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

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      Some of the unflattering private messages among the network’s hosts and executives may never become evidence when Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News goes to trial.For the past three weeks, a drip, drip, drip of disclosures have exposed widespread alarm and disbelief inside Fox News in the days after the 2020 presidential election, as the network became a platform for some of the most insidious lies about widespread voter fraud. These revelations are the most damning to rattle the Murdoch media empire since the phone hacking scandal in Britain more than a decade ago.The headlines have been attention-grabbing. Tucker Carlson, a professed champion of former President Donald J. Trump’s populist message, was caught insulting Mr. Trump — “I hate him passionately,” he wrote in a text. Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity disparaged colleagues in their network’s news division. And Rupert Murdoch said he longed for the day when Mr. Trump would be irrelevant.These examples and many more — revealed in personal emails, text messages and testimony made public as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News — are embarrassing. But whether they pose serious legal jeopardy for Fox in that case is far less clear.The messages that led to some of the biggest headlines may never be introduced as evidence when the case goes to trial next month, according to lawyers and legal scholars, including several who are directly involved in the case. Fox is expected to ask a judge to exclude certain texts and emails on the grounds they are not relevant.Laura Ingraham disparaged Fox News colleagues in private messages released recently.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesBut the most powerful legal defense Fox has is the First Amendment, which allows news organizations broad leeway to cover topics and statements made by elected officials. In court, Fox’s lawyers have argued that the network was merely reporting on what Mr. Trump and his allies were saying about fraud and Dominion machines — not endorsing those falsehoods.Media law experts said that if a jury found that to be true — not a far-fetched outcome, they said, especially if lawyers for the network can show that its hosts did not present the allegations as fact — then Fox could win.Fox News v. Dominion Voter SystemsDocuments from a lawsuit filed by the voting machine maker Dominion against Fox News have shed light on the debate inside the network over false claims related to the 2020 election.Running Fox: Emails that lawyers for Dominion have used to build their defamation case give a peek into how Rupert Murdoch shapes coverage at his news organizations.Behind the Curtain: Texts and emails released as part of the lawsuit show how Fox employees privately mocked election fraud claims made by former President Donald J. Trump, even as the network amplified them to appease viewers.Tucker Carlson’s Private Contempt: The Fox host’s private comments, revealed in court documents, contrast sharply with his support of Mr. Trump on his show.A Show of Support: In his first public remarks since the recent revelations on Fox News, Mr. Murdoch’s son Lachlan, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, issued a full-throated show of support for Suzanne Scott, who is at the helm of Fox News Media.“I think the case really will come down to a jury deciding whether the company or the commentators did or didn’t endorse — that really is the key question,” said George Freeman, a former New York Times lawyer who is now executive director of the Media Law Resource Center, which assists news organizations with legal issues.“It gives Fox, I think, a fighting chance,” he added.Despite the ways Fox could prevail with a jury, legal scholars say Dominion’s case is exceptionally strong.Lawyers for Dominion argue that the claims made by Fox’s hosts and guests about its machines and their supposed role in a nonexistent conspiracy to steal votes from Mr. Trump was anything but dispassionate, neutral reporting.“Truth and shared facts form the foundation of a free society — even more so here,” its lawyers said in a brief, filed with the court on Thursday. “The false idea that Dominion rigged the 2020 presidential election undermines the core of democracy.”It is rare for First Amendment lawyers to side against a media company. But many of them have done just that, arguing that a finding against Fox will send an important message: The law does not protect those who peddle disinformation. And it would help dispel the idea, First Amendment experts said, that libel laws should be rewritten to make it easier to win defamation suits, as Mr. Trump and other conservatives, including Justice Clarence Thomas, have suggested.In its most recent filings, Dominion argued that the law was more than adequate to find Fox liable.