Robert Evans, Cody Johnston, and Katie Stoo dissect Fox News' $4.2 billion defamation liability stemming from internal depositions proving executives knew Dominion fraud claims were false yet amplified them. They analyze Rupert Murdoch's text admitting high-profile hosts fed the stolen election narrative, contrasted with Brett Baer's internal warnings against baseless allegations by Maria Bartiromo and Sean Hannity. Ultimately, the episode reveals how corporate denial masked a coordinated disinformation campaign that prioritized political loyalty over truth, echoing historical scandals like the UK phone hacking affair. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Dominion Lawsuit Details00:14:26
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What's slowly destroying the brains of the people who raised us?
My various Rupert Murdoch properties.
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
And today we have a very special episode.
Before we get into that, I'm going to bring on my co-hosts, my once in future podcast buddies, Cody Johnston and Katie Stoo.
Daniel, 45 straight seconds of air horns here, followed by a laugh track.
Yeah.
Beep beep.
How's everything going?
I'm Rupert Murdoch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, wow, Cody.
I might try to have you do a couple of Murdoch lines for us.
Sounded a little bit like Ringo to me.
Sounds a little bit like my Boston accent.
Tucker Carlson.
It would be so much.
It would be so good if historically you could go back in time and switch them so that Tucker Carlson was kind of the most replaceable Beatle and Ringo was a fascist on me.
Anyway, how are you guys?
Oh, Robert.
Okay.
More specific question.
Have any of you like had complications among your loved ones as a result of a Rupert Murdoch property?
Sorry.
Oh, I just laughed and coughed at the same time.
It's been a thing that has complicated my life with a number of family members.
And it's a kind of a thing that, like, I have a couple of cousins, and every now and then we'll talk like, you know, something will be going around, so to speak.
I'm trying to be vague in the interests of like family peace, but something will be going around and we'll be like, yeah, that's fucking Tucker Carlson or whatever, like started this, saying this bullshit.
Now a bunch of the people, the bunch of the very nice people who raised me believe something terrible.
And it's, it's deeply frustrating.
It's very effective.
Yeah.
It's, it's, and it's, it's been kind of this black box up until recently.
Like every now and then you would get these lawsuits involving Fox, you know, and one little bit of it would go viral and you'd see in like all of the lefty newspapers, whatever, oh, Fox argues that they're not, you know, a news agency or whatever, that it's yeah, Tucker's like, I'm a character.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we, we, we, we haven't gotten like a tremendous amount of detail about what inside the company looks like until very recently.
Now, have y'all been paying much attention to the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News?
No.
It's um, no, no, that's that's good.
You're probably finding this in your two big lawsuits that Fox is fighting off right now.
One is from Dominion Voting Systems, which is in, I think, 28 states, and it's a $1.6 billion defamation suit.
And there's also a $2.6 billion defamation lawsuit from SmartMatic, which I think was only in one state, but there were a bunch of Fox allegations that they were like hacking the election.
We'll get into the details of all this in a little bit.
But it's been interesting because, you know, for years and years and years, there have been Fox has been what I would morally consider, not in a legal sense, because they haven't been found guilty of this in a legal sense, but I would morally consider them to be doing slander on a pretty regular basis against a wide variety of people.
But I think that's fair.
Yeah.
It's a fair statement to make.
A fair statement of protected opinion.
But Dominion chose to fight back.
And I think there's an argument to be made that they had more of a solid legal ground than a lot of the people that Fox has targeted over the years, or that Fox personalities have targeted over the years.
But they sued Fox.
And throughout 2022, they put together this team of lawyers who started running through a laundry list of Fox News producers, line executives, and on-air personalities and deposing them, right?
So you sit someone down, you sit Sean Hannity down, you sit Tucker Carlson down, you sit Lachlan Murdoch down, who's probably going to be the heir to Rupert Murdoch's fortune, and you ask them questions about what happened in this kind of spate of disinformation.
And if they lie, they can go to jail, right?
Like it's a crime to lie in a deposition.
And in order to help enforce that, there's also a process called discovery, where Dominion's lawyers got access to what seems to be a mountain of text messages, memos, emails from Fox personalities in order to like hold them accountable because you can actually see what they were saying to each other in addition to what they claim during the deposition.
And the questions that Dominion asked, they spread well beyond kind of just the specific allegations Fox personalities made against Dominion and went more broadly into Fox company culture and how decisions filtered both up and down from management.
And yeah, it's as a result, it's given us kind of the most complete look inside Fox and the most complete look at like the kind of human beings who work there and how they talk amongst themselves and how they kind of what they see, like the moral universe they inhabit in a way that I never thought we actually were going to get evidence of.
And so that's what I want to go into this week because there's a tremendous amount here.
It's worth noting before we start that Fox is in actually some potentially serious financial trouble.
We're talking between these two lawsuits, somewhere around $4 billion that they could be found liable for.
And this is in addition to the $1.2 billion that Fox has paid over the last decade due to the phone hacking scandal that racked The Sun and News of the World, which are both UK Murdoch properties.
