a key issue in a shareholder suit filed in April, which maintains that doing so would have “materially mitigated” Fox’s legal exposure.The CaseDominion’s chief executive, John Poulos, at a news conference in April after the company settled its defamation suit against Fox.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThree months after the election, another voting technology company tied to the Dominion conspiracy, Smartmatic, filed its own defamation suit against Fox, seeking $2.7 billion in damages. Dominion told reporters that it was preparing to file one, too.Mr. Dinh was publicly dismissive.“The newsworthy nature of the contested presidential election deserved full and fair coverage from all journalists, Fox News did its job, and this is what the First Amendment protects,” Mr. Dinh said at the time in a rare interview with the legal writer David Lat. “I’m not at all concerned about such lawsuits, real or imagined.”Mr. Dinh was saying as much inside Fox, too, according to several people familiar with his actions at the time. His words mattered.A refugee of Vietnam who fled the Communist regime and landed with his family in the United States virtually penniless, he graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law and was a clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. As an assistant attorney general for George W. Bush, he helped draft the Patriot Act expanding government surveillance powers. He and Lachlan Murdoch later became so close that Mr. Dinh, 55, is godfather to one of Mr. Murdoch’s sons.Mr. Dinh took a hands-on approach to the Dominion case, and eventually split with a key member of the outside team, Charles L. Babcock of Jackson Walker, according to several people with knowledge of the internal discussions.After disagreement over the best way to formulate Fox’s defense, Jackson Walker and Fox parted ways. George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and a former assistant general counsel for The Times, said Mr. Babcock’s exit had left Fox down a seasoned defamation defense lawyer. “He’s probably the best trial lawyer in the media bar,” Mr. Freeman said.By then, Mr. Dinh was fashioning the legal team more in his own image, having brought in a longtime colleague from the Bush administration, the former solicitor general Paul Clement.Mr. Clement’s presence on the Fox team was itself an indication of Mr. Dinh’s willingness to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court — few members of the conservative legal bar had more experience there.Mr. Dinh hired Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney, for the role of lead litigator, succeeding Mr. Babcock. Mr. Webb was known for representing a beef manufacturer that sued ABC News over reports about a product sometimes referred to as “pink slime.” The case was settled in 2017 for more than $170 million.The Fox legal team based much of the defense on a doctrine known as the neutral reportage privilege. It holds that news organizations cannot be held financially liable for damages when reporting on false allegations made by major public figures as long as they don’t embrace or endorse them.“If the president of the United States is alleging that there was fraud in an election, that’s newsworthy, whether or not there’s fraud in the election,” Mr. Clement told Jim Geraghty, a writer for National Review and The Washington Post. “It’s the most newsworthy thing imaginable.”Fox remained so confident, the company said in reports to investors that it did not anticipate the suit would have “a material adverse effect.”But the neutral reportage privilege is not universally recognized. Longtime First Amendment lawyers who agree with the principle in theory had their doubts that it would work, given that judges have increasingly rejected it.“Most astute media defamation defense lawyers would not, and have not for a very long time, relied on neutral reportage — certainly as a primary line of defense, because the likelihood that a court would accept it as a matter of First Amendment law has continued to diminish over time,” said Lee Levine, a veteran media lawyer. An early warning came in late 2021. The judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, rejected Fox’s attempt to use the neutral reportage defense to get the suit thrown out altogether, determining that it was not recognized under New York law, which he was applying to the case. Even if it was recognized, Fox would have to show it reported on the allegations “accurately and dispassionately,” and Dominion had made a strong argument that Fox’s reporting was neither, the judge wrote in a ruling.That ruling meant that Dominion, in preparing its arguments, could have access to Fox’s internal communications in discovery.That was a natural time to settle. But Fox stuck with its defense and its plan, which always foresaw a potential loss at trial. “There was a strong belief that the appeal could very well be as important, or more important, than the trial itself,” Mr. Webb said at the post-mortem discussion of the case with Mr. Clare.Things Fall ApartText messages that came to light in the Dominion case included assertions by the Fox host Tucker Carlson that voter fraud could not have made a material difference in the election.