“If this case does not qualify as defamation, then defamation has lost all meaning,” Dominion argued in a legal filing made public on Thursday.But legal experts said that the case would rise or fall not based on how a jury considered lofty concerns about the health of American democracy. Rather, they said, Dominion’s challenge will be to persuasively argue something far more specific: that Fox News either knowingly broadcast false information or was so reckless that it overlooked obvious evidence pointing to the falsity of the conspiracy theories about Dominion.Though the coverage of the case has largely focused on the disparaging comments the network’s star hosts and top executives made in private — about Mr. Trump, his lawyers and one another — those remarks could only help Dominion’s case if they pointed to a deeper rot inside Fox, namely that it cynically elevated false stories about Dominion machines because its ratings were suffering.The one episode of Mr. Carlson’s show that Dominion cited as defamatory included an interview with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive.Fox News“When I see the headlines that are primarily about Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, those are conversations that the litigation was designed to spur,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a First Amendment scholar and law professor at the University of Utah.“At least some of that evidence is going to be important atmospherically,” Ms. Andersen Jones added. But what will be more important to the outcome of the case, she said, is “what drove the narrower decisions at the individual shows.”Fox’s lawyers could ask the judge, for instance, to keep the jury from seeing most of Mr. Murdoch’s deposition on the grounds that he was the chairman of the company and played no direct role in decision-making at the show level. However, during his deposition, Mr. Murdoch did concede a key point of Dominion’s. He acknowledged that some Fox hosts had endorsed false claims of malfeasance during the election. And when Dominion’s lawyer, Justin Nelson, presented Mr. Murdoch with examples of how Fox went beyond merely providing a platform for election deniers, the Fox chairman agreed. “I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that,” Mr. Murdoch testified.Fox also plans to argue that the network’s coverage of the aftermath of the 2020 election needs to be considered as a whole, including the hosts and guests who insisted that there was no evidence of widespread fraud.And the more Fox lawyers can show instances in the coverage where its hosts rebutted or framed the allegations as unproven, the stronger their case will be.A lawyer working on Fox’s defense, Erin Murphy, said Dominion did not “want to talk about the shows where there was a lot of commentary coming from different perspectives.”Especially when those shows were ones “that had higher viewership and were the more mainstream,” Ms. Murphy added.Dominion would be on the strongest legal footing, defamation experts said, whenever it could point to specific examples when individual Fox employees responsible for a program had admitted the fraud claims were bogus or overlooked evidence that those claims — and the people making them — were unreliable.Dominion cites only a single episode each from Mr. Carlson and Mr. Hannity as defamatory: Mr. Carlson’s interview of Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive, on Jan. 26, 2021, and Mr. Hannity’s interview of Sidney Powell, a lawyer who made some of the most outrageous fraud allegations, on Nov. 30, 2020.Dominion’s defamation claims against three far more obscure shows with much lower ratings are more substantial and extensively documented: “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo” and the now-canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” both of which ran on Fox Business in 2020; and “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” which was Jeanine Pirro’s Saturday evening talk show on Fox News before the network canceled it and promoted Ms. Pirro to a regular slot on “The Five,” a weekday round-table talk show.Some of the most damning evidence to emerge involves Maria Bartiromo, legal experts say.Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesEspecially damaging, legal experts said, is the evidence against Ms. Bartiromo. Dominion has accused her of recklessly disregarding evidence that a key source for Ms. Powell, who appeared several times on Ms. Bartiromo’s show, was mentally unstable — a “wackadoodle” by the source’s own admission.In an email, the full text of which was released last Tuesday along with thousands of pages of depositions and private messages of Fox employees, is from someone who claims to be a technology analyst named Marlene Bourne. Ms. Powell forwarded Ms. Bourne’s email to Ms. Bartiromo on the evening of Nov. 7, and Ms. Bartiromo forwarded it to her producer.In the email, Ms. Bourne describes numerous conspirators in a plot to discredit Mr. Trump, including some who had been dead for years like Roger Ailes, the former chief executive of Fox News. She writes that she is capable of “time-travel in a semiconscious state” and that when she is awake she can “see what others don’t see, and hear what others don’t hear.” She also says she has been decapitated and that “it appears that I was shot in the back” once after giving the F.B.I. a tip.“If we’re really zeroing in on where the strongest evidence is,” Ms. Andersen Jones said, “it’s the wackadoodle email. Because the real question is whether you had subjective awareness of the likely falsity of the thing you were platforming on your show.” More