Did you guys hear?
Do you guys recall much about the phone hacking scandal?
Not a lot of details, but I remember the basic story.
Yeah.
The gist of it is that Rebecca Brooks, who edited both of those publications and went on to lead their UK publishing arm, and Andrew Coulson, who was an editor at News of the World and five of the paper's journalists, conspired to hack the voicemails of more than 600 people over a six-year period.
Yeah, it's so they hacked like a bunch of public figures and celebrities, but what really got them in trouble was they hacked the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl.
Um, in order to like what?
Yeah, it's fucked up.
Like that is unbelievable.
I mean, it's it's unbelievable.
Yeah, I mean, it, yeah, it's it's I think what's really unbelievable is that Rupert Murdoch claimed once this came public that he'd had no knowledge of it.
Um, he told me this is very funny.
Actually, Cody, I'm gonna, I'm gonna toss this text into the into the chat and you can um, you can do your Rupert Murdoch voice.
Oh, God.
Yeah, you're a really good Rupert Murdoch.
I feel that people I trusted, I'm not saying who let me down, and I think they behaved disgracefully.
And it's time for them to pay.
Wow.
Cody, I think you're the one that let us all down by that accent.
No, I think that's a flawless Aussie.
Thank you.
I worked on it.
I'm just mean.
I'm just worked on it.
Yeah, it's okay.
Most people who do an Australian accent, it just winds up really Boston.
So, you know, I'm glad that I got New Zealand.
That's that happened.
It's taunting that guy.
It's taunting.
So that's very funny that he's like, oh, those bad Fox News reporters, I'm going to make them pay.
I had no idea this was happening as the CEO of Fox News.
A lot of people wondered whether, you know.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
Like, it's time for them to pay such a weird thing, like phrasing for like you could make that happen, Rupert.
The boss.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, be, you know, take into account or like, there should be consequences.
Like, it's time for them to pay such a charge.
Whoever is a charge here needs to kill them, is what he's saying.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's good, good old-fashioned weasel bullshit.
So now, obviously, legally, I can't say that Rupert certainly knew something, but we are in the United States.
Uh, and I can say, which I couldn't say if we were in the UK, it seems kind of weird and suspicious that he wouldn't know anything about this massive hacking scandal his journalists and editors engaged in.
And while I'm not going to push much further than that, because he is a billionaire with a lot of lawyers, what I will do is quote a Fox News article about the UK Parliamentary Committee's investigation into the hacking scandal.
Quote from Fox News.
Although Rupert Murdoch and his son James were not accused of misleading Parliament, the committee said it was simply astonishing that they only realized that the hacking was not confined to one rogue reporter in December of 2010.
The report said that they should ultimately be prepared to take responsibility for the willful blindness of News International and News Corporation over the scandal, aside from the $454 million they spent on legal fees.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's good stuff.
So sketchy as that all was, the phone hacking scandal did not wind up doing Murdoch or News Corp any like permanent harm.
But Dominion's lawsuit included not only depositions under oath, but again, this expansive discovery process.
So suddenly we know exactly what Rupert Murdoch's involvement was here to a degree of legal certainty.
I should also note here because it's very funny that Dominion's lawyers deposed Sean Hannity for more than seven hours.
And honestly, moment of silence for those lawyers because they had to talk to Sean Hannity for seven hours.
Brutal.
Brutal.
That's hazard pay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I hope they hope they have to take frequent breaks.
Yeah, they needed some MDMA and a therapist after that shit.
So the bulk of the questions asked and materials provided have to do with discussions around the decision of several major Fox stars to host Sidney Powell on their pro remember Sidney Powell.
Yeah, she was a former lawyer for Donald Trump who filed lawsuits in numerous states attempting to overturn the results of the election.
Now, she spent most of her time since 2020 fighting disbarment hearings.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like she's going to get disbarred.
I think the case wound up being in Texas.
But in the heady days after November 2nd, she started massaging a collection of deeply questionable sources to argue that Dominion, which ran voting machines in 28 states and SmartMatic, quote, ran an algorithm that shaved votes from Trump and awarded them to Biden.
There's a lot more to her allegations, and we'll cover those presently, but that's what you need to know to start.
And before we get into all that, I wanted to begin this episode by giving you guys an example of how good journalists treated Sidney Powell, because we're going to spend most of this time talking about how Fox did.
I want to play a clip from an interview she did with an Australian journalist.
So, Cody, you can brush up on your accent, working for ABC Four Corners, an Australian news agency.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
That SmartMatic shifted votes from Trump to Biden in multiple battleground states.
That was your argument, wasn't it?
That there was an algorithm run machines via the software that shaved votes from Trump and gave those to Biden.
What actual research or fact-checking did you do at the time to find out what SmartMatic's actual involvement in the election was?
Do you work for Smart Matic?
Smart Matic.
I think it's incumbent on both of us to know what Smart Matic's involvement was.
It seems like a pretty foundational fact.
I'm confused right now about why you're here.
Because you made a series of very strong allegations against SmartMatic.
That's the crimes you committed.