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesFox executives did not foresee how daunting the discovery process would become.At nearly every step, the court overruled Fox’s attempts to limit Dominion’s access to private communications exchanged among hosts, producers and executives. The biggest blow came last summer, after a ruling stating that Dominion could review messages from the personal phones of Fox employees, including both Murdochs.The result was a treasure trove of evidence for Dominion: text messages and emails that revealed the doubts that Rupert Murdoch had about the coverage airing on his network, and assertions by many inside Fox, including Mr. Carlson, that fraud could not have made a material difference in the election.The messages led to even more damaging revelations during depositions. After Dominion’s lawyers confronted Mr. Murdoch with his own messages showing he knew Mr. Trump’s stolen election claims were false, he admitted that some Fox hosts appeared to have endorsed stolen election claims.That appeared to have undermined Fox’s defense. But Mr. Dinh told Mr. Murdoch afterward that he thought the deposition had gone well, according to a person who witnessed the exchange. Mr. Murdoch then pointed a finger in the direction of the Dominion lawyer who had just finished questioning him and said, “I think he would strongly disagree with that.”During Mr. Carlson’s deposition last year, Dominion’s lawyers asked about his use of a crude word to describe women — including a ranking Fox executive. They also mentioned a text in which he discussed watching a group of men, who he said were Trump supporters, attack “an Antifa kid.” He lamented in the text, “It’s not how white men fight,” and shared a momentary wish that the group would kill the person. He then said he regretted that instinct.Mr. Carlson felt blindsided by the extent of the questions, according to associates and confirmed by a video leaked to the left-leaning group Media Matters: “Ten hours,” he exclaimed to people on the set of his show, referring to how long he was questioned. “It was so unhealthy, the hate I felt for that guy,” he said about the Dominion lawyer who had questioned him.There is no indication that Mr. Carlson’s texts tripped alarms at the top of Fox at that point.The alarms rang in February, when reams of other internal Fox communications became public. The public’s reaction was so negative that some people at the company believed that a jury in Delaware — which was likely to be left-leaning — could award Dominion over a billion dollars. Yet the company made no serious bid to settle.With prominent First Amendment lawyers declaring that Dominion had an exceptionally strong case, a siege mentality appeared to set in.In the interview with Mr. Geraghty, Mr. Clement said Fox was being singled out for its politics. Unlike mainstream media, which tend to report on major events the same way and have power in numbers, he said, “conservative media, or somebody like Fox, is in a much more vulnerable position.” He added, “If they report it, and the underlying allegations aren’t true, they’re much more out there on an island.”Reflecting the view of Mr. Dinh’s supporters even now, Mr. Barr, the former attorney general, said the “mainstream media stupidly cheered on Dominion’s case,” which he said they would come to regret because it would weaken their First Amendment protections. (He made a similar argument in March in The Wall Street Journal.)But Judge Davis had determined that Fox had set itself apart by failing to conduct “good-faith, disinterested reporting” in the segments at issue in the suit. That was in large part why, just ahead of opening statements, he ruled that Fox could not make neutral reportage claims that the conspiracy theory was newsworthy at the trial, knocking out a pillar of Fox’s strategy. (He also ruled that Fox had, indeed, defamed the company in airing the false statements.)Mr. Webb, who had already drafted much of his opening statement and tested it with a focus group, had to remove key parts of his remarks, he said in the post-trial discussion with Mr. Clare.The Directors Step InRupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch acknowledged in a deposition that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald J. Trump.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesAll along, the Fox board had been taking a wait-and-see approach.But the judge’s pretrial decisions began to change the board’s thinking. Also, in those final days before the trial, Fox was hit with new lawsuits. One, from the former Fox producer Abby Grossberg, accused Mr. Carlson of promoting a hostile work environment. Another, filed by a shareholder, accused the Murdochs and several directors of failing to stop the practices that made Fox vulnerable to legal claims.The weekend before trial was to begin, with jury selection already underway, the board asked Fox to see the internal Fox communications that were not yet public but that could still come out in the courtroom.That Sunday, the board learned for the first time of the Carlson text that referred to “how white men fight.” Mr. Dinh did not know about the message until that weekend, according to two people familiar with the matter. Fox’s lawyers believed it would not come out at trial, because it was not relevant to the legal arguments at hand. The board, however, was concerned that Dominion was prepared to use the message to further undermine the company with the jury.In an emergency meeting that Sunday evening, the board — with an eye on future lawsuits, including those from Smartmatic and Ms. Grossberg — decided to hire the law firm Wachtell, Lipton Rosen & Katz to investigate whether any other problematic texts from Mr. Carlson or others existed.Over that same weekend, Lachlan Murdoch told his settlement negotiators to offer Dominion more than the $550 million for which he had already received board approval.In interviews, people with knowledge of the deliberations disagreed about how much Mr. Carlson’s text contributed to the final $787.5 million settlement price.By the time the board learned of the message, the Murdochs had already determined that a trial loss could be far more damaging than they were initially told to expect. A substantial jury award could weigh on the company’s stock for years as the appeals process played out.