Voter Fraud (Election Fraud)

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      Covering Dominion’s Defamation Lawsuit Against Fox

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      Katie Robertson, a media reporter for The New York Times, was in court in Wilmington, Del., when Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle for a staggering $787.5 million.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.The first sign that things were amiss came Sunday evening, the day before what was supposed to be the most high-profile media defamation trial in decades was set to begin.I was eating dinner with a few New York Times colleagues at a hotel restaurant close to the courthouse in Wilmington, Del., where Fox News was facing a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems. We, along with journalists from what seemed like every media outlet in the country, and more than a few from overseas, had expected to spend the next six weeks writing articles on the trial.But around 8 p.m., we received an email from the Delaware Superior Court. It said Judge Eric M. Davis had decided to delay the trial’s start by a day, though it offered no reasons for the move.While one of my Times colleagues fielded calls from our editors, the rest of us tried to riddle out the cause of the delay. Was Fox about to settle, or was a commonplace court issue at play? At the restaurant, we spotted a couple of lawyers for Dominion. They were casually drinking by the hotel bar, seemingly unbothered by the turn of events.Fox News was on trial for defaming Dominion by linking its voting technology to a vast conspiracy of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. But the trial was about more than that.Some saw it as a chance for accountability for the lies about a stolen election, pushed by former President Donald J. Trump. The trial touched on questions about a divided country and the role the media plays in those divisions, about echo chambers and the distortion of facts, about how a country operates as a democracy in an age of misinformation.It was also a test of First Amendment protections for the press, placing some libel experts in a curious position: cheering on a case against a media company when they were typically the first to warn of the dangers of such a thing.Media reporters at The Times had covered the lead-up to the trial since the lawsuit was filed in March 2021. Since January, I had pored over hundreds of pages of exhibits and attended numerous pretrial hearings. I’d gone back and forth from Wilmington enough times to warn my colleagues which hotels to avoid.Since the judge would not allow filming or recording inside the court, the Media team at The Times had planned to provide readers with real-time updates of the trial with a daily newsletter and a live blog.We were expecting to see some high-profile witnesses testify, too — including Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old head of the Murdoch media empire that owns Fox News, and a few of the network’s top-rated hosts. A tent had been erected at the back of the courthouse to shield some of the witnesses when they entered and exited. (A source told me the tent had been set up by the Delaware Capitol Police after Fox told the court that some of its witnesses had received threats.)Two days after the judge’s announcement, on Tuesday morning, we watched the jury selection. My colleagues Jeremy Peters and Jim Rutenberg were in the main courtroom, where reporters were allowed to have laptops only for taking notes; they weren’t allowed to use the internet. I watched the proceedings from an overflow room next door, where I was able to connect to the internet and report live updates on the proceedings.After a lunch break, lawyers for Dominion and Fox were ready to give their opening statements. The minutes, though, ticked by — no judge or jury had entered the courtroom. After about two hours of waiting, we saw the lawyers speaking quietly on their cellphones and occasionally ducking into the judge’s chambers for brief, private meetings.Then Judge Davis came out and addressed the court: “The parties have resolved the case.” It was all over before it began.Journalists scrambled to try to catch the lawyers as they were leaving. Fox’s legal team didn’t make any comments, but Dominion’s lead lawyers set up an impromptu news conference in front of the courthouse and told us the details of the settlement.Fox had agreed to pay a staggering $787.5 million and acknowledged the court’s ruling that certain claims it had made about Dominion were false. Defamation cases are almost always settled before they get to trial. That we had gotten this far was a wonder in itself, but the settlement still caught me somewhat by surprise — and upended our carefully laid coverage plans.Still, Dominion’s case provided a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a news empire that I had reported on for years. I started my career in journalism as a reporter for an Australian tabloid newspaper owned by Mr. Murdoch. The way the Murdochs, and especially Rupert, run their hugely influential media operations across the world has long interested me, from my inside view in Perth, Australia, to my current role years later covering the media industry from The Times’s Manhattan headquarters.The Dominion case revealed hundreds of emails, texts and internal messages between Fox hosts and executives that showed they hadn’t believed what they were telling their viewers. Those filings presented a challenge, too. Many pages of depositions and messages were heavily redacted, and The Times, along with NPR and The Associated Press, hired a lawyer to challenge the legality of those redactions. The settlement was also not the end of the story: On Monday, Fox News dropped the bombshell that it was parting ways with Tucker Carlson, its most popular prime time host, a signal that the Murdochs were making changes in the wake of the lawsuit and a move I had not expected.We are still calling, emailing and talking with sources to figure out which shoe will drop next, and when. One of the most difficult aspects of my job as a reporter who covers the news media is sifting through volumes of gossipy chatter (from sources, in my inbox and on social media) to find the truth. But experience on the beat and an understanding of Murdoch Kremlinology go a long way in discerning who is credible and who is not. More

