The Fox News Trial in Delaware – Is it really going to be a Game of Hasse? The case of Fox and Dominion

Roughly 300 potential jurors have been summoned to the Delaware Superior Court and will eventually be whittled down to a panel of 12 jurors and 12 alternates. It is expected to take about six weeks to finish the trial that will examine the role of misinformation and election denial in American politics.

My cup of tea has never been Fox News. But you can bet I’ll be glued to the coverage of this trial while the witnesses report and the jury decides.

The topic of potentially missing or withheld evidence is looming large over the Dominion case. A judge sanctioned Fox on Wednesday for withholding key material from Dominion — audio recordings of Bartiromo talking off-air with Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

The judge has already rejected several First Amendment defenses that Fox hoped to invoke, and he further constrained Fox in a flurry of pretrial rulings this week, stopping the right-wing network from trying to argue that the allegedly defamatory statements were “newsworthy” and thus deserved coverage.

A trial would be a truth-seeking situation and not a game of gotcha and not a game of playing around with me, so Judge Davis warned in a hearing on March 22, during which he praised lawyers for both Fox and Dominion.

But we’re still only at the start. Murdoch, his hosts, and a lot of other people are expected to testify during the trial. I think we are about to see a lot about the inner workings of power and money. We already know from the court documents that Murdoch provided Jared Kushner with “confidential information” about Joe Biden’s campaign strategy and ads — something no real journalistic outlet would ever do. Fox News is not about journalism. It’s about drawing the largest possible audience, and it has gone to dangerous lengths to do so.

Thanks to the sprawling real estate of cable television and the infinite expanse of the internet, we live in an age of so many information options, so many “news” purveyors, that we have an unprecedented ability to search out the one or ones that tell us precisely what we want to hear, for whatever reason we want to hear it. We needn’t reckon with the truth. We can shop for it.

Fox News, Politics, and Culture: Jeremy Peters, Defamation Lawyers and Supervisors in Dominion Voting Systems

A series of recent pretrial rulings has provided more clarity on how Judge Davis operates, and shows he has taken steps to reassure both parties that he had not predetermined the outcomes.

Of course, that never happened. A jury could buy that. I want to make it sound like it is a strong case, not like it is a total slam dunk. It depends on who’s on the jury. And really, it only takes one, two, you know, very, you know, Trump-leaning jurors to throw a whole wrench in this for Dominion.

There’s a show called “Grossology.” This is FRESH AIR. Let’s get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Jeremy Peters, who’s covering the defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems. He is covering it for The New York Times, where he deals with politics, law and culture.

A former Fox News producer who claims the right-wing network pressured her to give false testimony escalated her own lawsuit against the company, adding CEO Suzanne Scott as defendant and accusing Fox’s lawyers of deleting messages from her phone.

The company will point to the board of supervisors in Shasta County’s cancellation of its contract with Dominion due to baseless conspiracy theories.

What Do They Do About Voting Machines Stop in the Middle of an Election? The Case of Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein

SIDNEY POWELL: It’s to moderate to say the least. The computer glitch could not have happened in that situation. They flipped votes in the computer system or added votes that were not there, this was the place of the fraud. We need an audit of the computer systems that were involved in this fraud. And, you know, Joe Biden had it right. He said he didn’t need people’s votes because he had a huge voter fraud organization. He would need people in the future. They had this all planned, Maria. They had the software that did it. They had paper ballots waiting to be put in if and when needed. And notably, President Trump’s vote in the blue states went up enormously. That’s when they had to stop the vote count and go in and replace votes for Biden and take away Trump votes.

BARTIROMO: I’ve never seen voting machines stop in the middle of an election, stop down and assess the situation. I hear that Nancy Pelosi’s long-time chief of staff is an executive at the company. Richard Blum, Senator Feinstein’s husband – significant shareholder of the company. What can you tell us about what’s going on on the other side of the software?

POWELL: Well, obviously, they have invested in it for their own reasons and are using it to commit this fraud to steal votes. I think they’ve stolen them from other Democrats in their own party. Bernie Sanders might very well have been the Democratic candidate, but they’ve stolen against whoever they wanted to steal it from.

GROSS: OK, so that was Sidney Powell on Maria Bartiromo’s show on Fox News November 8, 2020. The election took place on November 3, so that’s just a few days after. Can you make sense of her statements about voting machines being stopped in the middle of an election? Like, what are they talking about?