“The distraction to our company, the distraction to our growth plans — our management — would have been extraordinarily costly, which is why we decided to settle,” Lachlan Murdoch said at an investment conference this month.But there was broad agreement among people with knowledge of the discussions that the Carlson text, and the board’s initiation of an investigation, added to the pressure to avoid trial.The text also helped lead to the Murdochs’ decision a few days later to abruptly pull Mr. Carlson off the air. Their view had hardened that their top-rated star wasn’t worth all the downsides he brought with him.Fox’s trouble has not ended. In the weeks since the settlement and Mr. Carlson’s ouster, prime-time ratings have dropped (though Fox remains No. 1 in cable news), and new plaintiffs sued the network, most recently a former Homeland Security official, Nina Jankowicz.As one of Ms. Jankowicz’s lawyers said in an interview, the Dominion case “signals that there is a path.”Still pending is the Smartmatic suit. In late April, Fox agreed to hand over additional internal documents relating to several executives, including the Murdochs and Mr. Dinh. In a statement reminiscent of Mr. Dinh’s early view of the Dominion case, the network said that the $2.7 billion in damages sought by Smartmatic — operating in only one county in 2020 — were implausible and that Fox was protected by the First Amendment.“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025,” the statement said. More

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      Arizona Judge Tosses Kari Lake’s 2022 Election Lawsuit

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      Lawyers for Ms. Lake, a Trump ally who lost the governor’s race, claimed Maricopa County did not properly review mail-in ballot signatures. A judge said the arguments “do not clear the bar.”An Arizona judge threw out a lawsuit filed by Kari Lake over her defeat in last year’s race for governor, ruling that she had failed to prove that the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, had neglected to review voters’ signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes.The decision, issued late Monday, is the latest legal setback for Ms. Lake, a Republican who was backed by former President Donald J. Trump in one of the nation’s most prominent governors’ races in 2022.During a three-day bench trial last week in state Superior Court in Maricopa County, Ms. Lake’s lawyers argued that election workers worked too quickly to properly review 300,000 signatures that accompanied mail-in ballots.But in a six-page decision, Judge Peter A. Thompson wrote that the process had complied with state law, which requires signatures to be compared to ones in public voter files, but does not include specific guidelines for how much time a worker must spend on each ballot.“Plaintiff’s evidence and arguments do not clear the bar,” he wrote, adding: “Not one second, not three seconds, and not six seconds: No standard appears in the plain text of the statute.”At a news conference on Tuesday in Arizona, Ms. Lake said that she would appeal the ruling and that her lawyers were exploring various pathways forward.“We can’t trust the buffoons running our elections in Maricopa County anymore,” she said, later adding, “You’ve not seen the last of our case.”The case was the latest in a string of court losses over the election for Ms. Lake, who has claimed, without evidence, that mail-in voting compromises election integrity. Other claims in her lawsuit had previously been rejected by the court.Ms. Lake has suggested she may run for office again. This year, she said she was considering a run for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December to become an independent.Clint L. Hickman, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which helps oversee elections in the county, praised the judge’s decision in a statement on Monday.“Wild claims of rigged elections may generate media attention and fund-raising pleas, but they do not win court cases,” he wrote. “When ‘bombshells’ and ‘smoking guns’ are not backed up by facts, they fail in court.” 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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      For Trump, a Verdict That’s Harder to Spin

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      After an indictment in Manhattan, Donald Trump’s supporters fell in line behind him. A jury’s decision in a sexual abuse and defamation case may yet carry a political price.When Alvin L. Bragg secured the indictment of former President Donald J. Trump, it galvanized Trump supporters. Allies of his Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, mark that indictment as the moment that Mr. Trump sped away from his nearest opponent in the polls.Nobody around Mr. Trump is making a prediction publicly or privately that there will be a similar effect after a jury on Tuesday in the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.The price that Mr. Trump was ordered by the jury to pay his accuser, Ms. Carroll, was $5 million, in a verdict he has promised to appeal. But whether he pays any political price at all is unclear. Mr. Trump was said to be furious about the verdict, and questioning the various decisions that were made by his team in the defense. Far from letting up on Ms. Carroll, his team plans to aggressively attack her claims and tether her to Democrats.There is no world in which the result of that civil trial was a positive development for the project he is most focused on: the presidential campaign for which he remains the Republican front-runner.Mr. Trump has a decades-long history of crude and misogynistic comments — and he has faced repeated accusations of sexual harassment and assault, so many that they most likely would have sunk any other candidate. But a majority in the Republican Party have largely dismissed the accusations against a celebrity former president as irrelevant to how they cast votes.But comments and even allegations are different from a jury verdict.The first real test of his in-person response will come on Wednesday night on a national stage in front of a live television audience — a town hall hosted by CNN in New Hampshire, in a venue filled with about 400 voters who are Republicans or Republican-leaning independents.