The Press Box - NPR’s David Folkenflik on Rupert Murdoch and the Fox News–Dominion Case

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Bryan is joined by NPR’s David Folkenflik to discuss NPR’s decision to quit Twitter (1:30) before he then provides an expert briefing on the Fox News defamation lawsuit (6:19). They begin by breaking down what happened back in 2020 that led Fox into court, dive into the details of the case provided in emails and texts from Fox reporters, executives, and Rupert Murdoch himself, and then discuss the cost of the lawsuit for Fox and, potentially, the work of journalists. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: David Folkenflick Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox's final edition. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. Thursday is a big day on the media beat because it's the first day of jury selection in the $1.8 billion defamation lawsuit the Dominion Voting Systems has brought against Fox News.

And I thought we needed an expert briefing on three things. One, what this case is all about. Two, how likely it is that Fox News will lose and what they stand to lose if they do. And three, what we learned from reading Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson's emails. My number one draft pick to talk about all of the above is David Falkenflick, who is NPR's media correspondent, a Murdoch biographer and one of the very best reporters on the media beat. We dove headfirst into the Fox trial after first talking about why David's employer is, as they say, taking a break from Twitter. Here's David Fulkenflick. All right, David, yesterday you got to do a fun thing that media reporters get to do once in a while, which is right about your employer.

Oh, boy. Why did NPR's main account stop tweeting 24 hours ago? 52 official Twitter accounts, I believe, and I may be getting this number wrong, but I believe serving something like 16 million followers. So early this month, a gentleman by the name of Elon Musk and his new social media play thing, I guess he bought it last October, decided to designate NPR and a number of other analogous institutions as state-affiliated media. Musk said that this was part of his push for transparency, more clarity on the social media

site. But the thing is, that's the designation that's given to Chinese and Russian propaganda outlets and other media outlets that are directed by authoritarian regimes abroad. This is not what NPR is. So NPR and BBC and others objected. And so he changed it to government-funded media. But by that point, he changed it a few days ago to that. By that point, wheels were already in motion at NPR, where John Lansing, the chief executive and his leadership team had concluded that Twitter was being run erratically, that the moves that Musk was making were undermining our credibility and the important model of journalistic independence

that not only do we project publicly, but I can tell you after working here since, you know, almost 18 and a half years, that NPR actually has. You know, NPR's private corporation, not-for-profit, it has its own board. The government has no say in who's appointed to the board or who's appointed to lead the institution and no say over our coverage. And if you doubt that, you know, NPR, you know, pushed the Obama administration hard with other media outlets to, for example, open up Guantanamo Bay

and court proceedings involving detainees there to the public. That wasn't an issue the Obama administration really wanted to talk about publicly. My colleague, Mary Louise Kelly, tangled with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who cursed her out using some fairly earthy Anglo-Saxon terms over questions about Ukraine that he didn't want to field. You know, we try to hold government accountable. We are not accountable to government ourselves in that way. We do get a little slice of money, about 1% of our funding from federal government, and you can add maybe a couple of extra percentage points indirectly through the programming fees we get from member stations. But we don't see ourselves that way. And what Lansing said was, look, this is a time where journalists are under attack here, rhetorically, but also being arrested and detained abroad. Right now, we've had, even in the absence of such a designation, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, arrested by the authorities in Russia working for Putin and accused of espionage. Now, he's basically been taken hostage as a bargaining chip, as the Russians are angry for our support of Ukraine, of course. But, you know, being designated that you're working for some sort of propaganda,

outlet, you know, is, it's not a forum in which our chief executive wanted us to play anymore, at least officially. And we've heard murmurs of other media organizations stepping away from Twitter, especially after a bunch of tech writers got their accounts suspended last year. But nobody really stopped, to my knowledge. Is NPR not worried about losing traffic? You know, the funny thing is our acting head of news, Edith Chapin, sent out a memo, an hour or two after John Lansing,

our chief executive, made his announcement. And she's like, look, we're actually devoting a fair amount of time and person power. We're getting very little yield. You know, maybe, I think it's something like 2% of our traffic comes from Twitter referrals. You know, Facebook, much bigger generator of things. For things like NPR music,

YouTube has been an enormously important platform for getting out things like Tiny Desk Concert, which is a huge hit, right? We've got a guy who does a hilarious TikTok account for Planet Money. That's hugely successful there, where he does many explainers about elements of the economy and finance. And they're just, they're seemingly low tech and quite brilliant. And that's a much bigger driver of engagement for what we do on those platforms and also back on our original, you know, our own platforms on NPR.org or on, you know, our podcasts or the like. So I think they felt that we're not going to lose a ton by doing this.