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      What Tucker Carlson’s Dismissal From Fox News Means for the Network

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      The host’s abrupt dismissal upends Fox News’s prime-time lineup — and the carefully honed impression that the ratings star was all but untouchable.In the days after the 2020 election, the Fox host Tucker Carlson sent an anxious text message to one of his producers. Fox viewers were furious about the network’s decision to call Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr.The defeated president, Donald J. Trump, was eagerly stoking their anger. As Mr. Carlson and his producer batted around ideas for a new Carlson podcast — one that might help win back the audience most angry about Mr. Trump’s defeat — they saw both opportunity and peril in the moment.“He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” Mr. Carlson warned, in a text released during Fox’s now-settled litigation with the voting software company Dominion.Mr. Carlson proved prophetic, if not entirely in the way he had predicted. His nearly six-year reign in prime-time cable came to a sudden end on Monday, as Fox abruptly cut ties with the host, thanking him in a terse news release “for his service to the network.”And while the exact circumstances of his departure remained hazy on Monday evening, the dismissal comes amid a series of high-stakes — and already high-priced — legal battles emanating from Fox’s postelection campaign to placate Mr. Trump’s base and win back viewers who believed that his defeat was a sham.Mr. Carlson’s departure upended Fox’s lucrative prime-time lineup and shocked a media world far more accustomed to his remarkable staying power. Over his years at Fox, the host had proved capable of withstanding controversy after controversy.The network stuck by him — as did Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation — after Mr. Carlson claimed that immigration had made America “poor and dirtier.” He seemed to shrug off his on-air popularization of a racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement,” along with revelations that he was a prodigious airer of the company’s own dirty laundry. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mr. Carlson’s show frequently promoted the Kremlin’s point of view, attacking U.S. sanctions and blaming the conflict on American designs for expanding NATO.The drought of premium advertisers on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” — driven away by boycotts targeting his more racist and inflammatory segments — did not seem to dent his standing within the network, so long as the audience stuck around. Disdainful of the cable network’s top executives, Mr. Carlson cultivated the impression that he was close to the Murdoch family and, perhaps, untouchable.Mr. Carlson’s rise as a populist pundit and media figure prefigured Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party: His own conversion from bow-tied libertarian to vengeful populist traced the nativist insurgency that fractured and remade the party during the Obama years. But he prospered in tandem with Mr. Trump’s presidency, as the New York real estate tycoon made frank nativism and seething cultural resentment the primary touchstones of conservative politics.Despite his private disparagement of Mr. Trump — “I hate him,” Mr. Carlson texted a colleague in January 2021 — Mr. Carlson electrified the president’s white, older base with vivid monologues about elite corruption, American decay and a grand plan by “the ruling class” to replace “legacy” Americans with a flood of migrants from other countries and cultures. With deliberate, hypnotic repetition, he warned viewers: “They” want to control and destroy “you.”Crucially, he worked to help Fox woo Trump supporters back to the network in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat.In 2022, Mr. Carlson’s program averaged three million total viewers a night.