Containing many errors of fact.
Do you accept the fact now that the company that you accused of stealing a national election only operated in one county in LA in California?
One county, one state.
No, I'm not prepared to accept that fact.
I think SmartMatic's involvement was far more significant than that.
Do I think they're trying to minimize their involvement?
Smartmatic Involvement00:06:13
Of course, I do.
You said that SmartMatic owns Dominion.
How do you justify the basic factual error?
I'm going to stop this interview.
It's wholly.
I'm sorry.
We're not even in the area of great dispute.
These are the simple facts.
And she gets up.
What did she think this was?
What did she think she was showing up for?
Which she said in this interview.
What the fuck, Sydney?
Legitimate.
What did you think they were going to ask?
She thought they were going to do what Fox did, actually.
I think is the answer.
Do you work for a smart matic?
It's like, can you tell me your just any reason for you to have made these claims?
Do you work for them?
Yeah, do you have any evidence that they were present in more than one county in Los Angeles?
Can you show your work, Sidney?
It's a simple question, Sydney.
We will talk about what her source is later.
And I don't want to spoil it, but it involves decapitation.
Oh.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
I know.
That's going to be.
Started that word.
I thought you were going to say DiCaprio.
No.
No, no, no.
I do believe everyone involved was older than 21, so he was unlikely to have played a role.
Yeah, he's off the hook.
Yeah.
So we will continue our main source for today, with our main source for today, which is the public version of a filing by Dominion voting systems against Fox News.
This is a brief in support of Dominion's motion for summary judgment on liability.
I'm going to explain the legally shortly.
The document opens up with several quotes, however, and I think these are interesting.
Quote number one: 71 million voters will never accept Biden.
This process is to destroy his presidency before it even starts.
If it even starts, we either close on Trump's victory or delegitimize Biden.
The plan, all caps.
That's Steve Bannon to Maria Bartiromo on November 10th, 2020.
Maria Bartaromo is a Fox News financial journalist and TV personality who hosts mornings with Maria and Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street.
She used to work at like CBS.
She was like a fairly respected reporter before all this.
When you Google her name, Wikipedia provides this poll quote.
As a reporter, I approach every situation knowing that everyone has his or her own agenda.
It's not a bad thing.
It's just a fact.
I mean, not untrue.
Not untrue.
For example, the agenda you and Steve Bannon hatched to delegitimize the Biden election.
The only thing, yeah, the only thing that I would push back on is the it's not a bad thing part.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it is a bad thing in your case because your agenda was to overturn a Democratic election and commit treason.
It certainly can be a bad thing if the thing is bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If the thing is, for example, installing a dictatorship, then yes, that personal agenda is bad.
Tomato tomato, Robert.
If your personal agenda is increased post office funding, then perhaps it's okay.
Yeah, we could give that a pass.
Yeah.
So Maria started Fox's troubles when she interviewed Sidney Powell right after the election on November 8th, 2020.
She said, quote, Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software.
I know there were voting irregularities.
Tell me about that.
And Powell replied, that's putting it mildly.
The computer glitches could not and should not have happened at all.
This is where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist.
Now, immediately.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I've practiced for years.
Now, immediately after airing this, Rupert Murdoch sent a message to one of his producers saying it was very hard to credibly cry foul everywhere because Trump had lost multiple swing states.
Yeah, it's hard.
Fair point.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And it's one of those things you can see why there was an interest on behalf of the Fox personalities using Sidney Powell to tie in Dominion to this because they were active in a bunch of different swing states.
And kind of creating this and pushing this conspiracy allowed them to explain how all of those swing states had broken against Trump, which was a thing that Fox's reporting had led folks to believe was not really possible.
Dominion's filing notes that Fox was aware that these claims were bogus from the jump.
And here's a message from Sean Hannity to Fox politics editor Chris Stirwalt.
That whole narrative that Sidney was pushing, I did not believe it for one second.
No reasonable person would have thought that.
Sterwald gets fired after this, by the way.
So the motion itself opens with this.
Fox knew from the top down, Fox knew that the Dominion stuff was total BS.
Yet despite knowing the truth, or at minimum, recklessly disregarding that truth, Fox spread and endorsed these outlandish voter fraud claims about Dominion, even as it internally recognized the lies as crazy, absurd, and shockingly reckless.
Those are all quotes from Fox executives.
So this all serves to support Dominion's key contention that Fox knew their claims were false and thus they reported on election fraud in a way that demonstrated actual malice without resort to motive or other circumstantial factors.
That's the legal term for they're completely at fault and they don't even have a right to defend themselves, right?
Like that's that's basically what complicit.
Yeah, that's that that's more or less what they are saying here.
Cause like this is a motion for summary judgment.
So the thing that they're saying is we want the judge to just kind of rule on this right now based on the merits of the case.
We think that this is such a clear case that like there's there's really nothing else to say based on the information that discovery and the depositions have drug up.
Like it's like on its face prima facey or whatever, however the fuck you're supposed to pronounce that.
This is just such an obvious case that we want a ruling right now, which is rare.