Let's talk Fox News. For those who are just catching up on this case, what happened on election night 2020 that led to Fox News appearing in court this week? Well, you've honed in on really a pivotal moment. Like if there are fateful moments in the history of institutions, this would be a fateful one for the Fox News Channel. On election night 2020, using news, new, essentially, technologies and algorithms that had developed in partnership with the Associated

Press. Fox News became the first TV network to project the key swing state of Arizona for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, not then President Donald Trump. And just in case any of your listeners are under any delusions, the core Fox viewer correlates rather neatly with the core Trump voter. And this was news that they did not want to hear, and they especially didn't want to hear it from Fox, and they really didn't want to hear it first from Fox. And what you saw, what we have learned, what we knew at the time, what I reported, other people reported, but what we've now learned in Technicolor is that Fox hurtled and chased after these Trump voters and Foxx viewers desperately in the weeks that ensued. And the way they fixed upon making it up to them to some regard,

is by giving great running room for the ventilation of completely false and baseless charges. The Dominion voting systems, a voting tech company, had intentionally been involved in throwing votes that were actually cast for Trump over to Biden. This was just untrue. And it was disputed and disproven by local and state election officials and federal election officials, both Republican and Democrat, and in about 70 court cases, overseen by judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents, including Trump himself. And yet, you had a number of Fox stars, Maria Bartolromo, Sean Hannity,

Lou Dobbs, Janine Piro, even by the account of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch, had not only amplified but endorsed some of these wild claims, even as some of their reporters were desperately trying, both on the air and on Twitter, to debunk this stuff in real time. So the judge in the case whose name is Eric M. Davis ruled before the trial that these accusations, which you mentioned, were false and also defamatory. So what's left for Dominion to do to win a defamation verdict? Right. He has gotten Dominion fairly far along the path to winning this. Now defamation cases, you know this, Brian, are actually pretty tough to win. They're intentionally built into not only our laws, but a key Supreme Court ruling in 1964 involving the New York Times that created a standard called actual malice.

And that doesn't mean somebody's being malicious. It means that they broadcast or publish something knowing that the statements were false and also that they were defamatory, which means that they're harming their core reputation in a way that's important to them. or that they published this information and should have known and willfully disregarded information. The judge stopped short of saying

that Dominion had achieved that, but voluminous evidence has been developed over the course of this case that shows Fox producers and executives and even Fox founder Rupert Murdoch himself talking about the fact that this is bull. It is just complete baloney. And yet that they have,

have to walk tenderly in presenting the hard facts to Fox viewers at one point, Suzanne Scott, the CEO, the chief executive of Fox News talks about Fox viewers going through the five stages of grief and that we've got to be gentle with them. And that her concern is paramount that Fox has to live up to its brand, that is to deliver the promise of red meat to Trump voters, and not to live up to its name, which is to deliver the news without fear of favor. Fox News's defense is then likely to be what in this case? I got to tell you the judge has hit the stuffing out of some of these defenses and it has been a, I've never seen anything quite like it. You know, I'm not a courts reporter. I'm not a lawyer. So I haven't covered a ton of trials from, you know, start to finish.

I covered the case that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin filed against the New York Times that got ultimately bounced by both the jury and the judge. In this case, the judge has knocked out a lot of their defenses. They said, look, the president and his allies, a sitting president talking about a national presidential election is an inherently newsworthy element, even if he's saying things that aren't true. And they were going to be adjudicated in all these forums, and this was an appropriate thing for Fox to be doing, even if you didn't like the specific words that came out of the mouths of the hosts and their guests. Judge didn't have a lot of time for Dave for that. They were using what's called the neutral reporting privilege that doesn't exactly exist under law. It's sort of asserted.

and judges sometimes are a little sympathetic to it, but it's not a standard that's enshrined in sort of Supreme Court or federal appellate court case law. So no. They're saying, look, it wasn't us, it was our guests. The judge this week said, absolutely not going to work as a defense. You broadcast it knowingly.

Fox has said, look, it's hard at times to know even that some of these statements are about dominion. The judge says we don't have to parse words here. We're going clearly about common sense. This is in the context of dominion. Absolutely, it's about them. Fox said at one point, this is opinion and not fact. And the judge ruled this is mixed opinion.