“Americans heard with their own ears in 2016 Trump brag on tape about sexual assault and still elected him,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama, referring to the “Access Hollywood” tape. “Will this be different, or will his supporters simply dismiss it as one more example of the politically motivated ‘deep state’ beat-down of which he claims to be the victim?”A handful of allies of Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Trump’s closest rival in the Republican primary race, anticipated that this case could prove different from myriad other scandals Mr. Trump has faced.Senators John Kennedy of Louisiana and John Thune of South Dakota essentially averted their gazes when asked to comment by reporters. Among those who publicly defended him was Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama defended Mr. Trump on Tuesday after the jury’s verdict.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“It makes me want to vote for him twice,” Mr. Tuberville told The Huffington Post. “People are going to see through the lines,” he added, saying that with “a New York jury, he had no chance.”Few of Mr. Trump’s opponents were willing to condemn him either, at least so far. Only one Republican candidate, Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, issued a statement.“Over the course of my over 25 years of experience in the courtroom, I have seen firsthand how a cavalier and arrogant contempt for the rule of law can backfire,” the statement read. “The jury verdict should be treated with seriousness and is another example of the indefensible behavior of Donald Trump.”Former Vice President Mike Pence told NBC News that it was up to the American public to decide whether Mr. Trump is fit to be president again, but added, “I just don’t think it’s where the American people are focused.”For years, Mr. Trump’s approach to his business and his political life has been to portray himself as inevitable, to give off the impression that challengers or critics shouldn’t even bother trying to best him. He has handled the 2024 Republican primary in much the same manner, encouraged by his polling lead and Mr. DeSantis’s stumbles. Still, some of his critics and even some allies concede that the various legal challenges could risk becoming too much freight for him to carry.Mr. Trump’s advisers have recently conducted extensive polling to explore how deeply the various legal cases are resonating with primary voters, according to people briefed on the efforts.Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were nervously anticipating the verdict before deliberations began. One was candid in private that while they were relieved Mr. Trump had been found not liable of the specific claim of rape, the rest of the jury’s verdict was “not good.”For Mr. Trump and his allies, describing him as the victim of a “deep state” plot by his government opponents and prosecutors could be much harder to accomplish in this case. A federal jury of six men and three women gave legitimacy to an accusation of sexual abuse made by Ms. Carroll, a writer who was photographed with Mr. Trump in New York yet whom he continues to maintain he does not know.One of the most damaging aspects of the trial for Mr. Trump was his videotaped deposition. People close to him acknowledge the comments were a self-inflicted wound, and are aware Democrats in particular may put them in television ads where independent and suburban voters whom Mr. Trump long ago alienated would see them.In his deposition, he burrowed into his remarks on the “Access Hollywood” tape, when asked by Ms. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, if it was true as he said on that recording that stars can grab women by the genitals.“Well, if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true,” Mr. Trump said. “Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately, or fortunately.” More

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      Release of Justice Stevens’s Private Papers Opens Window Into Supreme Court

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      Justice John Paul Stevens’s files on thousands of cases, including landmark decisions on abortion and the 2000 election, have been made public, opening a window on the Supreme Court.WASHINGTON — In June 1992, less than two weeks before the Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy sent a colleague some “late-night musings.”