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesIn broadcast after broadcast, he unspooled a counternarrative claiming falsely that the election had been “seized from the hands of voters” and suggesting that the voting had been rife with fraud and corruption. After Trump supporters — whipped into a frenzy in part by Mr. Trump and Fox — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, he recast the assault as a largely peaceful protest against legitimate wrongdoing, its violence the product of a false-flag operation orchestrated by the F.B.I.As a programming strategy, it worked: Last year, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged more than three million total viewers a night. At his height, and perhaps still, Mr. Carlson counted among the most influential figures on the right.But if Fox and its star host once prospered because of Mr. Trump, their efforts to deny or overturn the election results have also thrust both the network and the former president into legal peril.Mr. Trump faces one investigation by a federal special counsel over his efforts to retain power after losing and another by a local prosecutor in Georgia that began after the defeated president, determined to prevail, asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to overturn the election results there.A lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems speaking to reporters last week. Fox has agreed to pay the voting software company $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesFox agreed last week to pay three-quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation claim brought by Dominion, which had sued Fox for spreading false accusations that the voting software company was at the center of a vast conspiracy to cheat Mr. Trump of victory in 2020.Mr. Carlson and his show featured prominently in the Dominion case. And thousands of pages of internal texts and emails released as part of the suit revealed that the network’s embrace of election-fraud theories — and their promotion by guests and personalities at Fox News and Fox Business — were part of a broader campaign to assuage viewers angry about Mr. Trump’s loss.They also revealed that neither Mr. Carlson nor his fellow hosts truly believed that the election was rigged, despite their on-air commentary. And texts showed that Mr. Carlson held Fox’s titular executives in low regard, slamming them for “destroying our credibility” — for allowing Fox to accurately report Mr. Biden’s win — and belittling them as a “combination of incompetent liberals and top leadership with too much pride to back down.”Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer, is also suing the network.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesThe company is also facing a lawsuit from a former Carlson producer, Abby Grossberg, who said that she faced sexual harassment from other Carlson staff members and was coached by Fox lawyers to downplay the role of news executives in allowing unproven allegations of voting fraud onto the air.Yet another election technology company that featured in Fox’s coverage of supposed election fraud, Smartmatic, is still suing the network. In its complaint, Smartmatic said that Fox knowingly aired more than 100 false statements about its products. A day after the suit was filed in 2021, Fox Business canceled the show hosted by Lou Dobbs, who had been among the foremost spreaders of baseless theories involving election fraud.In the wake of Mr. Carlson’s abrupt dismissal, current and former Fox employees buzzed with speculation about the true reasons for his firing, and what it said about the company plans moving forward.Few seemed to believe that Mr. Carlson was being punished for his lengthy history of inflammatory remarks on-air — if so, why now? — or for his formerly private criticisms of Fox executives. (Some pointed out that his fellow prime-time hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were similarly scathing in their own text messages.)A more interesting question, perhaps, is what Mr. Carlson will do next.Like his clearest intellectual predecessor, the commentator and politician Patrick J. Buchanan, Mr. Carlson is one of the few people to find success as not only a television entertainer, but also an institution-builder — he co-founded the pioneering right-wing tabloid The Daily Caller — and a movement leader. More than any other figure with a mainstream platform, he succeeded in bring far-right ideas about immigration and culture to a broad audience.He is also, now, among the very few television talents to have been canceled by all three major cable news networks. Before Fox, he had a long run as a co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” and later headlined a show at MSNBC. In recent years, he served as both a pillar of Fox News’s prime-time lineup and the biggest-name draw on the company’s paid streaming network, Fox Nation, where he aired a thrice-weekly talk show and occasional documentaries.Within hours of his firing on Monday, at least one putative job offer was forthcoming.“Hey @TuckerCarlson,” tweeted RT, the Russian state-backed media channel. “You can always question more with @RT_com.” More

