Law&Crime Sidebar - Fox News' Biggest Stars Set to be Deposed in Billion-Dollar Lawsuit

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News heats up after the depositions of several key network hosts. Jesse Weber and Aidan McLaughlin, Editor-In-Chief of Mediaite, break down the developments in the case.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:Thanks to Established Titles for sponsoring this episode! Get 10% off on any purchase with code LC10. Go to https://establishedtitles.com/LAWCRIME10 and help support the channel!GUESTS:Aidan McLaughlin, Editor in Chief of Mediaite: https://twitter.com/aidnmclaughlinLAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergVideo Editing - Michael DeiningerGuest Booking - Alyssa FisherSocial Media Management - Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieObjectionsThey Walk Among AmericaCoptales and CocktailsThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. The $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News heats up as the network's major hosts sit for depositions. I'll be joined by Ada McLaughlin, the editor-in-chief of Mediite to break it all down. Welcome to Sidebar, presented by Law and Crime. I'm Jesse Weber. Last year, Dominion Voting Systems, the company that creates voting software and hardware like voting machines, they filed a lawsuit against Fox News for defamation.

And the lawsuit stated, quote, Fox endorsed, repeated, and broadcast a series of verifiably false yet devastating lies about Dominion. One, Dominion committed election fraud by rigging the 2020 presidential election. Dominion's software and algorithms manipulated vote counts in the 2020 presidential election. Three, Dominion is owned by a company founded in Venezuela to rig elections, dictator Hugo Chavez. And four, Dominion paid kickbacks to government officials who used its machines in the 2020 presidential election. Now, the lawsuit cited a number of Fox News stars as having pushed these false statements, including Maria Bartaromo, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Janine Piro. Here's actually a brief glimpse into some of the host talking about Dominion.

Yeah, I mean, we've got lots of information about the Dominion voting system, which I've been investigating myself. Several Trump campaign attorneys, prominently Sidney Powell, say they have evidence that certain voting software was rigged and that millions of ballots were changed from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. That is a shocking claim, but we do not dismiss it out of hand. We're dealing here on the left with people who support third trimester abortion and BLM riots. So clearly they have no limits. Are Dominion systems prone to human error? 72 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. All of them, all of us, deserve an answer.

Found a number of issues with Dominion's Democracy Suite 5.5A machine, the same model used, for example, in Pennsylvania. One of the troubling findings by the Secretary of State in Texas was that the voting machine was the voter's inability to check and retain a straight party ballot. Well, now several of those stars have to sit for depositions. Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Jenny and Piro, they've already been deposed. It's been reported that Maria Bartaromo will be deposed next week. All right, me lads and lasses, I want to talk to you about something very special.

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Aiden, good to see you. Nice to be with you, Jesse. First, congratulations. I heard Mediite had a record August of downloads and streaming. We did, yeah, and record page views as well on the website. So we're very happy with that. And thanks to our audience for continuing to come back. And so who better to talk to me about this giant lawsuit? who's been following it. I want to first start off, what are some of the alleged defamatory statements made by these hosts? I mean, what exactly did they say? Or allegedly said? So there were a blizzard of false comments made about dominion and about the election in the aftermath of 2020. They were made by mostly opinion hosts on Fox News. Now, there's one discrepancy that I'd like to make between some of the

Fox News opinion hosts were merely airing claims that were made by Trump and his allies about the election, or hosting his allies on air, like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Then there were other Fox News hosts who were actually pushing these claims themselves. Hosts like Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartoromo, and Gene Piro are named in this Dominion lawsuit as having made these false claims themselves. Maria Bartoromo suggested that Dominion was being used to rig the election. Lou Dobbs also said that there were problems with these Dominion voting machines that were switching votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Rudy Giuliani, for example, said that Dominion voting machines was created by an ally of Hugo Chavez in order to rig elections.