“Roe was, at the least, a very close case,” Justice Kennedy wrote in the three-page memorandum, which included reflections on the power of precedent, the court’s legitimacy and the best way to address a cutting dissent.The document is part of an enormous trove of the private papers of Justice John Paul Stevens released on Tuesday by the Library of Congress. They provide a panoramic inside look at the justices at work on thousands of cases, including Bush v. Gore and the 1992 abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.The papers are studded with candid and occasionally caustic remarks, sometimes echoing current concerns about the court’s power and authority.In the Casey decision, Justice Kennedy joined a controlling opinion with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David H. Souter that saved the core of the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe in 1973.In June, the current Supreme Court overturned Roe and Casey after considering questions about precedent and the court’s legitimacy, coming to the opposite conclusion from Justice Kennedy.There are other echoes of recent events in the papers of Justice Stevens, who served on the court for 35 years, retired in 2010 and died in 2019, at 99.There was, for instance, an apparent leak, one that prompted Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to write a stern note to all of the law clerks on June 10, 1992. The current issue of Newsweek, the chief justice wrote, “contains a purported account of what is happening inside the court in the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.”The article, attributing its information to “sources” and “clerks,” said that “at least three of the nine justices are planning to draft opinions in Casey” and predicted, correctly, that the decision would be released on June 29.Chief Justice Rehnquist admonished the clerks to follow a rule in the court’s code of conduct, which said, “There should be as little communication as possible between the clerk and representatives of the press.” He added, underlining the last three words: “In the case of any matter pending before the court, the least possible communication is none at all.”Researchers will be studying the Stevens papers for decades, and only small glimpses were possible in a day’s scrutiny of a selection of them. But those glimpses made clear that the current turmoil at the court has historical analogues.In 2000, for instance, when the court handed the presidency to George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore by a 5-to-4 vote, members of the majority wrote scathing private memos protesting what they called unduly harsh language in the dissents.Justice Stevens’s dissent ended this way: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”In a memo to his colleagues on Dec. 12, 2000, the day the decision was issued, Justice Kennedy, who had voted with the majority, appeared wounded.“The tone of the dissents is disturbing both on an institutional and personal level,” he wrote. “I have agonized over this and made my best judgment.”He added, “The dissents, permit me to say, in effect try to coerce the majority by trashing the court themselves, thereby making their dire, and I think unjustified, predictions a self-fulfilling prophecy.”Justice Antonin Scalia, who had also voted with the majority, said he was “the last person to complain that dissents should not be thorough and hard hitting.”But he said he could not “help but observe that those of my colleagues who were protesting so vigorously that the court’s judgment today will do irreparable harm have spared no pains — in a veritable blizzard of separate dissents — to assist that result.”At an earlier stage of the case, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who dissented in Bush v. Gore, urged his colleagues to stay away from the dispute, recalling the role that Supreme Court justices had played on a commission created to resolve the contested presidential election of 1876.“Rather than the court lending the process legitimacy, the process damaged the legitimacy of the court,” Justice Breyer wrote. “I doubt very much that our intervention would assure anyone that the process had worked more fairly. Rather, I fear that history could repeat itself, were we to intervene now.”In statements after the Supreme Court’s recent abortion decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has said that attacks on the court’s legitimacy, as opposed to its reasoning, should be out of bounds.In the 1992 memo containing his “late-night musings,” which was addressed to Justice Souter and copied to Justices O’Connor and Stevens, Justice Kennedy also reflected on the court’s legitimacy in the context of abortion.He appeared troubled by aspects of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s dissent, which said public opinion should not affect the court’s work.“You can fend off the chief,” Justice Kennedy told Justice Souter, “by stating that we are not concerned with preserving our legitimacy for our own sake but for the sake of the Constitution. Thus, when we speak of the principled character of our decisions, we mean that they are informed by precedent, logic and the traditions of our people, all with reference to our constitutional heritage.”“We must be clear,” he went on, “that we are not guided by expediency, contemporary attitudes or our own morality.”The newly released files cover the years up to 2005, when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court. They are filled with notes in Justice Stevens’s not always legible scrawl, marked-up briefs, draft opinions, vote tallies, memos among the justices, recommendations from clerks and all manner of other paperwork.Before the new release, the most recent set of Supreme Court papers was from the files of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who served through 1994 and died in 1999.The only current member of the court featured in the new files is Justice Clarence Thomas. The remaining parts of Justice Stevens’s papers are scheduled to be released in 2030.Kitty Bennett More

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      Dominion’s CEO: Why We Settled the Fox News Lawsuit