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      High-Ranking Election Official Is Killed in Myanmar

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      A rebel group has claimed responsibility for the attack on an official for the military junta, which comes amid cascading violence on both sides.A top election official for Myanmar’s military junta has been assassinated by bicycle-riding gunmen from a rebel group, which accused him of being complicit in “oppressing and terrorizing” the public. It is the latest in a series of high-profile killings targeting a military that has escalated attacks on civilians.The official, Sai Kyaw Thu, a retired lieutenant colonel who served as deputy director general of the Union Election Commission, was fatally shot Saturday afternoon after driving his wife, a doctor, to her job at a hospital in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city.A resistance group calling itself “For the Yangon” claimed responsibility for the killing. A spokesman for the group, who gave his name only as Sky for fear of retaliation, said Mr. Sai Kyaw Thu was targeted in part because he testified last year against the country’s ousted civilian leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and the ousted president, U Win Myint, at their trial for election fraud. Both were convicted and sentenced to the maximum three years in prison on that charge.A security camera outside a Yangon pharmacy captured the attack as two men rode up on one bicycle, jumped off in the middle of the street and began firing their handguns at a black sport utility vehicle. The car ran over the bicycle and continued down the road and out of camera range.The two gunmen, who both wore hats and face masks, then returned to the bike. One man picked it up, but it was apparently damaged; putting their guns back into shoulder bags, they fled on foot.The video of the shooting, as well as a photo of the vehicle after it had crashed into a power pole, were posted on a pro-military Telegram channel called Myanmagone, which also provided details of the killing. Mr. Sky, the rebel spokesman, told The New York Times that the video and photo depicted the assassination and its aftermath.The military junta, which seized power in a coup more than two years ago, is facing growing armed resistance in many parts of the country from pro-democracy forces and ethnic rebel groups that have long fought for autonomy.A rebel group in Myanmar this year.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven in urban areas where the military has established control, resistance fighters have carried out several high-profile assassinations, including that of a retired brigadier general outside his Yangon home in September.The military has responded in recent months with an increasing number of atrocities, including the beheading, disembowelment or dismemberment of rebel fighters, as well as attacks on civilians.In March, soldiers massacred 22 civilians, including three monks, at a monastery in Shan State. And in April, a military jet bombed a gathering in Sagaing Region, killing at least 170, including 38 children. It was the single deadliest attack on civilians since the coup on Feb. 1, 2021.In an attempt to legitimize its authority, the junta established the military-led State Administration Council to run the country and announced that it would hold elections this year. No date has been set.“Sai Kyaw Thu is not only a retired military officer, but he is currently a key player in the military council’s illegal election,” said Mr. Sky, the rebel spokesman. “Together with the terrorist military council, he was involved in oppressing and terrorizing the people.”Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, which won landslide victories in the three elections it was allowed to take part in, was dissolved in March by the election commission after the party announced it would not participate in a sham vote and did not register.Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, 77, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, was arrested on the morning of the coup and has been sentenced to a total of 33 years in prison on a wide range of charges, including corruption, inciting public unrest and election fraud. Mr. Win Myint, 71, is serving 12 years on similar charges.Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in 2018. Sai Kyaw Thu, who was killed this weekend, testified last year against her at her trial for election fraud.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBoth leaders have denied the charges. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s defenders have said that the charges against her were manufactured to prevent her from holding public office again. At the time of the 2020 vote, independent election observers said they did not see evidence of fraud.It is unclear what Mr. Sai Kyaw Thu testified at the election fraud trial, since the proceedings were held behind prison walls and closed to the public.A colleague at the election commission who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation said in an interview that he was not surprised Mr. Sai Kyaw Thu had been targeted, given his willingness to testify against the country’s civilian leaders. Because Mr. Sai Kyaw Thu had worked at the election commission since before the coup, the colleague said, he was in a position to testify about the handling of the 2020 elections.The Myanmagone channel said that Mr. Sai Kyaw Thu was shot five times, including in the neck, and the rebel spokesman, Mr. Sky, said that he was alone in the car when he was killed.The junta’s spokesman, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, did not respond to calls from The Times seeking comment.Mr. Sky warned that resistance forces planned to target other top officials associated with the junta.“We have already received a variety of information about people in senior positions in the military council,” he said. “We plan to take care of them as soon as possible. We will not be complacent toward anyone who is oppressing the public, including high-ranking officers.” More