So if you're mixing opinion and fact, you get a little more running room. You know, under the First Amendment, the whole idea and the 1964 Supreme Court ruling is that we need to have running room for people to have strong opinions about matters of government and politics in order to hold public officials accountable and allow for the robust free speech that is enshrine. in the Bill of Rights, right? But that running room isn't endless. And there has to be some limit to it, is what the judge is saying. And he's basically pointing to the question of, has this clearly passed this limit? The judge has, to my mind, been very clear about the law, but also wanting to be grounded in the facts before him.

And the facts before him are mounting up fast and furious. You mentioned voluminous evidence. Last month, this trove of emails, I believe in an NPR segment you did, you called it a tranche of emails. I'll take either word. I think an avalanche I called it. An avalanche of emails surfaced from Fox executives, Fox hosts, even Rupert Murdoch himself. As a media reporter, what does it like to be handed that kind of material? Right. Well, I was asked at one point, they said, so is this like an X-ray of Fox? I'm like, forget X-ray. This is like an MRI and a CAT scan. You're not just seeing bones. You're seeing body structure. You're seeing muscle tissue.

soft muscle tissue, you're seeing internal organs. You're seeing the whole thing. You're seeing the blood coursing through the veins. From the very bottom of the institution to the very top of the parent company with Lockland Murdoch, who's the chief executive and executive chairman of Fox Corp, the parent company and his father, Rupert Murdoch, as co-chairman. You see all these people weighing in. They're weighing in on things like Chirons. They're weighing in on tone. At one point, Rupert Murdoch says that the two political editors in Washington who stood by that projection of Arizona probably should be fired. And they need to do it as assigned to the Trump voters. And the chief executive of Fox News says, you know, I've already fired the one and I'm going to

fire the other today or tomorrow. You know, it's this incredibly granular investment in what are we doing to make sure that Fox retains, you know, Fox News. is, people sometimes ask me, you know, is Fox more about politics or business? I think we've answered that question. Fox News is about the business enterprise. Rupert Murdoch is about the business enterprise. Secondarily, it's a highly ideological outfit that seeks to have influence over specific major American political party and to use that influence and to help propel its

fortunes. And very distant third, fourth, fifth, whatever is the journal. And there are some real journalists there, but that it wraps around this institution for branding purposes for advertisers, essentially, so that it's content that they would want to be attached to. Would major advertisers want to be with Fox News if it were only Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin and Janine Perra? Not clear. So the news gives them this veneer of respectability. And that veneer is being stripped away. So you're asking about a reporter like me. What I'm really covering is two stories at once. There is litigation. There's a defamation lawsuit playing out in Delaware Superior Court, and I don't know how it's going to end. The judge has made clear in recent days that he thinks the Fox legal team has been playing essentially unfairly and misleading the court and perhaps even lying. And that's an extraordinary thing to hear from a very measured judge. That's the legal case. The second story is about Fox itself, what it looks like, what that MRI, that CAT scan looks like, what it looks like when you lift up the rock and you see everything wriggling

underneath. And it's just an amazing archaeological dig in almost real time. And for me, you know, this is putting meat in the bones of stuff that I and other reporters have been reporting and have been condemned for reporting for years about how Fox actually operates and where it puts at priorities. You wrote a book about Rupert Murdoch. Did you learn something new about Murdoch from reading his emails? I think that the fundamental nature that I tried to present to readers in that book and in my reporting both before and after that book was affirmed here. But what is important is the way in which you're seeing it affirmed in his own words. And that is, I think, inescapable.

You're seeing the chief executive of Fox News being presented in her own words. And her priority is brand. Her priority is, are we delivering on our brand promise? And as a business enterprise, we fail if we don't do that. Now, people at Fox say, look, this is true for the New York Times. Their brand promises to cover the world in the most sophisticated way possible. And if they fail to do that, they'll, you know, lose their readers. If they fail to hold government accountable and probably if they fail to go after Trump,

they will lose support and lose readers, right? And so Fox News would say, we're all doing brands. NPR. Your brand is to provide news and not to charge people money for it, right? And to do it, you know, in an earnest, you know, painfully responsible way. That's what they would say. But the difference is the consequences of what New York Times does or NPR does or the associate press does or Washington Post does is not inherently corrosive to the nation's body politic. It is not intentionally trying to put not just a thumb, but a fist on the scale to say this is what's going to happen and we're going to ram it down your throats.

