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      What Protects Fox News In the Dominion Trial Also Protects Our Democracy

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      Fox News, which is defending itself from Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion lawsuit, is going to trial on Monday in a hole. In an unusual move, the judge has already ruled that on-air statements — those asserting that Dominion’s voting machines played a role in causing Donald Trump to lose the 2020 election — were false. The main task left for the jury is to decide whether Fox made those false statements with what’s known as actual malice.It’s remarkable that Dominion’s suit has gotten this far and may even ultimately prevail, thanks in part to a raft of incredibly damaging Fox emails, text messages and other evidence that show deep internal misgivings about on-air claims about the 2020 election. But proving actual malice is difficult: Dominion must show that Fox News either knew that its reporting was false or entertained serious doubts about the truth of the reporting. This high bar, set by the Supreme Court in 1964, often is insurmountable for plaintiffs.Given the evidence against Fox that already has been made public, it might seem unfair that Dominion continues to face such an uphill battle in this case. But it is a very good thing for our democracy that it is so difficult to prove actual malice.A movement to erode this legal protection has gained steam in recent years, but the main push has not come from Fox critics. Rather, conservatives have characterized the protections as unfairly enabling liberal news outlets to lie. Commentators, politicians, judges and two Supreme Court justices have urged the court to reconsider these protections.The Dominion case demonstrates why this politicization is the wrong course. Overturning nearly six decades of vital First Amendment precedent would not benefit conservatives, liberals or anyone other than those who seek to stifle reporting and criticism with the threat of litigation.Sixty-three years ago, this newspaper ran a full-page advertisement from a civil rights committee that accused Southern officials of mistreating Martin Luther King Jr. and other peaceful protesters. Some statements were untrue. For instance, although the city of Montgomery, Ala., had deployed the police near a local college, the officers did not “ring” the campus, as the ad alleged. L.B. Sullivan, a Montgomery city commissioner who supervised the police, sued The New York Times for defamation, and the all-white jury found against The Times and four Black ministers whose names were on the advertisement and awarded Sullivan $500,000.The Supreme Court in 1964 unanimously overturned that ruling, reasoning that public officials must establish actual malice before recovering defamation damages. Justice William Brennan touted the “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” The court later expanded this requirement to public-figure defamation plaintiffs.The merits of New York Times v. Sullivan have long been the subject of academic debate, but its survival was not seriously questioned until 2019, when Justice Clarence Thomas called on the court to revisit the decision. He deemed Sullivan and its progeny “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.” Two years later, Justice Neil Gorsuch joined Justice Thomas, arguing that the actual malice rule might enable the spread of falsehoods online and on cable news.As the Supreme Court showed last year when it overturned Roe v. Wade, no precedent is entirely safe from reversal, so any supporters of Sullivan should be quite concerned by two justices calling to revisit the case.Sullivan is increasingly under attack. This month, for instance, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida took a swipe at the actual malice standard when applying it to rule in favor of CNN in a defamation lawsuit that the lawyer Alan Dershowitz brought against the network. “Policy-based decisions” such as the actual malice rule are best left to elected legislatures, “not to an unelected judge who may be king or queen for a day (or a lifetime),” Judge Raag Singhal wrote. Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit cited the media’s “bias against the Republican Party” in his 2021 call to overturn Sullivan. And at a February round table about the news media, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said the precedent enables the media to “smear” politicians.The actual malice rule protects speakers regardless of politics. It protects CNN and The New York Times. It protects Fox News and Newsmax. The rule gives them the flexibility to investigate, report on and criticize the most powerful people and companies without fearing ruinous liability because of an accidental error. It also protects individual speakers on social media.The precedent does not provide media outlets and other speakers with a blank check to knowingly lie. Actual malice is a high bar, but it is not insurmountable. Dominion has already produced emails and other evidence that Fox employees and executives privately entertained serious doubts about many claims about the election. The jury could well conclude that Fox knew of the statements’ falsity or were sufficiently aware of their probable falsity. But Sullivan gives Fox the opportunity to present this defense rather than automatically becoming liable for every error.Judges who argue that the actual malice rule may not be rooted in the First Amendment gloss over the threat to speech posed by using the power of the government — court judgments — to punish speech.Attacks on Sullivan are attacks on the building blocks of democracy, and they should concern everyone who cares about free speech, regardless of political affiliation. We have seen how the powerful have weaponized weaker defamation laws in other countries. In a December report, UNESCO noted that there has been a global increase in civil defamation lawsuits that often aim “to target journalists who publish content that makes public officials or powerful economic actors uncomfortable.” A 2020 report from the Foreign Policy Center observed that since a right-wing populist party rose to power in Poland in 2015, a Polish daily newspaper had received more than 55 legal threats from “powerful state actors,” state-owned companies and people tied to the ruling party.Fearing such an outcome, Matthew Schafer, a First Amendment lawyer (who represented The Times a number of years ago), and I came up with a backup plan: In a recent law review article, we proposed a federal statute that would codify the actual malice rule and other vital free speech and press protections. While courts and state legislatures would be free to impose even stronger protections, our proposal would prevent a sudden erosion of free speech because of a single Supreme Court opinion.Hopefully, such a plan will be unnecessary and judges will come to again recognize the enduring value of Sullivan. The Dominion trial is an opportunity for the nation to witness how this “profound national commitment” protects all speakers. And it will be in the best interests of conservatives to fight to protect Sullivan rather than to tear it down.Jeff Kosseff is a senior legal fellow at The Future of Free Speech Project and the author of the forthcoming book “Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation.”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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      Judge Limits Fox’s Options for Defense in Dominion Trial