What happened to Grosskopf? Before we move on from that clip, I just want to fact-check another thing that Sidney Powell said, and this was about Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein. The Associated Press, the AP, did a fact-check on that and said it’s all false. A former aide to Pelosi has represented Dominion as a lobbyist, but so have lobbyists who have worked for Republicans, and claims that Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, holds a stake in Dominion are baseless. So I just want to get that on the record. There are some intriguing facts about who the source was for some of Sidney.

GROSS: Yes, for some of Sidney Powell’s claims. There were some indications that she was not stable. Tell us about this source, Marlene Bourne, who claimed to be a tech analyst.

Pets are mentioned. This is a big part of the case and it proves that they acted recklessly. This email from the source could be enough to conclude that no one would think that this person was credible, so they shouldn’t rely on it for their coverage. I’ll let you know what was in that email. It is truly crazy. Sidney Powell had been talking to a woman by the name of Marlene Bourne. And in this email, she describes to Sidney Powell how she talks to ghosts and listens to the wind, and that she has been “internally decapitated” – that’s a direct quote. I don’t even know what that means.

Petes: There’s something about it. But it’s clear as day that a person like that is unreliable, mentally unstable. I think if I had forwarded that email to your producers saying that this was a source for my story, I would never be appearing on FRESH AIR. And – but the reason…

There is a talk show called “Grief.” She said she sees what others don’t see and hears what others don’t hear and that it appears that she was shot in the back after giving the FBI a tip.

PETERS: Yeah. I mean, it’s just nuts. And that’s the kind of language that people at Fox started to use to describe Sidney Powell. They called her crazy. They called her crazy. They called her things that I will not repeat on this air. And that, again, points to the doubts that they had about her and shows that, you know, they knew that this was all reckless nonsense.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

The Defamation Trial in the Footprints of Rudy Giuliani: Investigating Fox’s Deposition of Rupert Murdoch

In the tape of Giuliani, he admits he had no hard evidence to back up his claim that Dominion voting machine software could be manipulated. A special master may be appointed to investigate Fox’s handling of documents during the discovery process. It was only made clear yesterday that in addition to being the chair of Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch is also an executive at Fox News. More of Murdoch’s documents would have been part of the discovery process, if Murdoch’s role at Fox News had been made public. If there were to be further depositions or redos, Fox would need to do everything they can to make the person available, and it would be a loss to Fox.

GROSS: Well, Jeremy Peters, thank you so much for talking with us. I really look forward to your coverage of the defamation trial. Thank you for being with us today.

Another argument Fox has made is it was commentators who were making these statements, not news. So they’ve kind of argued both sides, that we were just covering the news. They have argued that it was commentators, not reporters who were making these claims.

Pets are Pets: Yes, that’s part of their First Amendment defense. They have tried to say that what Tucker Carlson was saying was protected commentary. What Sean Hannity was saying – you know, same thing. The First Amendment allows hosts to offer their opinions about significant news events. We will see how it goes for the jury, since there are reams of evidence that Tucker Carlson and other like minded people didn’t believe what Sidney Powell said. Sean Hannity acknowledged in his deposition that the same thing happened. A direct quote – he says, “I didn’t believe it for one second,” referring to what Sidney Powell was saying. Yet he allows her – gives her a platform on his radio show, then later that night on his Fox News show, where she continues to spread lies about Dominion machines.

GROSS: One of the reporters on Fox reported on a press conference held by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, two of Trump’s legal advisers, and they were talking about conspiracies to steal the election from Trump. She reported on the press conference and fact-checked it and showed that the conspiracy theories being floated were factually wrong. What consequences did she face for that report?

PETERS: Her name is Kristin Fisher. She used to work at Fox. She left the network because of this incident. After she fact-checked that press conference on the air, she received an angry phone call from her boss, who said, you need to do a better job of respecting our audience. And this is a sentiment that had been conveyed to her boss by the chief executive of Fox News, who, at this point in November of 2020, was looking at the ratings decline Fox had been suffering and the ratings gains that competitors like Newsmax had been enjoying because they were more overtly pro-Trump. Suzanne Scott panicked. Rupert Murdoch panicked. And they basically shut down an honest discussion of what really happened in the 2020 presidential election. They tell their correspondents only what they want to hear, and they don’t want to hear that President Trump has lost.

So let’s start with Tucker Carlson. He’s been a big defender of Trump on the air. But in private messages, he called Trump a demonic force, a destroyer – this was in a text with his producer – and he privately called Powell a nut. He said, I tried to make the White House disavow her, which they obviously should have done long before. He ridiculed claims about the plot to steal the election as shockingly reckless and absurd in a text message in November of 2020. So what are some of the things he did on the air that are counter to what he said in private to colleagues?