And we're going to do that because it's going to make us look good for this audience and build up our audiences and because we're going to be able to get benefits from it. One of the reasons Murdoch pushes politics so hard is he likes it. One of the reasons he does it is because it gives him influence. And one of the reason he does it is that influence gives him enormous business payoffs. And I've documented this in his native Australia, in Britain and here in the U.S. In the Trump years, he finally had a bat phone that would be picked up in the Oval Office, something he's wanted. He didn't particularly like Trump. He didn't particularly respect Trump.

His New York Post had made fun of Trump for years. But, you know, he got all kinds of regular. Relief. There were, you know, the Justice Department under Trump tried to block AT&T's takeover of CNN's parent company because Murdoch had wanted to take it over. I mean, there are all kinds of things Murdoch gets from this. But ultimately, what you're seeing is how it, you know, one of the fascinating things I try to find out as reporters, how do people behave behind closed doors?

The doors have been flung wide open. And it is day after day, sometimes hour after hour of mortification because Fox likes to wrap itself in the high rhetoric of journalistic mission. It likes, you know, Brett Bayer and, you know, the host of its Sunday show or Shannon Breem or Martha McCallum will sit with the other anchors, the Nora O'Donnells, the Jake Tappers, right, the Lester Holtz, and say, you know, we're all journalists. We're all trying to present the news. Maybe we do it with a slightly different sensibility, but that's what we're all about. You know, it's very hard to make the case that there are anything other than window dressing at Fox News right now. And the ones to

story that we broke earlier this week to show it, Brett Bayer, the chief political anchor of Fox, proposed doing an hour-long special repeatedly to his bosses, starting in late November of 2020 and going into early 2021. Not only did he not get to do it, they didn't even give him an answer. Can you imagine Dick Tapper not getting an answer if he wanted to do an hour-long special about politics? It's unfathomable to me. Two things about Bear that I was fascinated by. one is this line he had in the deposition he was giving to Dominion's lawyers. I look at my job as being sort of like a hockey goalie trying to stop bad pucks from getting through.

We've heard a lot of people compare themselves to umpires over the years. I'm just calling balls and strikes. Never heard the hockey goalie analogy, but that was interesting. That's such a good point. That is such a good distinction, I think, to make. And the thing that I thought was telling was that the pucks that he's stopping from going through are from his own side. And many of them are from people on his own team. And so he's saying, I'm just trying to do what I can. In that deposition, he also, I say, I don't mean to step on your

next question. But in that deposition, he also said, I keep my blinders on. And I only look at this one hour a day. He's the chief political anchor of the network. He should be setting the tone, not just for his hour, but for how politics is shaped and thought about and presented to the public on Fox News. You know, he should, you know, if you don't think that Tim Russert was performing that role, you know, at NBC, you're wrong.

You know, this is, he should be that kind of person and personage there. And clearly he's like, hey, I can't play beyond these 60 minutes a day. And what he's saying is, news is completely constrained like this. It cannot serve as the core identity

of Fox News itself. And yet there's another brush stroke as you report an NPR of the Bread Bear story, which is Brett Bear is, He projects himself as a journalist. We know trying to get this special on the air about the allegations and the voter fraud allegations, but also some of Brett Baer's colleagues had some doubts, did they not,

about how firmly Brett Baer was standing for the truth. That's right. And immediately following that call for Arizona, Bear was among those very much pressing Fox Hard to consider. What would it take to overturn that projection? He sent an email and he said in which he suggested, that it be put in Trump's column. I'm convinced after reporting fairly thoroughly on that, that's not what he meant.

He just meant pulled out of Biden's column. There was no credible way to argue that Trump was definitely going to win. To project that for Trump would have been really problematic. So I don't think that's actually what he meant. I think in the moment in his haste, he mistyped. But he was saying, let's pull this back. It did end up being an exceptionally close call. And even Nate Cohen, the guy who oversees certain kinds of projections for the New York Times,

argues it was probably the wrong call for Fox to make, but they made it with their new algorithms. They were ultimately right by a razor thin margin in Arizona. But the key thing is Bayer, as the political anchor, was talking about this because, or at least in pushing for at least raising the question

of whether Fox should reverse that call, he was citing the heat he was getting from Trump people. He was citing the anger and backlash they were getting from viewers. And in a post-mortem they did some weeks later, both he and Martha McCallum, another Fox news anchor very much said, you know, down the line in considering projections, we should think about