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      A Delaware judge said Fox News could not argue newsworthiness to defend airing false claims, and limited how Dominion Voting Systems could refer to the Jan. 6 attack.WILMINGTON, Del. — A judge ruled on Tuesday that Fox News could not argue that it broadcast false information about Dominion Voting Systems on the basis that the allegations were newsworthy, limiting a key line of defense for the network as it faces the beginning of a potentially costly defamation trial next week.The judge, Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court, also ruled that Dominion could not refer to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol except in very narrow circumstances, saying he did not want jurors to be prejudiced by events that weren’t relevant to the central question in the case: Did Fox air wild claims about Dominion’s purported involvement in a conspiracy to steal the 2020 presidential election from Donald J. Trump knowing that they were lies?In the first of two days of pretrial hearings, Judge Davis set many of the parameters that will govern how the trial is run, including what kinds of arguments the 12-person jury can hear and what questions lawyers may ask during jury selection to weed out those they believe would not be impartial.The hearing covered matters large and seemingly small, from the application of the First Amendment to how jurors may take notes.Judge Davis said he would allow lawyers to ask potential jurors about their cable news viewing habits and whether they watched Fox News programs — or intentionally avoided them. He will not, however, permit questions about how someone voted.In another ruling, the judge denied a motion from Dominion that sought to limit how Fox lawyers could invoke the First Amendment, leaving the network with some space to argue that the Constitution shields it from liability.The lawsuit, in which Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in damages, is teeing up a major test of the First Amendment and, depending on the outcome, could renew questions about whether defamation law adequately protects victims of misinformation campaigns.While legal experts have said Dominion’s case is unusually strong, defamation suits are extremely difficult to win because the law essentially requires proof of the defendants’ state of mind. Dominion’s burden will be to convince a jury that people inside Fox acted with actual malice, meaning either that they knew the allegations they broadcast were false but did so anyway, or that they acted so recklessly they overlooked facts that would have proved them wrong.Fox has argued that while it understood many of the claims made by its guests about Dominion were false, they were still worth covering as inherently newsworthy. Fox’s lawyers have taken the position that there is nothing more newsworthy than claims by a former president of the United States that an election wasn’t credible.Judge Eric M. Davis said he would allow lawyers to ask potential jurors about their cable news viewing habits and whether they watched Fox News programs.John Taggart for The New York TimesBut Judge Davis disagreed.“Just because someone is newsworthy doesn’t mean you can defame someone,” he said, referring to pro-Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani, who appeared repeatedly on Fox News and Fox Business in the weeks after the 2020 election and linked Dominion to various conspiracy theories.The judge admonished Fox’s lawyers, saying they cannot make the argument that the false statements about Dominion came from guests like Ms. Powell and not from Fox hosts. That argument is irrelevant, he said, because the fact remains that Fox is responsible as the broadcaster.Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani. The pro-Trump lawyers appeared repeatedly on Fox News and Fox Business in the weeks after the 2020 election and linked Dominion to various conspiracy theories.Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press“It’s a publication issue, not a who-said-it issue,” he said.Dan K. Webb, a lawyer representing Fox, explained that hosts would testify that they weren’t certain about the truth of the allegations but covered them because the former president and his lawyers said they could prove them.“The hosts will say during that time period, 15, 20 days, they were careful not to repeat the allegation,” Mr. Webb said.Judge Davis responded, “Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it’s true.”It was not the only tense exchange between the judge and Fox lawyers on Tuesday. At one point, a lawyer for Dominion, Justin Nelson, informed Judge Davis that Fox had disclosed only within the last 48 hours that Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls the Fox media empire, had a larger role in Fox News than the company had initially let on.By not acknowledging the extent of Mr. Murdoch’s responsibility for Fox News, the personal communications of his that Dominion could review were “significantly more limited,” Mr. Nelson said.Judge Davis was not pleased. “This is a problem,” he said. “I need to feel comfortable that when you represent something to me that it’s true,” he added.Fox has also made the argument that its actions were not defamatory because many hosts and guests said on the air that there was a lack of convincing evidence that suggested widespread voter fraud.Judge Davis rejected this position, too.“You can’t absolve yourself of defamation by merely putting somebody on at another time to say something different,” he said.In asking for such a large settlement against Fox, Dominion has cited the death threats its employees have received. People have shown up outside its Denver headquarters armed and left voice mail messages threatening to blow up its offices.Judge Davis on Tuesday limited how Dominion can refer to those threats in front of jurors, ruling that it may not mention specific content. He said he did not want to leave jurors with the impression that Fox was responsible for the actions of third parties.The trial begins on Monday, with jury selection expected to wrap up by the end of this week.Before Tuesday, the judge had already ruled that Dominion could compel several high-profile Fox executives and hosts to testify in person, including Mr. Murdoch; Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media; and the Fox News personalities Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro. More