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

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

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      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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      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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      Mike Lindell Loses Arbitration Case and Must Pay $5 Million

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      An arbitration panel ruled that the MyPillow founder had failed to pay a computer software expert who disproved his false election claims as part of a contest.Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and Trump ally who has been a leading voice in pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, must pay $5 million to a software forensics expert who debunked a series of false claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest, an arbitration panel said on Wednesday.Mr. Lindell issued the challenge at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota in 2021, saying he had data that would support his claims that there was Chinese interference in the election and offering the seven-figure prize to anyone who could prove the data had no connection to the 2020 election.Because the software expert Robert Zeidman successfully did so, the panel, composed of three members of the American Arbitration Association, ordered that Mr. Lindell would have to pay up.“Almost everyone there was pro-Trump, and everyone said, ‘This data is nonsense,’” Mr. Zeidman said in an interview on Thursday, identifying himself as a Republican who voted twice for former President Donald J. Trump. “A false narrative about election fraud is just really damaging to this country.”The ruling against Mr. Lindell was earlier reported by The Washington Post.Mr. Zeidman, 63, who is from Las Vegas, filed the arbitration claim against Mr. Lindell in November 2021 after the contest’s organizers rejected his findings. The claim was filed in Minnesota, Mr. Lindell’s home state.The arbitrators ordered him to pay Mr. Zeidman within 30 days.Mr. Lindell, who has spent millions of dollars on partisan reviews of voting data and efforts to bolster election skeptics across the country, vowed in an interview to challenge the panel’s ruling.“This is disgusting,” he said. He questioned Mr. Zeidman’s credentials and mused about how he had been granted admission to the symposium.Mr. Zeidman, who described himself as a “well-known” pioneer in the field of software forensics, said that he used his connections in the Trump world to obtain an invitation to Mr. Lindell’s symposium. “Friends of mine said, ‘You should go because you might win $5 million,’” he said.When conference organizers gave Mr. Zeidman and other attendees data to dissect, he said that he expected it might take weeks to analyze. But once he started going through the files, he said he quickly concluded that the data was bogus. He presented his findings to Mr. Lindell’s representatives in a 15-page report.The $5 million claim against Mr. Lindell is a pittance compared with a pending $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit that the election equipment company Dominion Voting Systems filed against him in 2021 over his assertions that its machines were part of a plot to steal the election. This week, the company reached a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News as part of a similar defamation lawsuit.Brian Glasser, a lawyer for Mr. Zeidman, cast doubt on whether Mr. Lindell would be able to successfully challenge the arbitration decision in court, saying the bar was particularly high. Mr. Lindell would have to prove “manifest injustice,” a legal term for an unduly harsh outcome, he said.Mr. Glasser also noted that the contest rules set by Mr. Lindell prescribed binding arbitration in the event of a dispute.Still, Mr. Lindell insisted: “It’s going to end up in court.”Mr. Zeidman said he planned to give some of the money to nonprofit groups, use part for a start-up business and spend some supporting a voter integrity project. He does believe there was voter fraud in 2020. “The question is how much and was it actually enough to swing the election? I can’t say that,” Mr. Zeidman said.He has joined the bipartisan political organization No Labels, he said, and won’t be supporting Mr. Trump for president in 2024.“I’d rather see a presidential candidate who is not an extremist,” he said. More

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      What Next for Dominion After Its $787.5 Million Fox Settlement

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