You don't generally get that, especially with very large lawsuits like this.
We'll see what actually happens.
But based on the reporting they've put together, I think they have a strong case.
Yeah.
Motion for Summary Judgment00:03:03
So I want to continue from the motion.
But first, you know what motion I want to urge people towards?
Forward.
Pulling out that wallet.
Pulling out that wallet.
That's right, baby.
Shrimp.
The dingo.
Ate your baby.
That's right.
Yes, that's Australian for purchase these products and services.
No one knows why.
We're back.
Cody, I'm going to give you the rest of the episode to figure out what that acronym is.
On it.
So I want to continue from the motion here.
Fox's correct call of Arizona for Joe Biden triggered a backlash among its audience, and the network was being rejected.
That's a I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Come on.
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Fox News False Claims00:14:55
The Nick Dick and Pole show.
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He's the writer director.
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It's a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying.
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Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
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I got that wrong.
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Quote from a Fox executive.
Rival networks such as Newsmax took advantage of the opening by promoting an alternative universe, another quote, of election fraud.
So Fox went on a war footing, caring more about protecting its own falling viewership than about the truth.
In the words of Fox News's SVP and managing editor of the Washington, D.C. Bureau, Bill Salmon, it's remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.
I might have a couple of notes for that, including the idea that there were many good journalists at Fox News, but that's where I went as well.
Yeah, that's where I might have an issue.
So next, Dominion goes on to assert why this is different from most defamation lawsuits.
Normally, plaintiffs prove defendants' actual malice, whether they knew it was false, or in fact, entertained serious doubts as to the truth of the statement by inference, as it would be rare for a defendant to admit such doubts.
And they cite Solano versus Playgirl in that here.
And they note that here, overwhelming direct evidence establishes Fox's knowledge of falsity, not just doubts.
And I want to talk about the Solano v. Playgirl case that it's a 2002 Ninth Circuit Court case that Dominion brings up here because it's kind of interesting.
In the January 1999 issue of Playgirl magazine, there was a cover photograph of actor Jose Solano, who played someone called Manny Gutierrez in Baywatch from 96 to 99.
Solano had not posed for or given an interview to Playgirl, and he did not consent for them to use his image.
He was shown shirtless and wearing red lifeguard trunks and had like a bunch of models surrounding him on the front cover in like a suggestive way that was kind of like meant to portray an image of him as a less wholesome character than his he personally portrayed himself as.
And since he hadn't actually like sat down to be interviewed or anything by Playgirl, his argument, Solano's argument, was that they were basically, there was essentially direct, like they either knew that what they were doing was false or they had serious doubts as to the truth of the statement, right?
Like that's kind of the case that's being cited here as like a previous example of precedent.
And Solano won the case and established damages.
I think it's, I don't know, I think it's interesting that they're falling back on this Playgirl case as sort of evidence of like, this is the most, this is like, this is the most directly similar kind of irresponsibility from like a major, a major media network in the recent past.
Dominion's lawyers note that Fox defamed their company not once or twice, but many times over a period of months.
Tucker Carlson accused Dominion of committing, quote, the single greatest crime in American history.
Yeah.
And so again, it's pretty hard to mitigate that.
I know, right?
There's a few genocides.
There's a lot of them.
I don't know.
Yeah, that sounds pretty hyperbolic.
Oh, Tucker.
And that's going to come back to bite Tucker in the ass in a very short time here.
Dominion notes that while defamation cases tend to involve just the malicious acts of either an individual employee at a company or maybe a small group of people, at Fox, literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility were involved, which is part of why they're saying we just want the judge to rule on this because the irresponsibility is so deep and far-reaching.
Fox, for their part, admits Sidney Powell and her team never provided Fox with any evidence as to her claims.
Dominion, by contrast, made 3,600 separate communications to Fox with a dozen separate and widely circulated fact check emails, each pointing to third-party information, debunking the claims.
I bet the algorithm did something though to it.
It made it lies.
Well, yeah, because Sydney's stuff just trended so well.
I love that clip of her talking.
They love just like being like, an algorithm did it.
There's a sinister algorithm.
It's always an algorithm.
It's so easy to point to the thing that nobody actually understands very well.
That's the fun thing about algorithms.
And it's about to be the fun thing about AI and deep fakes in that, like, as far as most people in media are concerned, it's just magic.
And so like, if you're a bad actor, like literally anyone at Fox, you can just use the word algorithm or AI now.
Yeah, deep fake.
It's easy.
Yeah.
It's just like saying a wizard did it.
You've got some sort of plausible explanation for an implausible thing.
Yeah.
And I don't know.
I'm torn on this because I do think we need more wizards in American politics.
But not like this.
Not like this.
No.
No.
No, actual wizards.
Not computer wizards.
Not computer wizards.
Real wizards.
No.
Real wizards.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like Gandalf.
Yeah, like that.
That's who I want.
I want Gandalf to have his own fascist news show where he supports Ron DeSantis in removing books from elementary schools.
That's what I want.
That's what you want.
Or even like a Dumbledore.
I don't know.