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      Fox News Settles Defamation Case With Venezuelan Businessman

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      In a letter to a New York judge, the parties said they had reached a settlement in a case related to claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, but did not disclose the terms.Fox News and one of its former hosts, Lou Dobbs, have settled a defamation suit with a Venezuelan businessman whom the network linked to voting-system fraud in the 2020 election.In a letter filed on Saturday to a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, the parties said they had reached a confidential settlement, although they did not disclose the terms.“This matter has been resolved amicably by both sides,” a spokesperson for Fox News said in an email. “We have no further comment.”The settlement comes days before jury selection this week in a major case that Fox News is defending. That case, a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, says that Fox News lied about voter fraud in the 2020 election, and that Fox hosts and guests repeatedly made false claims about Dominion machines and their supposed role in a plot to steal the election from President Donald J. Trump in 2020.In that trial, which is expected to begin on April 17, a jury will weigh whether Fox spread false claims about Dominion while knowing that the claims were untrue, and it will determine any damages.“Dominion’s lawsuit is a political crusade in search of a financial windfall,” the Fox spokesperson said.In the case of the Venezuelan businessman, Majed Khalil, Mr. Dobbs and Sidney Powell, a regular guest on Fox News, said on-air and in related Twitter posts that Dominion was using software to flip votes from President Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr., or to add votes for Mr. Biden.One of the tweets falsely said Mr. Khalil was “the effective ‘COO’ of the election project.” In an earlier complaint, the plaintiffs said neither Fox News nor Mr. Dobbs had reached out to Mr. Khalil for comment.Fox Business canceled Mr. Dobbs’s weekday show in February 2021. More

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      How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole

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

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      Attacks on Dominion Voting Persist Despite High-Profile Lawsuits

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

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      Trump and Fox News, Twin Titans of Politics, Hit With Back-to-Back Rebukes