And Dominion obviously says that there is no truth to that claim. But some of the hosts, so Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, at least not even, not supported Dominion, but they entertain this is something we should look into, right? That initially that's what they said. Right. And, you know, Dominion is very specific about what each host did. They note that when Rudy Giuliani made one of his claims about the voting systems company, that Lou Dobbs, who was a Fox business host at the time, approvingly mentioned that he made that he appeared to agree with it. Dominion is trying to make the case that even though he was skeptical about these false claims being made by Sidney Powell and other Trump allies, that he later came to embrace the false claims about Dominion and about the election. Well, what do you think they're being asked in these depositions? And by the way, when I say depositions, these are out-of-court sworn statements. They are obviously important in any litigation because it's a fact-finding mission trying to prove the elements of a claim. You need to do a fact-finding mission, see what's there. But also these depositions could be used at trial. If, for example, Tucker Carlson is called as a witness, whatever his testimony is at trial, should basically match up to what he said in these sworn depositions. I mean, it sounds to me, from what you're saying, the deposition of perhaps Tucker Carlson would look very different. than the deposition of a Maria Bardooma.

That's for sure. And I think there's probably two buckets of Fox News hosts that we're looking at in these depositions. There's hosts like Shepard Smith and Dana Perino, who were both on the news side of Fox News. Shepard Smith is now at CNBC. And they're being asked questions more about how the news side was handling these false claims of a stolen election. Then you have the opinion hosts who are the subject of this lawsuit like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Janine Piro. So the thing that Dominion is trying to do from the reporting that New York Times and Washington Post has done about what is being asked in these depositions is that Dominion is trying to establish that there is a pattern of disregard for the facts here, that these were publicly known facts about Dominion that Fox News hosts were disregarding in their coverage. They're also trying to establish that senior executives at Fox Corp, which is the parent company of Fox News, that's Lockland Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch, that they,

They were very intimately involved in Fox News' coverage and that they were telling Fox News hosts to disregard the truth about Dominion and about the election and to go forward with these allegations of a stolen election because they feared that the Fox News audience was leaving the network. And Fox News did see a massive erosion of its viewership in the aftermath of the 2020 election after the network was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden. A bunch of their viewers, their Trumpier viewers, fled to outlets like Newsmax and OAN, which saw a surge in viewership. So the argument that Dominion is trying to make is that in the wake of that erosion of viewership,

executives like Rupert Murdoch and Lachlan Murdoch instructed Fox News hosts to start airing these claims of a stolen election, to try and sort of cleave back a lot of that viewership. And they were under enormous amount of pressure, these Fox News hosts, to go along with what Trump was saying about the election, because he's attacking the network in real time, saying that viewers should go and watch Newsmax and OAN. So I'd expect that there is going to be a lot of questioning of these Fox News hosts about what they were being told by Fox and Fox Corp and Fox News leadership about how to cover that. It's my understanding the Murdox might be having to be deposed as well. I mean, what are you expecting from that? Because again, it becomes a question of what do you,

if you could be a fly in that room, right? What would you want to know from these Fox News hosts? And what would you want to know from Rupert Murdoch or Lachlan Murdoch or anybody like that? Right. So we're expecting to have depositions. There haven't been scheduled depositions for Lachlan Murdoch and for Rupert yet. Those are expected to be added since the scope of the lawsuit includes Fox Corporation and Fox News, a judge allowed for that scope to go forward. You know, what I would really want to know is one of the fascinating things about this is that

Fox News was sort of divided at the time. You had Fox News anchors on the news side of the network who would. air these extensive packages, Eric Sean, who airs a show on Fox News on the weekends, would air an extensive package debunking all of these election conspiracy theories and saying that they were provably false. We have information that shows that these claims are false. And then later on the Fox News opinion programs, opinion hosts would repeat those election conspiracy theories, or they would host Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani who would push them. So what I would want to know from these Fox News hosts and from Robert Murdoch and the Fox News executives

is you knew you had information that this stuff was false because there were newsmen on Fox News saying that this information was false. What went into the decision to have then an opinion host, and the opinion hosts are all, you know, they get much higher viewership than the news anchors, what went into the decision to have these news hosts then push these false allegations of election fraud or have allies push the false allegations of election fraud without debunking them on air? And I think that's where you, that's where Dominion really gets into their argument of whether there was actual malice here or a reckless disregard for the truth, which is, as you know, Jesse, is an extremely high bar to pass for these sorts of lawsuits.