The backlash was so intense, Tucker Carlson drops the subject, and you see text messages, both predating this Sidney Powell incident and after, in which his producers are saying, you know, our audience wants to hear about voter fraud and we’re not covering it. And they express their serious misgivings about the whole notion that the election was somehow tainted. They say openly, there just wasn’t enough fraud to have changed the outcome. This stuff makes me sick. And while this case raises a lot of really big questions about our democratic system and our news media and the susceptibility that people have to disinformation and the willingness of bad actors to profit from that disinformation, the case is ultimately going to turn on very small incidents.

GOSS: These are the rioters who broke into the Capitol. How does anybody square that? I don’t know that that’s relevant to the actual, to the defamation lawsuit. But what does it say about Tucker Carlson and Fox?

I would like to learn more about Sidney Powell. Lou Dobbs was a big believer in the conspiracy theories on Fox News. He hosted his own show on Fox Business News. According to the producer of Dobbs’ show, he believed that Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s legal advisers, had used drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

What will Fox News tell us about Rupert Murdoch’s role in deciding the coverage of the Fox News story? — Pets are Pets: What Will Fox News Pay for Spreading lies about voter fraud?

At that moment, you can see the moment when Suzanne Scott tells her lieutenants at the network to respect their audience. Code for we couldn’t tell them anything they’d find upsetting because they’re changing the channel.

Pets are Pets: And that is what it is. It’s something that Dominion cited in its presentation to the judge when they were arguing the summary judgment phase of the case. It’s definitely something I expect to come up at trial, especially when they put Rupert Murdoch on the stand.

One of the things that happened really recently is that Dominion went to the judge and said, we want access to more of Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, because when – during the period of disclosure, we didn’t realize how big a role Murdoch played in Fox News and in deciding what was going to be covered and how it was going to be covered. Tell us about this recent development.

Pets are Pets: I honestly don’t know what that means for Trump, his base, or the conservative media because they’re not really covering it, so I think the questions are more complicated. And I don’t know that those kinds of lessons of accountability will sink in with the average conservative.

Gross. Do the lawyers who are siding with Dominion want the First Amendment to protect baseless conspiracy theories and not protect the media that promotes them?

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

FRESH AIR Interviews: Don’t Just Give Up, But You Can Spread Lyrae About Voter Fraud

GOSS: If you’d like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed – like this week’s interview with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly, whose new memoir is about juggling her career and parenting; or with Josh Groban, who’s starring in the new Broadway revival of the Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd” – check out our podcast. There are a lot of FRESH AIR interviews.

FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Interviews and reviews are edited by a number of people, among them: Ann Marie Baldonado, Seth Kelley, Lauren Krenzel, and Susan Nyakundi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today’s show. I’m Terry Gross.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/13/1169677158/will-fox-news-pay-for-spreading-lies-about-voter-fraud

NPR’s Christina Grossberg, Dominion, and the 2020 January 6 Insurrection: An Attorney General’s Report to the Investigative Committee

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be perfect, but it will be updated and revised in the future. Availability and accuracy may be different. The audio record is the primary record of NPR’s programming.

In a number of lawsuits filed last month, Grossberg claimed Fox lawyers mistreated her in her deposition while protecting the network and its on-air personality.

Grossberg worked for Maria Bartiromo during the 2020 election cycle, and some of the comments made on Bartiromo’s show are at the center of Dominion’s defamation case against Fox, which saw jury selection begin Thursday in Delaware. The network says it never defamed Dominion and that Dominion’s lawsuit undermines US press freedoms.

In her complaint this week, she accused Fox lawyers of deletions from her phone. The lawsuit says Grossberg gave her phone to Fox lawyers in 2022, and “that certain messages between Ms. Grossberg and Ms. Bartiromo were missing/appeared to have been deleted” when she got the device back from Fox’s team.

Scott was forwarded an email from Murdoch, in which the Fox Corporation chairman blamed Donald Trump for the January 6 insurrection and decried his election denialism.

A report was commissioned and submitted to the court by the company, which said it has experienced about a billion dollars in damages. Due to the conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, the company has lost millions of dollars in profits, as well as potential business, legal, security, and other expenses.

Fox has asked the court not to award any damages to Dominion and said the claims are not based on any financial metrics, but instead on the assumption it will be completely out of business by 2031.

Dominion Voting Equipment Use Increases in the First Ten Years after the Bidding War: A Comparative Study with an Election Security Group

“Although economic damages are involved, most emotional feelings, hurt feelings and emotional damages are not going to be involved in the calculation,” said a law professor at the University of Michigan.