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      Donald Trump’s criminal indictment and Fox News’s civil trial have nothing in common, but, combined, they delivered a rare reckoning for two forces that have transformed politics.For the better part of a decade, Donald J. Trump and his allies at Fox News have beguiled some Americans and enraged others as they spun up an alternative world where elections turned on fraud, one political party oppressed another, and one man stood against his detractors to carry his version of truth to an adoring electorate.Then this week, on two consecutive days, the former president and the highest-rated cable news channel were delivered a dose of reality by the American legal system.On Thursday, Mr. Trump became the first former president in history to be indicted on criminal charges, after a Manhattan grand jury’s examination of hush money paid to a pornographic film actress in the final days of the 2016 election.The next day, a judge in Delaware Superior Court concluded that Fox hosts and guests had repeatedly made false claims about voting machines and their supposed role in a fictitious plot to steal the 2020 election, and that Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network should go to trial.A lawyer for Fox News, Dan Webb, center, leaving the first hearing for the Dominion v. Fox case in Wilmington, Del., on March 21.Hannah Beier for The New York TimesBoth defendants dispute the claims. Still, the back-to-back blows against twin titans of American politics landed as a reminder of the still-unfolding reckoning with the tumult of the Trump presidency.For the left, the seismic week delivered an “I told you so” years in the making. Democrats who have long wanted Mr. Trump criminally charged got the satisfaction of watching a prosecutor and a grand jury agree.A day later, after years of arguing that Fox News was hardly fair and balanced, they could read a judge’s finding that Fox had not conducted “good-faith, disinterested reporting” on Dominion. Fox argues that statements made on air alleging election fraud are protected by the First Amendment.While the two cases have nothing in common in substance, they share a rare and powerful potential. In both, any final judgments will be rendered in a courtroom and not by bickering pundits on cable news and editorial pages.“There will always be a remnant, no matter how the matter is resolved in court, who will refuse to accept the judgment,” said Norman Eisen, a government ethics lawyer who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. “But when you look at other post-upheaval societies, judicial processes reduce factions down to a few hard-core believers.”He added, “A series of court cases and judgments can break the fever.”That, of course, could prove to be a Democrat’s wishful thinking.In this moment of constant campaigning and tribal partisanship, even the courts have had difficulty puncturing the ideological bubbles that Mr. Trump and Fox News pundits have created. The legal system produced a $25 million settlement of fraud charges against Trump University, dismissed dozens of lies about malfeasance in the 2020 election, pressed for the search for missing classified documents and ruled numerous times that Dominion’s machines did not in fact change votes.Yet hundreds of thousands of Americans remain devoted to both defendants.Embarrassing and damaging material has already come out through both cases, with little immediate sign of backlash..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Thousands of text messages, emails and other internal company documents disclosed to Dominion and released publicly portray high-level figures at the network as bent on maintaining ratings supremacy by giving audiences what they wanted, regardless of the truth.Texts show the star prime time host Tucker Carlson calling Mr. Trump a “demonic force,” and the chairman of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, describing Sean Hannity as “privately disgusted by Trump.”Fox News has said Dominion took private conversations out of context. Its ratings dominance appears untouched by the negative headlines in recent weeks. Data from Nielsen show that in March the 10 top-rated cable shows in America were all on Fox News, led by “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and that 14 of the top 20 were produced by the network.Still, experts believe the case has already resonated.“I’ve never seen a case before where journalists said they didn’t believe the story they were telling but were going to keep telling it because it’s what the audience wanted to hear,” said Lyrissa Lidsky, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Florida and an expert on defamation law. “It’s a shock wave saying it’s time to get serious about accountability.”Democrats, too, could see their illusions fall. Although many have clamored to see Mr. Trump charged, and felt vindicated this week, the risks of failure are considerable.If Mr. Trump’s lawyers file to have the charges simply dismissed as prosecutorial overreach and quickly win, the consequences would almost certainly strengthen Mr. Trump, who will make the case — and possibly others to follow — central to his primary campaign.But in a court of law, the magnetism that Mr. Trump and Fox News have over their audiences may lose some of its power. No matter how many times the former president insists outside the courtroom that he’s the victim of a political prosecution, inside the courtroom his lawyers will have to address the specific charges. They will win or lose based on legal arguments, not bluster.“I’ve been around for 50 years, and I’ve heard the political argument before,” said Stanley M. Brand, a veteran Washington defense lawyer. Mr. Brand cited the “Abscam” bribery case of the 1970s, when the defendants accused President Jimmy Carter of orchestrating the bribery sting, or the investigation of Senator Robert G. Torricelli, which was also surrounded by charges of politics. “It’s never worked in a court of law.”Members of the media and protesters outside Trump Tower in New York City on Thursday.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesJames Bopp Jr., a conservative defense lawyer, said he agreed with virtually all Republicans that the Manhattan district attorney had coaxed his grand jury to bring forward a specious indictment for the political purpose of damaging Mr. Trump.But, he said, Mr. Trump’s lawyers must answer the charges, not grandstand on the politics.“A charge is not automatically dismissible because it’s brought for political purpose,” he said. “The motive of prosecutors may be pertinent to the broader society. It’s not pertinent to a judge.”The exact charges against Mr. Trump may not be known until he is arraigned on Tuesday. The grand jury that brought the indictment was examining payments to Stormy Daniels and the core question of whether those payments were illegally disguised as business expenditures, a misdemeanor that would rise to a felony if those payments could be labeled an illegal campaign expenditure.If past legal skirmishes are an indication, Mr. Trump is likely to drag the proceedings out for months, if not years, with motion after motion as he builds his third presidential campaign around what he called on Friday the “unprecedented political persecution of the president and blatant interference in the 2024 election.”Likewise, Fox News will almost certainly continue to frame the Dominion case as that of a corporation intent on stifling the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press.“This case is and always has been about the First Amendment protections of the media’s absolute right to cover the news,” the network said in a statement Friday.That may be left for a court to decide.Ken Bensinger More