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      The Week in Business: Fox News Anchors’ Private Messages

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

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

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

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      Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump

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      Fox hosts and executives privately mocked the former president’s election fraud claims, even as the network amplified them in a frantic effort to appease viewers.“Do we have enough dead people for tonight?”It was a week after the 2020 elections, and Tucker Carlson — along with Fox News executives and other hosts — had watched with panic as Fox viewers, furious and disbelieving at President Donald J. Trump’s defeat, began to turn against the top-rated network. The viewers believed Mr. Trump’s claims that a widespread conspiracy of voter fraud was behind his loss. And as Mr. Carlson’s nightly 8 p.m. hour approached, the host pushed his producers to give the viewers what they wanted.He demanded examples of dead people voting in Nevada or Georgia, even offering to call the Trump campaign personally to ask for help. That night, he trumpeted the evidence, borrowed from a Trump campaign news release: Four allegedly dead Georgians had cast ballots. Within days, though, the campaign’s spoon-fed examples began to fall apart. Three of the dead Georgians were actually alive. And Mr. Carlson was forced to partly retract his allegations, while insisting to viewers that “a whole bunch of dead people did vote.”Mr. Carlson told his viewers on Nov. 11, 2020, that dead people had cast ballots.Mr. Carlson’s frantic effort to appease angry Fox viewers, revealed in texts and emails released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, underscore the central quandary faced both by Fox and the Republican Party in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat and still today, as the former president mounts another campaign for the White House.Like the Republican Party more broadly, Fox wants and needs the support of Trump fans, who both dominate party primaries and form the core of Fox’s viewership. And like the party, Fox has found it difficult to quit Mr. Trump even as his manic efforts to relitigate his defeat have hobbled the party in subsequent elections.Fox News has been the most trusted and watched source of information for conservative America for decades, and its frequent symbiosis with the Republican Party is well established. But the internal documents released in recent days have provided an unprecedented glimpse into network decision-making as its dual imperatives — to keep its base audience of conservatives satisfied and meet its promise to maintain journalistic standards of fairness and factuality — came into conflict as never before.No figure is more central to that conflict than Mr. Carlson. Ever since taking over Fox’s 8 p.m. hour in 2017, Mr. Carlson had maintained a carefully calibrated distance from Mr. Trump, using inflammatory segments about a border invasion and the “replacement” of native-born Americans by immigrants to appeal to Mr. Trump’s base — while minimizing how often he discussed Mr. Trump, whom he regarded as erratic and undisciplined. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Mr. Carlson texted with staff members in early January 2021, adding, “I hate him passionately.”But in the months after the Jan. 6 attacks, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” doubled down on a pro-Trump narrative that both Mr. Carlson and his bosses knew was rooted in a lie. According to a New York Times analysis, in 2021 nearly half of Mr. Carlson’s shows — more than 100 episodes — featured segments downplaying the Capitol riot, casting the insurrectionists as innocent citizens seeking legitimate redress for election fraud, and suggesting the riot itself was a “false flag” operation orchestrated by federal law enforcement to entrap Trump supporters.His efforts to rewrite the events of Jan. 6 again took center stage this week, just as reams of emails, texts and deposition transcripts from the Dominion suit revealed that the network’s hosts and executives knew they were peddling lies to their own viewers.On his show this week, Mr. Carlson once more recast the violent attack that took place in January 2021 as a largely peaceful protest, this time using previously unreleased surveillance footage provided to his show by the new Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Mr. McCarthy, whose campaign for the speakership was backed by Mr. Trump, provided the footage after Mr. Carlson suggested on his show that releasing the tapes would help Mr. McCarthy overcome conservative resistance to his bid.On Mr. Carlson’s show on Monday, he described the Jan. 6 riot as a largely peaceful protest.On air, Mr. Carlson accused a Democratic-led congressional committee of misleading the public about what really happened. “Committee members lied about what they saw, and then hid the evidence from the public,” Mr. Carlson charged.News outlets and fact checkers found the broadcast rife with inaccuracies and false claims. Republicans in the House, among whom loyalty to Mr. Trump remains strong, defended Mr. Carlson’s segment. But Republicans in the Senate — currently controlled by Democrats, after Trump-backed candidates went down to defeat in the 2022 elections — attacked the powerful Fox host in unusually blunt terms.