Huge day in the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News defamation case, with both sides filing summary-judgment motions. Dominion's version is a nearly 200-page document bursting with text messages from network talent in the tense days following the 2020 presidential election. 1/
Have a look at this collection of Fox quotes from November 2020, as Sidney Powell and others were spinning their case that the presidential election was stolen. 
The argument from Dominion -- bolstered by correspondence among the network's top people -- is that Fox News knew all too well that the stolen-election claims were a lie, yet they plowed ahead with programming indicating the opposite. /3
One thing that leaps out of the document is just how panicked were network officials about the viewers' disenchantment with the network's very early call of Arizona for Biden. It appears the whole place was in a state of revolt:
More: After a Fox News staffer correctly fact-checked stuff that was coming out of the network's opinion side, all hell broke loose among the prime-timers. Stunning:
CEO Suzanne Scott revealed this about the process:
Though Hannity said in private that he knew Trump needed accept the election results, look at what the host presented to his viewers each night: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…
Fox News wiggled out of a defamation suit by arguing people shouldn't take the programming seriously (specifically, Tucker Carlson's show). Perhaps to fend off that defense, the Dominion filing goes into detail to show that the network's people see themselves as journalists:
More material in which Fox News people affirm they're in the news biz:
The minutiae disclosed in the Dominion filing are scandalous: They show just how incompatible is the hosts' candid chatter with the product they put on the airwaves -- and the reason for that gulf is ratings. Period.
By filing its suit and plowing through discovery, Dominion has produced perhaps the most piercing look at the internal goings-on at Fox News in its quarter-century history.
One caveat: News organizations that proceed through discovery in defamation suits rarely look good. Think of the New York Times in the Sarah Palin suit -- discovery exposed a shoddy and hurried editorial process that the Times surely didn't want to see in the light of day.
And when the WikiLeaks dumps of 2016 showed reporters' emails with people in the political sphere, the results often were unflattering.
Yet those instances were far more mild than what we see in these Fox News revelations. This is astounding.
Yet those instances were far more mild than what we see in these Fox News revelations. This is astounding.
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