Consider This from NPR - The Dominion Lawsuit Pulls Back The Curtain On Fox News. It's Not Pretty.

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Documents released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit reveal that many Fox News stars knew conspiracy theories about the 2020 election were baseless but invited guests who spewed those claims on air anyway.The documents were released by Dominion Voting Systems as part of its lawsuit against both Fox News and its parent company. They include text messages sent by Fox News personalities and statements made under oath by the network's controlling owner Rupert Murdoch.NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik explains that the lawsuit is the latest in a series of ethical breaches during Murdoch's decades-long reign at the helm of one of the most powerful media companies in the world.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

If you were a regular viewer of Fox News in the fall of 2020, you heard a whole lot from one person. Well, joining us tonight is Sidney Powell. The reaction to what you just heard is Sidney Powell. Sidney Powell. A great American and prominent appellate lawyer. Great to have you with us, Sidney. Sidney Powell, one of the attorneys involved in Donald Trump's attempt to overturn his loss in the presidential election. She made at least nine appearances on Fox News and Fox Business in November 2020. Night after night, Fox hosts pitched softballs to Powell as she spread fabricated stories about widespread election

fraud and rigged voting machines, machines from one company in particular, Dominion Voting Systems. Here she is talking to Laura Ingraham the week after the election. It's provable and we will be proving it along with other methods of fraud that they used. Well, Sidney, you certainly know a little bit about what the other side is capable of. And here she is on Lou Dobbs tonight, a few days later. Sidney, at the outset of this broadcast, I said that this is the culmination of what has been over a four-year effort to overthrow this president, to first deny his candidacy the election, but then to overthrow his presidency. This looks like the effort to carry out an end game in the effort against him. Do you concur? Oh, absolutely. The thing is,

off the air, Fox hosts were not so sold on Powell. Sidney Powell is a bit nuts. Ingram said in a text to other Fox hosts, Sorry, but she is. And Lou Dobbs? After Powell's second November appearance on his show, he texted his producer that he didn't know what Powell was thinking or doing or why. She, quote, could be losing her mind, his producer replied. Two days later, she was on the show again. Now, we know all of this because of legal filings made public as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion against Fox and its parent company. In response, a Fox News spokesperson says Dominion cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context.

But in the latest batch of documents, we hear from the man at the top. In a sworn deposition, Rupert Murdoch, the network's controlling owner, admitted that Fox News stars endorsed the false claim of a stolen election. And he said he could have ordered Fox to stop having lawyers like Sidney Powell on air, but he didn't. Consider this. Rupert Murdoch rose from an Australian newspaper owner to, arguably, the most powerful man in American media by shrewdly amassing and wielding influence,

often at the expense of basic journalistic ethics. Of course one enjoys a feeling of power. In the Dominion lawsuit, Murdoch's company faces a reckoning. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Friday, March 3rd. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. It is difficult to overstate the reach of Rupert Murdoch. His media empire spans five continents and includes The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, and, of course, Fox News.

And Murdoch has taken on an almost mythical place in the culture. Even The Simpsons fictional tycoon Mr. Burns has paid homage. Well, I guess it's impossible to control all the media. Unless, of course, you're Rupert Murdoch. He is one beautiful man. But Murdoch's quest for influence has often been in tension with the mission of a journalistic outlet and the law and ethics that go along with it. Here's Murdoch in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Company back in 1967. This is where he said he enjoyed the feeling of power that came with his newspapers.

It's against that backdrop that these revelations in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit came out this week. To help us walk through these revelations, we have NPR's David Fulkenflick. In addition to covering media for NPR, he's written a biography of Rupert Murdoch. Hey, David. Hey, Mary Louise. Okay, so these revelations against Murdoch have all come out as part of this defamation lawsuit against Fox. Just catch us up with what what the major guiding issues here are. So this is a lawsuit, accusing Dominion of switching votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and thus costing Trump an election fraud. And Fox amplified this. And as Rupert Murdoch said, some of its stars even endorsed this view in a way that

Dominion is alleging really harmed it. Yeah. Okay. So what else exactly is Murdoch saying about how this happened? Why this happened? Well, if you sift through the evidence presented by Dominion so far, and Fox would say this is cherry picking and out of context, but nonetheless, it's a voluminous record of emails and other exchanges, as well as Murdoch's own testimony under oath to Dominion's lawyers that show that Fox embraced this as a strategy, that on election night, Fox News was the first major TV outlet to project that Joe Biden would win the key state of Arizona and thus putting the election almost certainly out of reach of Donald Trump. Arizona, are you 100 percent sure of that call and when you made it and why did you make it? Absolutely. We made it after basically a half hour of debating.

Is it time yet? Because it was it's it's been clear for a while that the former vice president is in the lead in Arizona and was most likely to to win the state. And Trump voters, which is to say Fox viewers, abandoned the network in droves by the millions. And you saw a panic set in among their stars, their top names, the Tucker Carlson's and Sean Hannity's of the world. And you also saw executives scrambling to say, how do we keep faith with our viewers, not by giving them the truth, but by telling them something they might want to hear? David, I mentioned you followed Murdoch's career for a long time, and it's been a long career to follow. He's 91 years old now. How surprising have you found his statements in this case?