“It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks,” said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader.In the pretrial public relations maneuvering, Fox News has accused Dominion of using its court filings to share selective and out-of-context portions of internal text messages to “smear Fox News,” part of a broader effort to “silence the press” through a winning verdict. In a statement, a network spokeswoman said, “Fox News will continue to fiercely protect the free press as a ruling in favor of Dominion would have grave consequences for journalism across this country.” In defending Mr. Carlson’s coverage of Mr. Trump’s voter fraud claims, Fox executives have also pointed to Mr. Carlson’s on-air criticism of a lawyer behind some of the most outrageous voter fraud charges, Sidney Powell.Documents released in the Dominion lawsuit illustrate in vivid detail Fox’s complex relationship with the Republican Party, with the network serving variously as custodian, enforcer and powerful interest group in its own right.Senator Mitch McConnell pushed back against Mr. Carlson’s characterization of the Capitol attack.J. Scott Applewhite/Associated PressDuring the election, Dominion has alleged, Fox’s chief, Rupert Murdoch, personally gave Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, a preview of at least one Biden campaign ad. After the election, Mr. Murdoch called Mr. McConnell and asked him to lobby other Republican senators to avoid endorsing Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. At moments, Mr. Murdoch and a top editor at the Murdoch-owned New York Post discussed editorials intended to encourage Mr. Trump to accept his defeat gracefully, seemingly in hopes of avoiding further damage to the party.In mid-November 2020, Mr. Murdoch emailed Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, explaining the need for Fox to reorient away from Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theories and focus on the Georgia special senate elections, with Fox “helping any way we can.”Top Fox personnel agonized over the difficulty of escaping Mr. Trump’s influence over their own audience. “This day of reckoning was going to come at some point — where the embrace of Trump became an albatross we can’t shake right away if ever,” Dana Perino, a prominent Fox host, wrote to a friend in November 2020.Yet the shoals they were trying to navigate had been in no small part laid by Mr. Carlson, one of Fox’s most-watched hosts. Though the newly released messages show Mr. Carlson expressing skepticism in his private emails about the extent of “voter fraud,” he had been an early and energetic promoter of the doubt Mr. Trump was trying to sow.Within 24 hours of the polls closing, he declared that the election had been “seized from the hands of voters,” and that the final results would finally be determined by “lawyers and courts and clearly corrupt, big-city bureaucrats.” Americans “will never again accept the results of a presidential election,” he predicted.After the major networks declared Mr. Biden president-elect, Mr. Carlson reminded his viewers that troubling questions remained: “We don’t know how many votes were stolen on Tuesday night; we don’t know anything about the software that many say was rigged,” he said. His audience members, he said, were being played for suckers: “They knew you were coming. They laughed at you when you left.”But behind the scenes, Mr. Carlson and his producers were among those scoffing.In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, they discussed their intense hopes that Mr. Trump would soon leave the political scene. They mocked his plans to block the certification of Mr. Biden’s win and raged at how Mr. Trump’s lawyers had undermined their own arguments about fraud with sweeping conspiracy theories and debunked allegations.Two weeks after the election, Mr. Carlson, his executive producer and a top Fox executive named Ron Mitchell traded texts about a news conference at which one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, unspooled a litany of debunked allegations while hair dye dripped down his face. “I don’t see how to cover this,” Mr. Mitchell wrote. (That night, Mr. Carlson devoted his opening monologue to the news conference, carefully asserting that Mr. Giuliani “did raise legitimate questions and in some cases, he pointed to what appeared to be real wrongdoing.”)Mr. Carlson has claimed to “never look at the ratings” for his show. But Dominion texts show Mr. Carlson, his bosses and his fellow hosts obsessing over them. Within weeks of the election, it became clear to them that Fox viewers badly wanted them to focus on supposed evidence of voter fraud.“Tucker wrote me and Laura and said last nights numbers were a disaster,” Sean Hannity wrote to Fox producers in late November 2020, referring to Mr. Carlson and Laura Ingraham. (His executive producer, Robert Samuel, noted that the previous week’s most highly rated programming minutes “were on the voting irregularities.”) Mr. Carlson had also texted the two other hosts about ratings earlier that month, joking that an angry Fox viewer who had ranted against the network on Twitter would get “way better numbers than what we have” and warning Mr. Hannity that “the 7:00 was third last night,” referring to the time slot immediately preceding his own.As Mr. Carlson’s broadcast was coming to an end on Nov. 10, a Fox staff member warned the host that he was being attacked on Twitter for not covering allegations of voter fraud. “It’s all our viewers care about right now,” the staff member wrote. Mr. Carlson replied that it had been a “mistake” but that “I just hate” the topic.That night and the next morning, Mr. Carlson and the unnamed colleague brainstormed how to get into the story, trading links and tweets, eventually seizing on a local news report in Nevada suggesting a woman who had died in 2017 had voted there in November. (An investigation later determined that the woman’s husband, a Republican, had used her ballot to vote twice, then claimed her ballot had been stolen.) They debated whether they could “get up to five examples of specific names of dead people that voted,” and reached out to Jason Miller, a Trump campaign official, asking for evidence that they could then present on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”“Obviously they need to do whatever they can to help us,” Mr. Carlson told his Fox colleague.On the afternoon of Nov. 11, as the next evening’s broadcast approached, the staff member texted Mr. Carlson again.“Have you seen last night’s numbers?” the staff member wrote, adding, “It’s a stupid story but this is all the viewers are into right now.”Mr. Carlson replied: “I noticed.”Julie Tate More