Well, Gandalf in particular.
Co-host.
He got radicalized after they banned indoor smoking.
That really, that really, that really got him.
Yeah.
He's a big anti-masker, too.
Dumbledore and JK are tight still.
Yeah, problematic.
I got to say.
Problematic.
Yeah, I'm just glad he's dead.
So now Dominion is, yeah, moving for summary judgment, which again, there's a very high burden of evidence when you ask a judge to do this.
Dominion argues that they can cross it easily.
Quote, Fox falsely claimed, number one, Dominion committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 presidential election.
Number two, Dominion's software and algorithms manipulated vote counts in the 2020 presidential election.
Number three, Dominion is owned by a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chavez.
And number four, Dominion paid kickbacks to government officials who used its machines.
This is what false Fox claims.
These are the claims they have to prove are false.
That's right.
They don't have to prove it like Dominion saying these are obviously false claims.
Like, yeah, this is the only evidence that they have that would make what they did responsible if these were true.
And it's patently ridiculous.
So what was number four?
Oh, yeah.
Number four, Cody, is Dominion paid kickbacks to government officials who used its machines in the 2020 presidential election.
Yeah, this is like, these are pretty serious allegations to make with absolutely there's not quite no again we're building towards what the evidence here was for the greatest crime in American history so Dominion insists that it's irrelevant that the accused statements that I just read were made by guests of Fox rather than hosts Yeah, and basically they're like, look, Fox is a publisher.
Every statement that they choose to put out without contradiction or questioning is something they are publishing.
If you were to have Sidney Powell on and then question her like that ABC4 corners journalist did, that's okay.
Then you don't have to defend what she said because you're deliberately like questioning its accuracy, you know, like you're actually trying to report.
But if you just let somebody talk as Fox News, you are publishing their allegations.
Yeah, there's also like there's a supportive language that a lot of Fox News, I mean, all of them, I guess maybe, use when dealing with these topics because of stuff like this, because they know they can't say 100%, but they're not always great at it.
Yeah.
And maybe they won't get away with it.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, when the three of us were trying to launch that podcast on your network and you guys wanted to report on breaking news, and I wanted to make a series of allegations against the Home Depot Corporation and the one bad time you had at Home Depot.
Yeah, well, and because of the tunnels underneath Home Depot's where they traffic, well, I probably shouldn't make another trafficking children joke.
The last one we made went badly against us, huh?
I can't imagine why, Robert.
This is me being a responsible publisher.
That's right.
Push back on yourself.
Yeah, recognizing that the years of lawsuits from Home Depot when we tried to put that out are not worth repeating a second time.
See, unlike Fox, some of us can learn.
Learn your lessons.
Go to home depodidit.org.
Anyway, let's move on.
Let's move on here.
So, yeah, the bulk of Dominion's assertion is that they are due summary judgment because Fox editorial employees demonstrated actual malice.
Prevailing on summary judgment in this case requires that they show just one person acted with malice for each false claim about the company.
And this is where the stuff that's really interesting to us comes in.
Quote, as Tucker Carlson told Sidney Powell on November 17th, you keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software.
I hope you will prove that very soon.
You've convinced them that Trump will win.
If you don't have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale, it's a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.
And then on November 21st, Carlson texted, it was shockingly useless to claim that Dominion rigged the election.
If there's no one inside the company willing to talk or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it, and as you know, there isn't.
Which is a pretty clear evidence that Tucker knew that what Sidney was saying was wildly irresponsible.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, you're right.
I'm wondering how much pushback, like what qualifies as pushback, right?
Because what, again, what he said was like, well, this is a very, it's compelling and you've convinced people, but you need to show evidence.
So like, you know, the thing that he does and knows that he's doing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, Dominion furthermore alleges that the statements Fox made are what you call, again, per se defamatory.
This means that they allege that the Dominion, that the defendant committed a serious crime and those allegations injured the defendant in their trade or profession.
The key here is that when a statement is per se defamatory, the injured party doesn't need to prove specific damages to establish liability, right?
Not per se.
Yeah, not per se.
I love it.
Per se.
You know, lawyers, those wacky guys.
Per se defamatory.
So Dominion also notes that Fox cannot claim they had some sort of a right to report on Powell's allegations against Dominion on the basis of newsworthiness, since doing so would require them to report accurately that Powell had no evidence to back up her assertions.
Discovery has given Dominion some interesting ammo here, including a text from Rupert Murdoch asking Suzanne Scott, current Fox News CEO, whether it was, quote, and here's Murdoch again: unarguable that high-profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6th was an important chance to have the results overturned.
That is Rupert Murdoch telling the CEO of Fox it is unarguable that high-profile Fox voices fed the story that the election was stolen and that Jan 6 was an important chance to have the results overturned.
That's Murdoch saying we absolutely caused January or helped cause Jan 6.
That's nuts.
An unbelievable thing that he just said.
Yeah.
What?
He texted his co-worker.
He texted the quiet part.
You can't just say that.
Yeah.
Oh, maybe you can.
He did.