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      Fox News Suffers Major Setback in Dominion Case

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      A judge said the suit would go to trial, for a jury to weigh whether the network knowingly spread false claims about Dominion Voting Systems, and to determine any damages.Fox News suffered a significant setback on Friday in its defense against a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit that claims it lied about voter fraud in the 2020 election.A judge in Delaware Superior Court said the case, brought by Dominion Voting Systems, was strong enough to conclude that Fox hosts and guests had repeatedly made false claims about Dominion machines and their supposed role in a fictitious plot to steal the election from President Donald J. Trump.“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding,” Judge Eric M. Davis wrote, demonstrates that it “is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”Judge Davis said the case would proceed to trial, for a jury to weigh whether Fox spread false claims about Dominion while knowing that they were untrue, and to determine any damages. The trial is expected to begin April 17.But he rejected much of the heart of Fox’s defense: that the First Amendment protected the statements made on its air alleging that the election had somehow been stolen. Fox has argued that it was merely reporting on allegations of voter fraud as inherently newsworthy and that any statements its hosts made about supposed fraud were covered under the Constitution as opinion.“It appears oxymoronic to call the statements ‘opinions’ while also asserting the statements are newsworthy allegations and/or substantially accurate reports of official proceedings,” Judge Davis said.For example, in a “Lou Dobbs Tonight” broadcast on Nov. 24, 2020, Mr. Dobbs said: “I think many Americans have given no thought to electoral fraud that would be perpetrated through electronic voting; that is, these machines, these electronic voting companies including Dominion, prominently Dominion, at least in the suspicions of a lot of Americans.”The judge said that statement was asserting a fact, rather than an opinion, about Dominion.Under defamation law, Dominion must prove that Fox either knowingly spread false information or did so with reckless disregard for the truth, meaning that it had reason to believe that the information it broadcast was false.Numerous legal experts have said that Dominion has presented ample evidence that Fox hosts and producers were aware of what they were doing.RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor and First Amendment scholar at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, said the judge had signaled that he disagreed with many of Fox’s arguments.“The case will head to the jury with several of the key elements already decided in Dominion’s favor,” Ms. Anderson Jones said.Dominion, in a statement, said: “We are gratified by the court’s thorough ruling soundly rejecting all of Fox’s arguments and defenses, and finding as a matter of law that their statements about Dominion are false. We look forward to going to trial.”A spokeswoman for Fox said the case “is and always has been about the First Amendment protections of the media’s absolute right to cover the news.”“Fox will continue to fiercely advocate for the rights of free speech and a free press as we move into the next phase of these proceedings,” she added.Both parties had asked for the judge to grant summary judgment, meaning to rule in their favor on the merits of the evidence that each side had produced so far, including at a pretrial hearing last week. Dominion has argued that texts and emails between Fox executives and hosts proved that many knew the claims were false but put them on the air anyway.Fox has accused Dominion of cherry-picking evidence and argued that the First Amendment protected it because it was reporting on newsworthy allegations.In Friday’s decision, Judge Davis said damages, if they were awarded to Dominion, would be calculated by the jury. Lawyers for Fox pushed back on Dominion’s claim for $1.6 billion in previous hearings, arguing that the company had overstated its valuation and failed to show it suffered any loss of business.Fox has argued that Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News, was not involved in the broadcasting of the allegedly defamatory statements. In the decision, the judge left that question up to a jury.The case is the highest profile so far to test whether allies of former President Donald J. Trump would be held accountable for spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election. The prosecutions of those who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have mostly been focused on petty criminals and low-level agitators.Major revelations have been buried in the suit’s filings. Hundreds of pages of internal emails and messages in the weeks around the 2020 election, some of which were redacted, showed that many Fox executives and hosts did not believe the false claims of voter fraud they were broadcasting and made derogatory comments about Mr. Trump and his legal advisers.Tucker Carlson, the popular prime-time host, described Mr. Trump as “a demonic force, a destroyer” in a text with his producer. In a separate message to the host Laura Ingraham, Mr. Carlson said Sidney Powell, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, was lying about the fraud claims, but “our viewers are good people and they believe it.”The trove of messages also revealed the panic inside Fox News in the weeks after the election. Leaders including Suzanne Scott, the network’s chief executive, and Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of its parent company, fretted about angering viewers who felt the network had betrayed Mr. Trump when it correctly called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr.As some of those viewers left for more right-wing channels like Newsmax in the days after the election, Ms. Scott told Mr. Murdoch in an email that she intended to “pivot but keep the audience who loves us and trusts us.” She added: “We need to make sure they know we aren’t abandoning them and still champions for them.”Mr. Murdoch acknowledged in his deposition that some Fox News hosts had “endorsed” the false fraud claims. He added that he “would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight.”The suit has also had a recent complicating factor: A former Fox News producer filed her own lawsuits against the company this month, claiming that the network’s lawyers coerced her into giving a misleading testimony in the Dominion case. Fox News fired the producer, Abby Grossberg, who worked for the host Maria Bartiromo and Mr. Carlson, after she filed the complaints.On Monday, Ms. Grossberg’s lawyers filed her errata sheet, which witnesses use to correct mistakes in their depositions. She revised her comments to say she did not trust the producers at Fox with whom she worked because they were “activists, not journalists, and impose their political agendas on the programming.”Judge Davis’s ruling sets the stage for one of the most consequential media trials in recent history, with the possibility that Fox executives and hosts could be called to testify in person.In several recent hearings, the judge indicated that he was losing patience with Fox lawyers and their objections to Dominion’s efforts to introduce evidence into the record. And he said on Friday that he believed Dominion was correct in asserting that Fox had not “conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.” More