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      Arizona Sues After County Puts an Election Skeptic in Charge of Voting

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      Cochise County, a hotbed of conspiracy theories, transferred election duties from a nonpartisan office to the county’s elected recorder, a Republican.An Arizona county is being sued by the state’s Democratic attorney general after it transferred voting oversight to the county’s Republican recorder, who has cast doubts about past election results in a place where former President Donald J. Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2020.It is the latest clash between Democrats in statewide office and Cochise County, a deeply Republican area in southeastern Arizona, where conspiracy theories about voter fraud and irregularities still swirl.The county’s nonpartisan elections director, Lisa Marra, announced in January that she would resign, citing threats against her after she refused to comply with rogue election directives from the Republicans who control county government, including plans to count ballots by hand after last year’s midterm elections. She recently accepted a position with the secretary of state’s office.The county’s board of supervisors then made David W. Stevens, the Republican recorder, the interim elections director, with the board’s two G.O.P. members supporting the new power structure in a Feb. 28 vote, and its lone Democrat opposing it.On Tuesday, Kris Mayes, who was narrowly elected as Arizona’s attorney general in November and took office in January, filed a lawsuit against the county and called the power shift an “unqualified handover.”Understand the 4 Criminal Inquiries Into Donald TrumpCard 1 of 5Intensifying investigations. More

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

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

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      Conservative Media Pay Little Attention to Revelations About Fox News

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

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      Fox Leaders Wanted to Break From Trump but Struggled to Make It Happen