Maybe I should have been paying attention to this story.
We did January 6th.
Yeah.
That's that Rupert Murdoch quote.
We did January 6th, you know?
Put that on some merch.
I just wanted to get that lady murked by the Secret Service.
Oh, my God.
That's Rupert Murdoch for you.
That's a joke.
It's not legally actionable.
So Fox News responded to Murdoch's state, but basically, Murdoch is like, I'm fairly certain that we contributed to this.
Do we have evidence of our voices feeding our people feeding the story that the election was stolen?
And executives responded to him with 50 examples of this.
Which again, really making the lawyers at Dominion's job easy for them.
Why?
That's so like, because they can't even be like Dominions dug up all these examples.
And Fox's like, those aren't examples.
They're like, no, here are some examples.
I'd love to see it.
Signed Rupert.
Yeah, from Rupert.
Here's some perfect evidence.
I hope it gave him indigestion when he had to hand over all of his fucking text messages to these guys.
I agree with you, Katie.
I hope he was shitting a sandbag, so to speak.
Boy, that's a terrible phrase.
And that's what I hope.
Yeah.
Rupert Murdoch shit.
There's a video going around.
I tweeted it recently of a guy like getting sucked down into a grain silo.
That's the consistency of shit.
That is awful.
Yeah.
Stay the fuck away from grain silos.
Don't go in grain silos, folks.
Stay away from them.
Shoot them at a distance.
Fox readily.
Grain silos.
And I was like, what's that about?
Didn't investigate.
Now I know.
I came from a small farming town where every year people would die in grain silos.
God.
Grain silos and drunken ATV rides.
Those were two of the leading causes of death.
If only Fox News had a similar record.
I'm going to continue quoting from the Dominion lawsuit.
As Rupert Murdoch told Suzanne Scott, who's again the CEO of Fox, in the aftermath of January 6th, all very well for Sean to tell you he was in despair about Trump, but what did he tell his viewers?
When Rupert Murdoch watched Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell spin their lies on November 19th, he told Suzanne Scott, terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear.
Scott concurred.
Grain Silos and Death00:04:12
Yes, Sean and even Pierrot agrees.
They talk about Judge Janine Pira.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Look at all the damage we're causing.
Yeah, wow, we're really fucking some shit up here.
You know who else is fucking up?
Like all those other times.
No.
Speaking of fucking shit up, but like in a good way, in an ethical capitalist way, where we all learn about what kind of mattresses we need.
Cody, a lot of people don't know this about you.
You prefer to sleep.
We call it PBJ style with a mattress below you and another mattress on top of you.
Yeah.
Makes me feel secure.
That's right.
A little bit cozier, a little bit more weight than a weighted blanket.
Yeah.
I'm not rustling around.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, if you have guests over, they can stay on top.
Exactly.
And this is the difference between us, Cody.
I prefer to sleep literally PBJ style, where once a week I bake two large bedside sheets of bread and I fill them with jam and with peanut butter.
And I just roll around in it naked all night.
And then in the morning, my breakfast is ready.
Oh, that's nice.
I just lick myself clean like a lizard.
Like I dream my lamb that's just been born.
Oh, that's good.
Because I'm stuck.
Yeah.
Anyway, here's some real ads.
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I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict me.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk.
Yeah, mom.
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Brett Baer Malfeasance00:11:56
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Patreon backslash.
Hit them up, Jiff.
A lot of money here, potentially.
So one of the things I find compelling about the allegations Dominion's lawyers have put together is the fact that Fox execs were aware ahead of time that Trump would claim fraud if he lost.
Now, this suggests, you might say, something of a conspiracy, a loose plan to find a serviceable election fraud argument and then push it whether or not it's true.
In the words of Chris Sterwalt, Fox's politics editor, who again gets shit canned after this, during the relevant timeframe, long before the election, Chris says, Trump started making the claim that the only way he could lose the election was by fraud, or that the only way he would not prevail would be if it was stolen.
He had laid that predicate down throughout the spring and into the summer, and it was very well known and understood by everybody in the business that this was the gambit that he was making.
That's a straight quote from Sterwalt's deposition.
Now, Sterwalt said this under oath, and Dominion adds that other Fox executives made similar statements under oath.
They understood that Trump was laying out a false line ahead of time so that he could justify contesting the election, even if the evidence did not support it.
As the COVID-19 pandemic made more mail-in voting inevitable, an understanding evolved that the discrepancy between in-person counts and mail-in votes would provide an opportunity to question the election.
So before the election, Fox personalities were talking about like, well, you're going to have all the in-person votes get counted first, but then the mail-ins are going to come and it's going to cause a sudden shift.
And that...
What's funny is that we were all talking about how they were going to be doing this.
Yes.
So are they?
It's so maddening.
See, we're not so different after all, Katie.
We were all talking about the same thing.
A lot of things.
Yeah, we agree.
God.
I'm going to quote again from Chris Sterwalt's deposition here.
Election Day votes are going to skew heavily Republican.
Early and absentee votes are going to skew heavily Democratic.
