More about that defamation lawsuit against Faux News

From page 149 of the Dominion lawsuit

against Faux: Comments by Tucker Carlson

At its heart, the lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Faux for defamation is about profit and the capitalist mindset. Since a moderately redacted version of the 192 page lawsuit was released a few days ago, experts have had time to read and analyze the evidence and what it means. It is clear that what Faux did was done solely for profit, knowing that truth had to be sacrificed to protect profit. But one other very important point has become just as clear. A large segment of the Faux audience was leaving Faux because they could not handle truth. They simply left Faux when truth was presented to them. Faux was desperate to keep that audience to keep its revenues.

The Guardian writes:

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said Dominion Voting Systems’ brief requesting summary judgment against Fox News for defamation – and $1.6bn – is “likely to succeed and likely to be a landmark” in the history of freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

“I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues,” Tribe told the Guardian. “Fox and its producers and performers were lying as part of their business model.”

The case concerns Fox News’s repetition of Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, including claims about Dominion voting machines.

Tribe said the filing “establishes that Fox was not only reckless” but also that producers, owners and personalities were “deliberately lying and knew they were lying about the nature of Dominion’s machines and the supposed way they could be manipulated”.

Tucker Carlson called the charges “ludicrous” and “off the rails”. Sean Hannity texted about “F’ing lunatics”. A senior network vice-president called one of the stories “MIND BLOWINGLY NUTS”.

“This is the most remarkable discovery filing I’ve ever read in a commercial litigation,” said Scott Horton, a Columbia Law School lecturer, Harper’s Magazine contributing editor and litigator with clients including CBS and the Associated Press.

“A summary judgment motion by a plaintiff in this kind of case is almost unheard of. These suits usually fail because you can’t prove the company you’re suing knew they were spreading falsehoods. That you would have evidence they knew it was a lie is almost unheard of … in this case the sheer volume of all the email and text messages is staggering.”

Tribe agreed: “This is one of the first defamation cases in which it is possible to rule for the plaintiff on summary judgment. This is not a request to go to trial. There is no genuinely disputed fact. The defendants were deliberately lying in a manner that was per se libelous and they clearly knew it.”

The biggest irony revealed by the Dominion filing is that Carlson and colleagues quickly decided the greatest threat to their network was one of the only times it reported an accurate scoop: that Arizona had gone for Biden, at 11:20 pm on election night.

Four days later, another Murdoch property, the New York Post, asked Trump to stop the stolen election claim. Rupert Murdoch thanked the Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott, for making sure the editorial got wide distribution, according to the Dominion filing.

But later that day, as Fox executives realized they were losing viewers, the tide began to shift.

“Getting creamed by CNN!” Murdoch messaged Scott.

In a message to his producer, Carlson sounded terrified: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating to us.”

And so on 8 November Maria Bartiromo featured the Trump adviser Sidney Powell and said: “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”

That alternate reality would be repeated for months. Perhaps most devastating of all is Dominion’s account of what happened on 12 November, after the reporter Jaqui Heinrich “correctly factchecked [a Trump] tweet, pointing out that top election infrastructure officials said that there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Carlson was incensed. He messaged Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously what the fuck? Actually shocked. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”

Hannity complained to Scott, who said Heinrich had “serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted”.

Faux executive: The North Koreans do a more 

nuanced news show than Lou Dobbs

That’s really bad

(page 152 of the lawsuit)

What about the Faux audience?

As its audience was abandoning Faux, executives and show hosts were aware of it. That scared them. They believed that lost audience meant lost revenue. But what is puzzling is that Faux does not make much money from ads. Over 90% of its profit comes from cable subscriptions, not eyeballs on the screen or ads. The NYT wrote in 2021: 

Fox News still makes up the vast majority of Fox Corporation’s profits. The cable division that houses the news network generated $899 million in pretax income, accounting for 95 percent of the company’s total pretax profit.

Even if viewers rejected Faux for telling the truth, they would still be stuck paying for Faux on cable TV. Few people would bother to try to unbundle Faux from their cable subscriptions. Even if they tried, they would fail. We’re all stuck either with paying Faux or dropping our cable subscriptions.

The Faux audience does not want to hear

about a peaceful transition of power

(page 155 of the lawsuit)

Although Faux viewers will vehemently deny it, they cannot handle inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. The psychological discomfort is more than they are willing to accept. And it is not just Faux that is intolerant. America’s entire radical right seems to be the same way. That's why I’ve been banned or blocked at 9 out of 9 radical right politics websites. This isn’t just about Faux. It is about public support for radical right authoritarianism grounded in some combination of brass knuckles capitalism and Christian nationalist fundamentalism. Both are staunchly anti-democratic.

So, are most of those temporarily disgruntled Faux viewers good, decent Americans who have been bamboozled and betrayed? Or, are most of them mostly something else? If something else what?

About all those embarrassing internal Faux messages

One final thought. Are the people who work at Faux stupid for putting all of their thoughts in writing? Or, are they just arrogant jackasses who believed they were above the law and merely in cynical pursuit of profit, based on lies being sold as truth?

I bet that Faux has a shiny new, but unwritten, internal rule about putting things in writing. The new rule is this: 

Never, ever, put in writing something 

you do not want anyone outside the company to see.

If it has to be said, say it verbally.

That is a rule I always tried to adhere to in my professional career. No one had to tell me that. Common sense made it painfully obvious. When I had bad things to say, I preferred to say it in person. Failing that, I used the phone and hoped the line wasn’t tapped. Failing that, I usually said nothing to anyone.