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      Vindication. Shame. Triumph. Tragedy. Surrender. These are a few of the characterizations I’ve heard following our recent settlement with Fox News in our historic defamation case against the network for its lies about Dominion Voting Systems and the 2020 election.The public has complicated feelings about our decision to end this trial before it ever began, and that’s OK. It’s bittersweet for us, too.We’ve seen the havoc that lies create for societies, democracies, businesses and families. Over the past two and a half years, I’ve watched it firsthand. My customers, employees, family and friends face harassment, discrimination and threats to this day.But for us at Dominion, when we reflect on the case and its outcome, we think about our first and foremost goal: accountability.On Tuesday, when we proudly walked into the Delaware Superior Court, we were going to trial. We knew our case was incredibly strong, and I still believe that at the end of the six-week trial, the jury most likely would have agreed.We had reviewed more than a million internal Fox documents and deposed dozens of people, and Fox’s legal team had reviewed more than a million of ours. Then, in a summary judgment ruling on March 31, the court allowed the case to proceed and dismantled many of Fox’s legal defenses, ruling its claims about Dominion were clearly false and it could not seek refuge in arguments about the lies’ newsworthiness.At trial, we weren’t expecting any more shocking revelations — we frankly didn’t need any more. From the earliest days of discovery, we knew our employees, our customers and the American public needed to see what we had found, and that is exactly what we presented in our pretrial filings and exhibits.With that goal now met, we were focused on our obligations to our people — many of whom were set to testify, when they would recount trauma caused by the threats, violence and hate surfaced by lies about Dominion. I’d already seen some of them suffer emotionally during their depositions, and I worried deeply that a trial and associated media attention would cause only more lasting pain.The settlement we negotiated accomplished two critical goals: allowing our employees and customers to move forward, and hitting Fox where it hurt most — its bank account.What was missing was an apology, so I myself drafted one for it that I thought would be appropriate to include. When I read it to my business partner, he asked what I thought about mandating Fox issue an apology that would be forced, insincere and limited. At that moment, I threw my draft in the garbage.An hour later, when the Fox board approved the wire payment for $787.5 million — one of the largest known defamation settlements in history — Fox acknowledged what we needed it to acknowledge: spreading false claims comes with a huge price tag.Even so, nothing can ever fully compensate for what happened. The stain on my company’s reputation and our employees’ and customers’ emotional scars can only fade. They won’t ever vanish.If we could, we would trade it all in a heartbeat to go back in time to get our reputation back. But I take solace in the fact that the public has seen the enormous mountain of evidence proving what Fox did, and Fox paid dearly for it.Our settlement with Fox is just one win on a long road. We have six more defamation cases pending: against Mike Lindell and his company, MyPillow; Rudy Giuliani; Sidney Powell; Patrick Byrne; One America News Network; and Newsmax. We will not stop until we hold all parties to full account.By the way, it’s never too late for an apology. And if one day it comes of Fox’s own volition, we will know it was real.Mr. Poulos is a co-founder and the chief executive of Dominion Voting Systems.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Did Fox News Just Pay for the Privilege of Continued Corruption?

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      In many legal settlements, both sides declare victory. The settlements themselves are often confidential, or are for amounts so far below the plaintiff’s original demand that a defendant can argue, with a straight face, that he settled essentially to make the case go away. Rather than deal with the risk of a rogue jury, defendants can settle for a reasonable sum and then often, in exchange for the cash, gain the silence of the plaintiff. The public, to the extent it cares, is left to argue over what “victory” truly meant.Not so with Dominion’s settlement against Fox. The moment the amount of the settlement emerged — $787,500,000 — I knew that Dominion had won and Fox had lost, and it wasn’t even close. The reason was clear to anyone who’d followed the case carefully: Damages, not guilt, were the weakest part of Dominion’s case. It had asked for $1.6 billion in damages, based in part on a theory outlined in the complaint that Fox’s “viral disinformation campaign” had “destroyed the enterprise value of a business that was worth potentially more than $1 billion.”To call that claim speculative is an understatement. According to a 2020 report in Forbes, Dominion had been paid $118.3 million for its election services between 2017 and 2019. I’ve litigated lost profit/lost enterprise value cases, and I know how difficult it is to prove estimated future financial fortunes.In other words, it was going to be straightforward to prove that Fox employees lied and deliberately platformed lies. It was going to be much harder to prove the kind of damages that Dominion claimed. Then, in the settlement, Fox paid Dominion a sum larger than Dominion could reasonably presume a jury would require. Why?This brings us to the difference between justice and accountability. The legal system can achieve justice when an aggrieved party is made whole. And make no mistake, Dominion received justice. It was more than made whole for Fox’s lies, and its quest for even more justice continues. Its lawsuits against OAN, Newsmax, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Lindell are still pending.But accountability is different. Accountability occurs when the people responsible for misconduct — and not merely their corporate bank accounts — experience proportionate