Right. Let's get into that for a second. So when we're talking about the legal standard here, this is a very, very interesting lawsuit. Some would say it could be a landmark lawsuit, could change the whole landscape of being able to sue giant media organizations. As you said, the high standard here for defamation, because you are dealing with public figures and public institutions is to prove defamation, you need to say, A, that the statement was false and that it was either Fox News host or Fox News knew it was false or was made with reckless disregard for the truth, like basically completely ignored the facts that would say, this isn't what's happening. And so there is a very high burden here.

I want to ask you about something, though. I want to ask you about Fox's reaction to this. So I'm going to ask you about Fox's reaction, if any, to the depositions. Before I do that, though, this is the statement from Fox News. media regarding the Dominion lawsuit. They say, quote, we're confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected. In addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported and not rooted in sound financial analysis, serving as nothing more than a flagrant attempt to deter our journalists from doing their jobs. By the way,

a little side note, of course, there could be a case where Fox News loses and it doesn't necessarily mean they'd have to pay out $1.6 billion. A jury might not come back with that. Now, Dan Webb, who's a lawyer representing Fox News has said that the network was merely reporting on a very important story. He said, quote, there are a few events in the last 50 years in this country that I think are more newsworthy than our president alleging that our entire Democratic system was put on its head by a voting machine company stealing votes. And I'll just add one more thing. Fox News had filed an application to continue to seal documents in the Dominion case. And they made quite a statement And they said, Fox said, quote, Dominion's misleading presentation of the confidential documents

illustrates the dangers of unnecessarily presenting discovery documents at this early stage of the lawsuit. In addition to the public's lack of interest in these documents, Dominion's maneuver does not further judicial economy or an orderly process. Instead, Dominion's goal is clear. It wishes to mislead the public with cherry pick and mischaracterized non-public documents long before it has to carry its burden of proof in court. So in other words, they are completely fighting this right now and completely disagree with Dominion's

characterization of events. Have they responded so far Fox to the announcement that depositions have been taken? So no, Fox News spokes people have basically directed us to their previous statements on this. And Fox News's position is that they're basically appealing to the broad First Amendment predictions that media outlets enjoy in this country. And their argument is that you have the president of the United States that was making these claims of a stolen election, and we were merely reporting on it. And they're saying, you know, basically what we were doing was no different from how every other media outlet is going to report on the very newsworthy things that a president of the United States says. What Dominion is trying to show is that they went a step further and

actually were advancing these claims themselves, claims that they knew to be false. As far as what I know from what is going on in Fox, you know, beyond the statements that they've made, the people inside Fox are a little bit rattled by this because you have, you know, in the discovery phase, you have all these private communications between Fox News hosts that Dominion is going to have access to. And what Dominion is trying to show is that while these Fox News hosts are making these claims on air, internally they know that these claims are false. Fox News is obviously not admitting to that. They are saying that what they were merely doing was reporting on what was going on and that the no specific claim made by a Fox News host, you know, while there may have been claims made

by Rudy Giuliani on air that, you know, you can dispute the veracity of them. Fox News hosts did not make any claims that were libelous. I think that they will probably have a hard time doing that. You know more about the legal standards than I do, but, you know, if you look at just from a journalistic standpoint, the stuff that they were saying on air was provably false, and it was shown false by other hosts on the network, hosts and anchors on the network. And I think what's also interesting, and Dominion is going to try and push this in their case, is that other Murdoch properties, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, they were running

editorials. And their editorials are famously not liberal. They're very conservative, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. And they were running editorials saying Trump should drop the stolen election claims. They are false. They've been tossed by judges that he appointed. He should stop saying that there was a stolen election. So while you had other Murdoch properties saying that this stuff was untrue, you had Fox News hosts and guests on their network, still pushing them. And I think what Dominion is trying to show is that Rupert Murdoch was telling one thing to his newspapers, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, whilst encouraging Fox News to run a different line. And I think that's going to be an