But Niehoff says making the case for monetary damages can be challenging because of the complexity in connecting the dots between a business loss and why the loss happened.

“These are things that very often can’t be proven with mathematical precision. It’s difficult to show that people who don’t do business with you don’t do it because of one reason or another.

For Dominion that means demonstrating that state and local governments aren’t using its equipment specifically because of lies and conspiracy theories and not other business factors.

Patrick Henry Jones, who brought the motion to cancel the contract, said he couldn’t rely on the mainstream media for accurate information about the machines.

It’s assumed that it isn’t going to gain any new customers and not a single new customer will walk in the door. In addition, for the existing customers, they are not going to get any new business from existing customers after 2024,” said Scott Ahmad, an attorney representing Fox News, in a recent court appearance.

An analysis provided to NPR by an election security group shows that there has been an increase in the use of equipment from Dominion since the beginning of 2020. The nonprofit monitors election equipment contracts around the country.

“So I think what’s notable is that you can have many jurisdictions, some of which are quite small,” said Verified Voting CEO Pamela Smith about the discrepancy.

Most of the time voting systems are not changed every couple of years. They change them over the course of a decade or more. She said that the huge cost and challenges of changing equipment is part of the reason for that.

But she said it is very difficult to predict what could happen to Dominion’s business years into the future, for instance if a jurisdiction shuts Dominion out of the bidding process.

“Where previously they had an okay relationship, or a state might say, ‘well, we’re gonna go with this brand and then find out, oh, on second thought, we’re not because the pushback is really hard.’ Smith said that there’s a lot of that and more than what is shown on the surface.

While an increase in business is to some degree at odds with seeking monetary damages, Dominion can still make the case that its growth has been thwarted, Niehoff said

Although the business statements have gone up, they didn’t go up as much because of the defamation statements.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/14/1169858006/the-math-behind-dominion-voting-systems-1-6-billion-lawsuit-against-fox-news

What’s coming up with Succession? How the Colorado County Clerks Association voted to keep Dominion afloat, but what was left after Grantham

In a sign that Shasta County might be an outlier, many other conservative jurisdictions around the country are sticking with Dominion, despite voter distrust.

In rural Fremont County, Colorado, Justin Grantham recently renewed his country’s contract with Dominion. Grantham is a Republican and leads the Colorado County Clerks Association. He said that because of the audits show that the machines are accurate, it would be difficult to switch to another machine.

“You’re talking about learning how to use the system, learning how to program the ballots in the election, learning how to just figure out the tabulation and the software and the hardware,” he said.

You’re talking a lot of training requirements, it is used once a year in the odd years and two or three times in the even years.

Everything’s coming up Murdoch! Succession is back, Dominion Voting Systems won’t drop its suit, and our boy Rupert may be open to further [LCD sound system voice] discovery, discovery, discovery.

We know Murdoch is driven by power. More people means more money. This is the central thing that Succession nails about the Murdoch family: truth doesn’t matter — only power, and you keep score on power through money.

Now, Fox News’ original grift was claiming to be “fair and balanced.” The outlet decided to paint other outlets as being unfairly biased to the left to make them look less like the Republican Party’s propaganda department. This was a success. I think of it every time someone tells me that The New York Times, a paper written by and for middle managers who live in New Jersey, is a left-wing outlet. In comparison to Fox News, sure. In comparison to actual left-wing outlets such as The New Republic or The American Prospect? Please.

Now, people are naturally suspicious of “objective journalism,” and they are absolutely right to be. All journalism is biased because it is always written by humans, and we are, unfortunately, limited creatures. (AI isn’t going to fix this.) Most of the important biases in journalism have less to do with partisan lenses and more to do with recency, novelty, and reportability. Readers shouldn’t be suspicious of us.

What Murdoch has to Say about the Right People and Their Politics: Murdoch’s Last Fox News Message to the President of the House of Representatives

Murdoch replied to the email from Paul Ryan, who was the speaker of the House of Representatives, stating that Sean Hannity “has been disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.”

We’ve talked before about rich people and their politics. They will say whatever will make them richer, and they don’t believe in anything. The documents released so far in the Dominion suit back that up. If Rupert Murdoch woke up tomorrow and thought there was a lucrative audience in far-left socialism, I suspect Fox News would tack left so hard its hosts’ heads would spin. After all, he built Fox Broadcasting Company on The Simpsons and Married… with Children — not exactly right-wing fare.