You know, it isn't surprising exactly, but it's so stark. It still comes as something of a shock to see it in black and white and to see these impulses so clear. There's no subtlety. There's no code. There's no misdirection. It is just stark and it is pretty cynical. But it's in keeping with how he's handled himself

and the way in which he's operated. Let's take a couple of examples from his tabloids. And why do I pick that? Because the tabloids are sort of the beating heart of his journalistic instincts. You know, there was an instance back in the late 80s where the Sun tabloid, the largest daily in Britain, it's owned by Murdoch, a place he famously loved,

falsely blamed nearly 100 British soccer fans for their own deaths in a stadium stampede. There was a reporter, Harry Arnold, who carried guilt for that in his heart for decades. He much later told the BBC that Murdoch's editor-in-chief had intentionally distorted his reporting. That story with my name on it, Headline the Truth, was the unhappiest episode of my career. And when I had to come back and do some other reportings on tabloid years

later, you know, I had British listeners pelt me with accounts of how angry they still were. Well, and I'm remembering that other huge tabloid scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's media empire. That was like a decade ago, right? And it was a different tabloid. That's right. The news of the world hacked into emails and voicemails and cell phones of so many people and that started to come out.

And the British public basically tolerated it when it was the royals or sports stars or celebrities that they thought were basically sport for tabloid reporting. But when it became crime victims, when it became war dead, then it was too much. And by Murdoch's account, to his own shame, he called it the most humble day of his life when he had to testify in front of a parliamentary committee. But Murdoch then, as he would say now, said he wasn't responsible, said ultimately, look, this happened under me, but it happened way under me. Those I hired and empowered failed me, and I'm the guy to clean this up. Okay. Well, so let's take all of that, the history, the tabloids, all of Murdoch's enterprises in Britain, and turn to what lessons he may have taken, how that became what is now the most recognizable part of his media empire here in

the US, at least, which is Fox News. I think tabloid blood coursed through the veins of Fox News. And one of the, in some ways, the improvements Murdoch was able to make on Fox was that it was mostly about talk, that breaking news was never the point and has become decreasingly important there. And they pick incendiary themes to choose, issues of race, issues of religion, issues of culture to whip up the kind of urgency that requires people to tune in night after night. I interviewed a guy who was a top legal executive and lawyer for Murdoch over his publishing side in the Wall Street Journal who quit, who was an Afghan-born Muslim who said he could no longer stomach what he saw on the air and, for that matter, read in some of Murdoch's other publications. Scaring people, demonizing immigrants, creating like a fervor, right, an anxiety about what was happening in our country. That was the former News Corp senior legal executive Joseph Azzam. So that's the stage onto which a presidential candidate named Donald Trump walks.

And I think it feels worth remembering how then and then for a long time after, Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump seemed to very much serve each other's interests. Well, and that's well put because if we were to see all the emails and private correspondence that Murdoch had about Trump prior to that, it would have been contemptuous. He thought Trump was intellectually unimpressive. He did not want Trump for president. But once it was clear Trump was going to win, he had Fox run to the front of the parade and look like it was leading it all along. Here's how President Trump described his relationship with Rupert Murdoch early on in his administration. And thank you to my very good friend, Rupert Murdoch. There's only one Rupert that we know. And as we now know, ahead of the election in 2020, Murdoch was feeding the Trump campaign

ads from Joe Biden before they had aired, helping them strategize for the campaign. So, David, talk to me about how Fox is covering Trump today or not covering him, as the case may be, because when I turn on Fox these days, there seems to be a lot less Trump. You're not wrong. You know, after the January 2021 siege of Congress, Murdoch told a former advisor that he wanted Trump to become a non-person. That's what Trump has all but become on Fox News. What you're really seeing is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis auditioning for Fox and also for the Fox viewers. Okay, so back to the developments that are why we're all talking about this this week. What are we watching for next in the Dominion lawsuit?

Well, we're going to see the next stage is that there's going to be a release of hundreds if not thousands of pages of what are called exhibits. And that's the actual raw text messages, emails, sworn depositions where people testify under oath to learn more about what will either substantiate Dominion's case or, as Fox alleges, maybe undercut it and maybe show the ways in which some of these assertions and characterizations are made out of context. But all of this is heading towards the inflection point of the start of the trial in mid-April, which is scheduled. And the question hanging over it, is there some way Fox can settle this that limits the extent to which Fox has to acknowledge to its viewers how it not

only told them things that were wrong, but that it was wrong to do so and knew it was wrong to do so at the time. Dominion claimed at the outset of the case that they wanted prominent retraction and acknowledgement of the damage done to them. And Fox so far isn't even acknowledging they got it wrong. Their defense is we're reporting newsworthy allegations from inherently newsworthy person, the president of the United States, and the press needs to be able to do that if it's to function freely in the U.S. NPR's David Fulkenflik sharing his reporting there. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.