important question in the depositions, right? I mean, understanding why certain things were said and what was the motivation behind it? We talked earlier about, was this a directive from the higher ups that we have to keep pushing this to get viewers? Now, I'll just say something, because I wanted to get your reaction to this lawsuit from a general point of view, a news point of view. You have this news organization being sued. And generally speaking, as you mentioned, there is a First Amendment protection for news organizations. They can make mistakes. They can get reporting wrong. They can report things that are not true as long as it wasn't done intentionally. And as you said, with actual malice in many circumstances. And that's fair, right? You don't want to have

this kind of chilling effect on news organizations. Now, does that not mean that somebody in that news organization would get fired as a result of that? Sure, but it doesn't mean that they're going to be sued for defamation. I am curious, though, with this level of a lawsuit, which, by the way, we're at the point of depositions. Fox News tried to have this dismissed. It's not. It's moving forward. From your point of view, in the media industry, what do you think the effect of this case could be? Are you concerned about it in any way? Because they're taking on a giant news organization, and it is possible that Fox News could be found liable for defamation. Right. So I'm not particularly concerned about this case. I mean, first of all, it's remarkable in its scope and its evidence.

You know, usually defamation cases focus, particularly against media outlets, focus on one, you know, statement that can be proven to be false. This Dominion lawsuit involves dozens and dozens of statements made on air over the course of weeks. So it's just, it's a really, really broad case to begin with. I think when you're looking at the scope of defamation claims brought against media outlets in America, I think it's a great thing that we have such broad protections for media outlets because, as you said, there's, you know, media outlets can get things wrong and they shouldn't be punished by that, particularly by, you know, powerful people that media outlets are supposed to be holding to account. With this case, it really is when you look at the claims,

that were made on Fox News, it was incredibly irresponsible. And at the time, you know, this wasn't one of those things where there was one report that Fox News dropped that turned out to be false later and now you have a lawsuit about it. You had media critics like, you know, us at Mediaite and, you know, the Washington Post, the New York Times, all of these news outlets basically screaming at Fox News saying you are reporting things that are false, that we know to be false, that we knew to be false before you reported them on air. And Fox News completely ignored to that and went ahead and continued. to air this stuff that was incorrect.

And, you know, we've had a couple times in the past where Fox News has been reined in by, you know, the threat of lawsuits. You know, notably the parents of Seth Rich sued Fox News because of false claims that were made about Seth Rich, you know, the killed DNC staffer that were made on air. Fox News ended up settling for a lot of money with the parents of Seth Rich. I think that was a good thing that they were able to sue Fox News and to achieve that victory in court. So I think that this case, the Dominion case, because of what Fox News was airing, because we knew it to be false at the time, it doesn't particularly worry me, but it's certainly an incredibly, you know, momentous case for First Amendment in the United States and for the media in the United States. You know, hopefully it lends some a little bit of humility to Fox News when it goes covering, you know, stolen election claims in the future.

It's not going to be an issue that's going to fall away in the next couple years. And it does make me wonder if they'll actually settle this because although settlements are confidential, the fact that they would settle this, again, if they were terms that both sides could agree to, I wonder if they don't optically want to do that because it would make it look like, yeah, you know, what, we did do something wrong here. So, and if it's not a settlement, this looks like it's going to a jury trial in April of 2023 and then maybe a jury will ultimately make a determination. Ada McLaughlin, editor-in-chief of Mediite, and you can also check them out on the Mediite to the interview podcast. Thanks so much for coming on and taking the time. I'm really appreciate it. Thanks, Jesse. Everyone out there,

thanks so much for joining us here on Sidebar. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you get your podcast. We very much appreciate it. Sidebar is produced by Sam Goldberg, YouTube manager Robert Zoki, Alyssa Fisher as our booking producer and video editor Logan Harris.

I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this long crime series, ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.