consequences for their actions. One of the #MeToo movement’s greatest achievements was exposing to the world the degree to which corporations essentially paid for the privilege of continued corruption. They’d write checks to the survivors of abuse (granting them justice) without taking action against the abusers (enabling them to avoid accountability).This is not a critique of the plaintiffs at all. They need justice, and they don’t have the power to impose accountability. They can’t mandate that corporations apologize or terminate employees without the agreement of the corporation. The system itself can generally only give them money. Do we want to ask people who’ve been harmed by misconduct to delay or risk their own quest for justice for the sake of using the settlement process to mandate apologies or terminations that the courts don’t have the power to compel?The end result, however, is a system whereby wealthy institutions can essentially build in their corruption as a cost of doing business. In 2021, for example, my wife and I published a report detailing years of sexual abuse at one of the largest and most prominent Christian summer camps in America, Kanakuk Kamp. The pattern there was clear: pay survivors, get them to sign confidential settlements, and continue on with the same leaders who had abjectly failed to protect the kids in their care.The Fox settlement reeks of justice without accountability. Not only is Fox not publicly apologizing for its misconduct, it has released deceptive descriptions of the settlement and the court’s findings. Its initial statement said in part: “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”That is not what the settlement reflects. The settlement reflects Fox’s abandonment of even the most minimal journalistic standards.Fox’s “news” story about the settlement was perhaps even worse. The headline stated that “Fox News Media, Dominion Voting Systems reach agreement over defamation lawsuit,” but it didn’t state the amount of the settlement and instead mainly focused on the judge’s compliments of Fox’s legal team. No, really:Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, who was overseeing the defamation lawsuit, praised both parties for their handling of the case.“I have been on the bench since 2010. … I think this is the best lawyering I’ve had, ever,” Davis said, adding, “I would be proud to be your judge in the future.”No mention, of course, that less than a week before, the same judge rebuked Fox’s lawyers, said he was concerned about “misrepresentations to the court” and lamented, “What do I do with attorneys that aren’t straightforward with me?” And then the Fox story ends with this howler of a paragraph:Then-President Donald Trump and his allies fiercely challenged Joe Biden’s victory in the weeks following the election. Some of them, including members of his legal team, made false and unsubstantiated claims against Dominion Voting Systems and are the subject of separate defamation lawsuits.Note the deflection of responsibility. It was Trump’s legal team that made “false and unsubstantiated claims.” That’s unquestionably true, but those same lawyers were enthusiastically put on the air by Fox for the purpose of spreading their “false and unsubstantiated claims.” And as the court’s summary judgment ruling made clear, Fox employees also made what they knew to be false and unsubstantiated claims.The end result is that Fox has paid an immense price for its lies, but it recognizes that its true vulnerability isn’t in its bank account but in its audience. It can absorb huge financial losses so long as those losses are fleeting. It cannot prosper if it loses its audience. Shielding its audience from the truth is easily worth almost $800 million to a company that made $1.2 billion in net income last year and is sitting on $4 billion in cash reserves.In the meantime, many of the viewers who keep the company so very profitable won’t know anything meaningful about the Dominion settlement or Fox’s lies — because Fox won’t tell them. I can think of any number of friends, relatives and neighbors who regularly consume conservative media and know nothing about the case. They know nothing about Fox’s falsehoods. Their ignorance is of incalculable worth to Fox.While this newsletter is admittedly rather bleak even in the face of Fox’s decisive court defeat, the story is far from over. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox is pending in New York State court in Manhattan, and the larger right-wing media world is facing a series of reckonings in cases across the country. My friends at Protect Democracy have filed cases against Project Veritas, Gateway Pundit, Rudy Giuliani, Dinesh D’Souza and several additional defendants related to some of the most grotesque lies in the entire Stop the Steal effort.There is a chance that great weight of legal judgments will lead to legal accountability. Justice can be so punishing that even the most amoral institutions have to respond as a matter of self-preservation. But true accountability remains elusive.Indeed, the Dominion lawsuit is perfectly representative of a vital lesson we’ve learned during the Trump era. The law can stave off disaster, but only moral norms truly preserve the republic. The law (and law enforcement) blocked Trump’s attempted coup. Legal processes are underway to hold Trump responsible for his alleged criminal misdeeds. Court cases are likely to compensate multiple victims of defamation for their profound losses. Yet still our public square is overrun with ignorance and outright lies. A Machiavellian spirit stalks the land.But the legal system does give our nation a chance to come to its senses. In the words of the old Fox show “The X-Files,” “The truth is out there.” Not only did Dominion receive justice, but its litigation gave the public the gift of truth. Now it’s incumbent on our nation to receive that truth and react accordingly. Fox News has tried to purchase the privilege of continued corruption, but even its vast bank account can’t protect it from the public — but only if that public possesses a trace of curiosity and preserves a moral core. 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 News Remains an Aberration in American Journalism