If you stretch out the period of time over which that's going to be counted, it's going to create a false, it could tend to create a false impression about the direction that the election was going to go overall.
He noted that political professionals and political journalists at Fox universally understood this phenomenon, also termed the red mirage and the blue shift.
Yeah.
So that's good.
Good that they just said all this.
Now, Dominion just happened to be in a position at the nexus of all these facts, which made them a convenient scapegoat for false claims of election fraud.
Discovery in this case also gives us some insight as to communications between Fox employees and members of the Trump team.
When Fox called Arizona first at 1120 p.m., a member of Trump's team called Fox's Washington Bureau managing editor Bill Salmon and told him it was, quote, way too soon to be calling Arizona.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows followed up shortly thereafter, just as angry, and Fox viewers were even more enraged.
Quote, On November 5th, Fox's chief White House correspondent told Salmon and FNC President Jay Wallace, we are taking major heat over the AZ call.
Our viewers are also chanting, Fox News sucks, something I have never, something I have never heard before.
What you just said about your popular power.
I've definitely heard that.
Might I also listening?
Dominion also cites internal Fox emails stating, holy cow, our audience is mad at the network and they're all caps furious.
It is at this point that we get to one of the more intense, because again, parts of this are redacted.
And the way that redactions work, you know, you don't, you don't always know why, right?
Like, that's that's part of the problem.
Or sometimes it's, yeah, yeah.
But there's the, like, immediately following those internal Fox emails, there's this paragraph that begins, the backlash was so strong that, and then the rest of the paragraph is all blacked out.
I have no idea what that's going on about, but I hope we find out someday.
And the mystery of what that paragraph holds is made all the more enticing by what comes next.
Fox hosts Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingram, and Sean Hannity immediately understood the threat to them personally.
Carlson wrote his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, on November 5th: We worked really hard to build what we have.
Those fuckers are destroying our credibility.
It enrages me.
He added that he had spoken with Laura and Sean a minute ago, that they are highly upset.
Carlson noted, at this point, we're getting hurt no matter what.
Pfeiffer responded, it's a hard needle to thread, but I really think many on our side are being reckless demagogues right now.
Tucker replied, Of course they are.
We're not going to follow them.
And then he added, What Trump's good at is destroying things.
He's the undisputed world champion of that.
He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.
This is awful and so good.
It is.
There's so much going on there, too, because he's like, first off, I'm furious.
They're destroying our credibility by questioning the narrative that Trump's election was stolen from him, right?
That's what they're doing that's destroying our credibility, is they're making the audience distrust us because the audience will only believe the lie that the election was stolen.
But then he's like, fuck these people who spread the election lies in the first place because they're being reckless demagogues and we're not going to follow them.
But also, Trump is a destroyer and I don't want him to destroy.
It's this incredible mix of totally aware of how much of a lie that they're spreading and also comprehensive cowardice.
Yeah.
And a history of that knowledge too, because even the, they're all, they're acting like demagogues.
Of course they are is what he said.
Yeah.
Imply, like, of course they are.
That's what they do.
That's what we are, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, they don't mind that part.
Yep.
Nope.
So Dominion next presents evidence that Summit Fox sought to actively rein in this disinformation.
Chief political correspondent Brett Baer repeatedly told colleagues that there was no evidence of fraud.
And he alerted his boss when Maria Bartaromo posted baseless allegations of vote dumps on social media, telling him, we have to prevent this stuff.
We need to fact check.
And it is a note of how bad this is that Brett Baer is the, it's the voice of reason inside the ethical center of the company.
Pops his little head out.
Yeah.
Like, I'm like, I understand kind of because Shep Smith was like the other guy at Fox.
Like not a completely broken monster.
It's fascinating to me, like what these guys must have told themselves in order to keep doing this because they clearly have some ethical center.
Right.
Because this is also like, it's interesting because this is just about this one topic.
Yeah.
And I can't imagine just now do all the rest.
Yeah.
This is the same thing.
Like, what have you been saying about everything?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because one of two things is true.
Either Brett does this with everything that Fox lies about, or this was the first time he was like, well, this is a bridge too far.
Right.
Or yeah, like everybody like texts each other like, this is damaging how we're going to do this and play it and lie to people.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think I kind of suspect because you remember there's that thing.
Oh, God, what's her name?
Lady with the TV show who's like very popular liberal news person.
Rachel Maddow.
Rachel Maddow.
I was literally my, she put it anyway, whatever.
I can't believe I forgot her name.
But like, she's made comments about Tucker being a nice guy in person and like their friendly way.
Yeah, they used to work together and stuff.
I kind of suspect that's what's going on with Brett, where it's like there's a certain degree of like malfeasance and propaganda that like his friends who you know are elsewhere in media and politics don't mind from Fox, right?
But this denying the election entirely, trying to inciting this fucking seditious act of January 6th, that was fucking a step too far.
And it was going to make him look bad in front of his friends.
So he had to, I don't know.
I don't know, Brett Baer.
It's good to know there's a line.
But clearly for some of them, there's a line.