the backlash and about the voter, meaning viewer response that we'll get as an extra layer in our decision-making process. That's essentially saying, if it's going to go against their interests, maybe we don't go first. And that's not a journalistic impulse, right? In addition, I spoke to colleagues of Bayers, current colleagues of Bayers, who say, you know what, does the journalism, but he only pushes up to a point. And he goes along. He gets a a ton of money. He gets to go in celebrity golf tournaments. He gets to go to the White House. He gets to go around the social circuit of Washington, D.C. He is a great life. Ruffling that too much, you know, we've seen Shep Smith's position was ultimately untenable. We see that Chris Wallace

was so outraged by what happened in terms of Tucker Carlson's so-called documentaries that claimed that January 6th interaction was just, you know, some nice people who got a little bit out hand, but also blamed it on FBI informants in Antifa in the absence of any such evidence. Wallace is like, this is not only fact-free, this is really damaging to Americans' understanding of itself, and he walked away. Brett Bayer has made a decision not to do that, and that comes with these compromises. In addition, we have some documentary evidence backing up what I've been hearing from sources inside Fox. You had Bill Salmon, he had been the Washington managing editor for Fox, and Chris Steyerwalt, Fox's political director, who were involved in making that projection for

Arizona and shaping their political coverage. And they rejected Bayer's suggestion that they overturned that. But they watched him and they felt that he was giving too much credence to some of these allegations of election fraud and giving them, in fact, just too much airtime. Even in debunking them was giving them too much credibility and oxygen. And in one instance, Salmon said, it's amazing to watch what good journalists will do. pursuit of ratings. And they were talking about Brett Bayer. And that was somebody with whom they had worked very closely for a lot of years. Both were, as I mentioned earlier, you know, purged by Fox News

chief executive Suzanne Scott as assigned to the Trump voters that Fox was on their side. Two more quick ones for you, David, for you go. Over the weekend, Jim Rutenberg wrote a big piece about Fox News in New York Times Magazine. And he used an interesting word about this case, calling it existential. Do you see an existential threat financially or otherwise to Fox in this case? I don't think it's existential as in I think Fox News will endure. I think it is existential to the fiction that Fox News is just another variety or flavor of news that maybe classic you know, lefties and old mainstream legacy media types. don't like.

You know, the, to the extent it was still there, the, you know, curtain has been pulled down and you see the man behind it, right? You see what Fox News is, and people, I think, will still watch it. And many of their core viewers are either not absorbing the coverage of this from other news outlets. And by the way, Fox News sure as hell isn't covering it in any, you know, intellectually honest way. or they've been, you know, conditioned and heard for so many years that you can't believe what the mainstream media tells you about conservatives, tells you about Trump, tells you about Fox, and therefore they've already absorbing it at a steep discount. You know, that I don't think Fox will lose a ton of viewers over this. You know, they stand to lose a lot of money if they lose. And I think you'll see, we've already seen one shareholder file suit against Murdoch and three other members of the board of Fox Corp for failing their fiduciary responsibilities for failing to intervene and prevent this damage to Fox's brand.

And in this instance, the shareholders arguing, listen, for advertisers, you know, our brand has to have some integrity of news, otherwise they're going to peel away. That's his argument. And I think if Fox loses, and if they're even more damaging admissions, you're going to seal some real problems. I think that this could affect, depending on what plays out in court, Rupert Murdoch's legacy and Lachlan Murdoch standing as the next guy in line. I think that's a big deal. You know, will this be controlled by the family? The family used to have 47% of the voting shares locked up

because the family controls about 40%. And Prince Al-Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia had another 7 plus percent. And that got them close to 50%. And not everybody votes. And that gets them whatever they want. He sold his holdings in five. So they don't have him anymore. So they're a little bit more exposed on that if shareholders decide to revolt.

I don't think that will happen, but it could. But I think that the reputational cost to Fox will be near absolute outside of the Trump Fox, what shall I say, MAGA vector. And yet I think it will move along and make money as this very damaged battleship going into the future. So it's almost like a split screen. Inside the bubble, you know, they'll continue to make money as long as people aren't cord cutting too fast in the, you know, 65, 70 and up demographics that are so important to their viewership. You know, as an institution that people look to, I think it's very hard to look at them in the

same way, even for people who for years have been bending over backwards to be respectful of them. Finally, what do you make of the argument, which we often hear in cases like this, that a verdict against Fox is bad for journalists generally. This is part of Fox News's ultimate defense. It's been part of its explicit defense. It'll be part of, I'm sure, it's rhetoric at trial. You know, most media lawyers who work for media organizations

don't want anybody found guilty of defamation. It is a very blunt instrument in which to force corrections, right? It is not a particularly surgical or careful way to do it, and it can uproot things. Most news organizations and most lawyers are nervous about the precedent of having every exchange, every Slack channel message, every voice memo, every late-night text between colleagues yanked out and slapped up there. Fox has argued that Dominion has cherry-picked them.