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      Executives and top hosts found themselves in a bind after Donald Trump began pushing unfounded claims about election fraud, court filings show.Five days after a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, a board member of the Fox Corporation, Anne Dias, reached out to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch with an urgent plea.“Considering how important Fox News has been as a megaphone for Donald Trump,” she said, it was time “to take a stance.” Ms. Dias, who sounded shaken by the riot, said she thought Fox News and the nation faced “an existential moment.”As quickly as the two Murdochs began discussing how to respond, their bind became evident.“Just tell her we have been talking internally and intensely,” Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls the company, wrote in an email. Fox News, he told his son, “is pivoting as fast as possible.” But he sounded a note of caution: “We have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem.”Ever since Donald J. Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News Channel have struggled with how to handle the man and the movement they helped create.“Navigating” the delicate balance between truth and “crazy” was how Mr. Murdoch described his challenge in emails made public this week as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which is expected to go to trial in April.For the most part, Mr. Murdoch has been wildly successful at striking the balance. Fox converted Mr. Trump’s mass following into loyal viewers who deliver Mr. Murdoch and his shareholders huge profits.A 2018 headline about President Donald J. Trump that was displayed outside Fox News studios in New York.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressBut the emails among the Murdochs and the senior leadership of their companies, along with depositions of both men as part of the case, revealed just how Fox and its leaders strained to push back against Mr. Trump when he began spreading unfounded claims about widespread election fraud.The leadership of Fox and its star hosts are often viewed from the outside as power brokers in Republican politics — with much justification. But in the wake of the election, they appeared fearful of alienating Mr. Trump’s supporters, almost to the point of powerlessness, court filings containing internal communications and depositions show.Privately, the executives and hosts expressed despair and disgust at the Trump associates who were using Fox News’s platforms to spread bogus allegations of voter fraud. Yet the wishes of the audience — or how the network’s executives interpreted them — dictated which guests were booked, what kind of new programming was created, what correspondents could say on the air and even which people lost their jobs, according to the details in a 212-page brief that Dominion filed in a Delaware state court this week.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Fox News has expressed confidence that Dominion’s claims will fall apart once their full context becomes apparent at the trial. “Dominion blatantly misconstrued the facts by cherry-picking sound bites, omitting key context and mischaracterizing the record,” a Fox News spokeswoman said.As it became evident that some of Fox’s audience was turning against it after it projected President Biden’s victory, and viewers started switching to hard-right alternatives like Newsmax, people inside the network scrambled to stanch the bleeding.Even as executives raised concerns about Mr. Trump to one another, they came down hard on those seen as too tough on him.Eleven days after the election, for instance, Lachlan Murdoch became irritated watching the Fox News correspondent Leland Vittert’s reporting on a pro-Trump rally in Washington, considering it too critical. Mr. Murdoch called Mr. Vittert’s coverage “smug and obnoxious” in a message to Suzanne Scott, chief executive of Fox News Media. Ms. Scott responded that she was “calling now,” to direct someone to relay the message to the correspondent and his producer.As word of Mr. Murdoch’s complaint made its way down the food chain, the executive in charge of Fox’s weekend programming, David Clark, also weighed in, telling a colleague in an email that he had texted Mr. Vittert “and told him to cut it out.”To Lachlan Murdoch, there seemed to be no detail too small to complain about if he believed it was hurting the bond that Fox News had forged with its audience over the years. He also complained to Ms. Scott at one point about what he saw as the negative tone toward Mr. Trump in the chyron — the block of text that appears at the bottom of the screen. It was too wordy, he said, and too negative about the president.Lachlan Murdoch complained that a Fox News reporter’s coverage of a pro-Trump rally was “smug and obnoxious.”Mike Cohen for The New York TimesRupert Murdoch offered Ms. Scott suggestions on booking guests who were known to Trump supporters as loyal defenders. One person he proposed in late November 2020 was the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to federal investigators about his contacts with a Russian ambassador. A week after Mr. Murdoch sent his note, Dominion’s filing says, Mr. Flynn appeared on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business program.The elder Mr. Murdoch also told Ms. Scott to get rid of a senior Fox News manager, Bill Sammon, telling her that it would go a long way with the former president’s core supporters. “Maybe best to let Bill go right away,” he told Ms. Scott on Nov. 20. Mr. Sammon ran the network’s Washington bureau and oversaw the unit that was responsible for Fox’s early — and correct — decision to project that Mr. Biden would win Arizona. That call had infuriated Mr. Trump and his supporters.Mr. Murdoch explained to Ms. Scott that the firing would “be a big message with Trump people.” According to the Dominion brief, Mr. Sammon was told that he was being let go that same day.As Fox executives stamped out skepticism of Mr. Trump in the network’s coverage, they also grew disillusioned with the increasing amount of “crazy” on their airwaves, as Rupert Murdoch described the Trump legal adviser Sidney Powell in an email to a friend, according to the legal filings. By early December 2020, as Mr. Trump’s claims of being cheated grew more far-fetched, Mr. Murdoch acknowledged how difficult it had become to continue delivering coverage that didn’t insult loyal, pro-Trump viewers without stating the obvious: The president was lying to them about his loss.In one message to Ms. Scott, Mr. Murdoch lamented Mr. Trump’s performance at a rally in Georgia where he called for Gov. Brian Kemp to help overturn the election, as well as other recent comments from the president. “All making it harder to straddle the issue! We should talk through this,” he wrote.After Jan. 6, 2021, as hopes among many conservatives skeptical of Mr. Trump swelled that the Republican Party might finally be done with him, some of his biggest stalwarts inside Fox News seemed to be backing away from him — even the host Sean Hannity, one of Mr. Trump’s most dedicated on-air supporters, according to Mr. Murdoch’s emails.“Wake-up call for Hannity,” Mr. Murdoch wrote in an email on Jan. 12, 2021, to Paul D. Ryan, the former Republican speaker of the House and a Fox Corporation board member. Mr. Murdoch explained that the host had been “privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.”For a time, at least. It did not take long for Mr. Hannity and other prime-time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, to begin talking about the attack and its aftermath as Mr. Trump and his supporters preferred.In the opening monologue of one of his shows in June 2022, with a congressional investigation into the assault in full swing, Mr. Hannity told his audience, “January 6 is just another excuse to smear Donald Trump and anyone who supports them.” More