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      Fox Argues Top Executives Weren’t Involved in Voter Fraud Broadcasts

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      Lawyers for the company, which faces a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, are pushing for a judge to rule in their favor before a trial.WILMINGTON, Del. — Fox Corporation executives, including Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, had no direct involvement in what aired on the company’s cable news channels, and therefore their company should not be found liable in a $1.6 billion defamation case, lawyers for Fox argued Wednesday in a Delaware court.The argument was part of Fox’s request for a pretrial victory. Dominion Voting Systems has accused both Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corporation, of defaming the business. Dominion says Fox’s shows repeatedly linked its voting machines to a vast conspiracy of fraud in the 2020 presidential election.Erin Murphy, a lawyer for both Fox Corporation and Fox News, said there was no evidence that corporate executives were involved in the Fox News shows in question. She said Dominion would need to show that they had directly participated in the broadcasts to meet the high standard needed to prove defamation.Ms. Murphy conceded that some of the executives had the power to bar certain guests from the shows, but said: “It’s not enough for them to show that they have the ability to step in. They have to have been involved.”Fox has asked that Fox Corporation be dropped from the lawsuit.Dominion must prove that Fox knowingly broadcast false information about the company, or was reckless enough to disregard substantial evidence that the claims were not true. Defamation cases have traditionally proved hard to win because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections. But legal experts say Dominion may have enough evidence to clear that high bar.Dominion, too, is asking for summary judgment; its legal team gave its arguments in Delaware Superior Court on Tuesday. The judge, Eric M. Davis, said he would make his decision by April 11. A jury trial is scheduled to start April 17.Judge Davis told both sides on Wednesday that he preferred for trial witnesses to appear in person rather than over a video link, setting up the possibility that Fox News hosts like Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson could show up. He said Rupert Murdoch might also be compelled to testify in person, though he did not issue any decisions on the matter.Fox lawyers had submitted a letter to the judge on Monday asking that Mr. Murdoch and some other executives not be compelled to testify, saying that it would amount to “hardships” on the witnesses and that their testimony would “add nothing other than media interest.”After Fox finished its arguments, a lawyer for several media outlets, including The New York Times, asked the judge to review redactions that Fox had made to some of the communications it handed over, arguing that Fox kept too much confidential. Judge Davis said he would consider the request.Judge Davis also remarked on a lawsuit filed in Delaware on Monday by a Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg. She argues that Fox lawyers coerced her into providing misleading information in her deposition in the Dominion lawsuit.Judge Davis said the lawsuit had been originally assigned to him but then given to another judge in Delaware Superior Court.Fox News said in a statement on Wednesday: “Despite the noise and confusion that Dominion has generated by presenting cherry-picked quotes without context, this case is ultimately about the First Amendment protections of the media’s absolute need to cover the news.” More