Foxes argued that Dominion has put them out of context. Fox has argued that Dominion is playing upon, you know, certain elements of the public's dislike of Fox to try to punish it. when it's merely trying to cover things that are obviously, you know, the Associated Press covered some of these allegations. So did NPR, you know, obviously in so doing, Fox is shearing its actions from its own context, right? There is a nervousness. There's also a nervousness that someday this could rise back to the Supreme Court.

You've seen justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicate formally that they'd be very open to revisiting the language in Sullivan in New York Times. Sullivan from 1964, that tough actual malice standard. And interestingly, Elena Kagan, well before she joined the bench, I believe when she was maybe dean of Harvard law, wrote a journal article in which she said she questioned whether that was the right balance to strike between holding the press accountable and giving them a lot of running room. So that's three justices who are at least intellectually open to that. You only need two more.

you know, and there's some very conservative folks who have been quite critical of the media, you know, Alito, you know, would probably be among them. Kavanaugh felt the media treated him badly. Like, you don't know. So I think there's real trepidation and nervousness about that. On the other hand, the folks I've talked to, even conservative media lawyers I've spoken to, suggest that this fact pattern is so absolute and so distinct, that Dominion has gone a long way to proving

that from the lowest levels of junior producers to the top echelons of Fox Corp, you know, its top executives in the Murdochs, people knew. And people let this happen because they concluded this is what was necessary to make sure the business prospered. That's a pretty, you know,

usually you don't have motive for defamation. Usually, you know, you find that people suing for defamation assign motives to the journalist they're suing, they don't really need to prove why. Fox has a why that it is articulated to one another many times, and why a couple of folks like Maria Bartaromo seem to cling to the possible belief that the fraud thing was true, you know, even some of the most resolutely protective voices of Trump

like Tucker Carlson, don't buy it. Sean Hannity, who Rupert Murdoch said, endorsed the lies a bit. when Murdoch was test of, or was, you know, giving deposition under oath. Sean Hannity said in his deposition, I didn't believe it for a minute. So, you know, I think Fox has excellent lawyers. Those lawyers are being kind of called on the carpet on at this point, almost a daily basis by the judge.

And I think I want to focus this. You know, I said before this is two stories, but here's where the two stories converge. This is really a case about credibility. This is a case about the credibility of Fox and in some ways about whether or not it can be considered Fox News. It's also come to be a case

about the credibility of the institution of Fox News, not just the opinion hosts and guests and whatever they put on the air, but about whether they speak the truth off the air to the public and to one another. And now it's becoming a case that's involving very much the credibility of their legal team.

The judge has repeatedly accused the lawyers for Fox of withholding information, not just from Dominion, which is not the way trial is supposed to work, but from the judge himself. And so this is a case in which the surrounding question is credibility. Can journalism, can the political system, can America confer credibility on Fox News anymore? Whatever the legal verdict, I think people are entitled to draw their own conclusions from the massing of evidence that they've seen pour out in public. David Falkinflick, one of my favorite reporters on the media beach. You can read him at NPR.

You can find him on Twitter, at least for now. David, thanks for coming on the press box. You bet. That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic, as always, by Erica Servantes. Before we go, I wanted to try something out on this edition of the press box, which is to give you some of my favorite reads of the week about the media. In fact, it's just one piece this week.

It's in The New Yorker. It's by Melissa Del Bosque. The headline is the covert mission to solve a Mexican journalist's murder. I don't want to spoil it too much because it's one of those pieces that you sort of need to read and let unfold in front of your eyes. But the short summary would be that a Mexican reporter was murdered while reporting on politics and drug trafficking in her home country. and that a band of fellow journalists came together to try to solve her murder after finding the state's investigation to be somewhat shabby.

Fascinating piece that I read every single word of and learned a ton from. Check that out in the New Yorker. In the meantime, enjoy the weekend. Read, relax, work on your nut graphs. Let's meet back Monday, shall we, for more lukewarm takes about the media.