By November 6th, Rupert Murdoch had stated the same fears as Brett Baer and warned CEO Suzanne Scott, if Trump becomes a sore loser, we should watch Sean especially.
And others don't sound the same.
Good night on Sean.
He's going to be a wild card on this one if Trump tries to make himself a dictator.
That same day, Sidney Powell was a guest on Lou Dobbs Tonight, where she told viewers about a supposed CIA program called Hammer and Scorecard.
Hammer was a government supercomputer, she told viewers, and scorecard was a program that would allow it to change votes.
She told Fox viewers this, quote, explains a lot of what we're seeing.
After the broadcast, a viewer emailed Brett Baer about Hammer and Scorecard.
He forwarded this to Fox president Jay Wallace and asked, What is this?
What the fuck is this?
So there is evidence that Murdoch even took steps with one of his other properties, the New York Post, to stop stolen election conspiracy theories from spreading.
On November 7th, the Post published an editorial begging Trump to admit he'd lost and quote, get Rudy Giuliani off TV.
Murdoch, one of the things that Discovery revealed is Murdoch thanking a Post employee for ensuring the editorial was spread.
So he had no problem with like manipulating his various periodicals in order to get this message out, which is particularly interesting to me given another fact revealed by the Dominion lawsuit.
Dominion alleges Rupert Murdoch provided Donald Trump's senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner with confidential information about the Biden campaign.
In specific, they gave Kushner access to Biden campaign ads before publication and information on his debate strategy.
Dominion does not go into more detail here.
That is just an allegation that they make in their filing.
Fox, for their part, say that Dominion is mischaracterizing the facts here.
And they further note, quote, Dominion cherry-picks any soundbite it can find from any corner of the Fox organization, even though it admits in its brief 117 pages later that most of the evidence is utterly irrelevant to the legal issues in this case.
Dominion's focus on such irrelevant evidence demonstrates that it is more interested in headlines than in law or fact.
And what's compelling to me about this is that that's not entirely wrong.
I don't think that Dominion's wrong on the facts.
They are including a lot of shit in here that is not specifically targeted towards their lawsuit, right?
That is not specifically about claims Fox made about Dominion.
I think their strategy here is to try and prove how comprehensive the malice and irresponsibility.
Well, also the culture and what this, yeah.
And the agenda and relationship, if there's a clear idea, painting a full picture here.
Yeah.
And I think what they're doing is fair.
I also kind of suspect that a piece of it also is them being like, well, they fucking dragged our name through the mud, and we can do that without lying about it.
Irrelevant Evidence Focus00:04:21
Fuck yeah.
Fuck yourself.
Fuck them.
Fuck them.
Fucking Petty.
I'll be fucking up.
Fuck these pieces of shit.
Well, we can throw down.
You want to throw down, motherfuckers?
Try me.
Yeah, that's what this is.
But right now, do you want to motherfuckers want to throw down by telling people your plugs?
Because this is part one.
We're done.
This is part one.
We're done.
We're done.
One and done.
Bada bing, bada boom, baby.
And then they learned their lesson.
It was fun, though.
Yeah, and everything was good forever.
Yeah, yeah, this wraps up.
Yeah, we've got other shows for you to check out.
Hello.
We'll plug the podcast even more news.
Oh, wait, you guys have a podcast.
Interesting.
We do.
And we talk about stuff.
We shoot the shit.
We make jokes.
We have fun guests.
Sometimes Robert's a guest.
Robert, would you like to come on our show again soon?
We'll talk about that.
I would love to come on the show again.
I've been meaning to get into podcasting, so this could be a really good way for me to explore that.
I think that you'd be really good at it.
Interesting.
Cody, plug our other thing.
Oh, yeah.
We have another show called Some More News.
It's also available as a podcast if you'd like.
It's on youtube.com as well as a video.
There's stuff in it with puppets are there sometimes.
And check out our patreon.com slash some more news.
Support those things.
Yeah.
Furthermore.
Furthermore.
Things to be continued.
How are you doing?
When we return.
Yeah.
Whistlers.
Yeah.
What are you supporting that too?
Yeah.
How are you doing?
Like, would you flex for us?
Maybe, like, lay down, take those shoes off.
Get that shirt off too.
You know, come on over.
What are you asking them to flex?
They're cute?
Cuddle up with me.
Just come on.
Get on in here.
Get on, listeners.
Get another mattress.
Pop a mattress on top of us.
Yeah, just make that a double deck of city.
We got ourselves a towel.
We all get covered in peanut butter and jelly together.
Okay, this guy.
Maybe watch season one of True Detective, you know?
No, it's less than that.
Good stuff.
That was a great season.
I did.
I re-watched it recently.
I love that show.
That season.
Just for the reggie to do of it.
That show.
Anyway, I'm going to go dig out my generator from this pile of fucking snow.
Yeah.
And I'm going to re-watch True Detective Season 1 again.
Again, already.
Wow.
I'm not going to do either of those things.
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They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on Demand This Guy's.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like.
Wild bats you were with.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
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We are talking about the one investment most people ignore.
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It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
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