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      The decision by Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday to settle its defamation suit against Fox News is no doubt a disappointment to the many people who have been viciously demeaned and insulted by the network’s hosts over the years and who now won’t get to see those hosts writhe on the witness stand as they are forced to admit their lies. But the settlement is also a lost opportunity for the profession of journalism.A six-week trial, especially if it ended in a victory for Dominion, could have demonstrated to the public in painstaking detail what an abject aberration Fox has become among American news organizations. In-person testimony would have illustrated what the pre-trial evidence had begun to show: that Fox hosts and executives knew full well that the conspiracy theories they peddled about the outcome of the 2020 election were false, but they broadcast them anyway to hang on to viewers who didn’t want to hear the truth. A loss by Fox, with a staggering damage award, would have demonstrated that its behavior was so exceptional and outrageous that it had to be punished.People inclined to believe that all news organizations deliberately lie to build their audience may not consider Fox’s actions to be the least bit aberrant. But if that were true, there would be a lot more trials like the one that almost happened in this case. In fact, there have been very few media trials in recent years — usually in the single digits each year, according to one study — compared with the thousands of civil trials each year. Most defamation cases are dismissed before they ever get near a trial, in part because the plaintiff could not come close to proving a news organization met the “actual malice” standard set out in the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case of 1964, but also often because the plaintiff couldn’t even convince the judge that the defamatory material was false. News organizations also win dismissals by persuading judges that the material at issue was a legitimate opinion or was a “fair report” of allegations made at a public meeting or trial.Fox couldn’t persuade a judge of any of those defenses. In fact, the judge in this case, Eric Davis, ruled in March that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true” — a decision that was a huge setback for Fox and may have led to its eagerness to settle the case.Most defamation cases that are not dismissed are settled before trial, and the Dominion case essentially fits that pattern even though a jury had already been selected. But the size of the monetary settlement that Fox must pay, $787.5 million, also makes it a huge outlier. The next-largest publicly disclosed settlement of a defamation case against a major news organization was reached in 2017, when ABC News settled a case for at least $177 million. (Alex Jones, who was ordered last year to pay over $1.4 billion to families of victims in the Sandy Hook shooting, is not part of a legitimate news organization.)Still, nothing would have compared with a full-length trial in this case and a victory for Dominion, which many legal experts said was a strong possibility. That kind of defeat for a major news organization almost never happens, and the reason is that unlike their counterparts at Fox, journalists in conventional newsrooms don’t actually plot to deceive their audiences. They might make mistakes, they might be misled by a source or cast a story in a way they later regret, but with very rare exceptions they don’t deliberately lie.The emails and text messages demonstrating Fox’s knowing deceit, which came out in pre-trial discovery, were shocking both in their cynicism and in their deviation from industry norms. Vociferous press critics on the right and the left will scoff at this notion, but the fact is that journalists in functional newsrooms want to tell the truth. And they do so not because they fear getting sued but because that’s why they got into the business. I’ve worked for more than four decades in six American newsrooms, large and small, and the pattern of behavior shown by Fox would have been unthinkable in any of them at any time.That’s why a loss by Fox would not have raised significant press freedom issues, nor would it have increased the threat that journalists would regularly be sued for defamation. Because of the Sullivan case, news organizations are protected from libel judgments if they do not recklessly disregard the truth or engage in actual malice, which almost all newsrooms scrupulously avoid doing. Fox, however, sped right past those red lights, got caught and then spent an enormous amount of money to avoid the stain of a potential guilty verdict and the spectacle of its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, testifying to its dysfunction. (The company again demonstrated its disdain for the truth by issuing a statement on Tuesday afternoon saying the settlement demonstrated its “commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”) A second chance at clarity is coming with a libel suit against Fox by a different voting-technology company, Smartmatic. Maybe this time the opportunity to perform a public service by conducting a trial will outweigh the temptation of a Fox settlement offer.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More