Media Matters has obtained a slide deck that Dominion lawyers used at a March 28 hearing in the Fox defamation lawsuit.
I'll be sharing some takeaways here.
In an email, Fox CEO Suzanne Scott responds to Fox's Eric Shawn fact-checking a Trump falsehood: "This has to stop now... this is bad business... the audience is furious and we are just feeding them material."
Here's a Maria Bartiromo email from November 7 in which she says that "We have to go to a full on war. They have used all systems to defraud." And adds that "Jared says he doesn't want to hear about any conspiracy theory."
"Raw notes" from a November 7, 2020, pre-interview with Kevin McCarthy for Bartiromo's show have him saying there was no "mass cheat" in the 2020 election
Dominion responds to Fox saying Tucker Carlson "respected" Sidney Powell with texts in which he calls her a "crazy person" and various slurs.
On November 13, Fox "Brain Room" employee Leonard Balducci circulated fact-checks from Dominion and the AP debunking various claims about the company.
Suzanne Scott, November 19, 2020 email: "I can't keep defending these reporters who don't understand our viewers and how to handle stories... We lost 25k subs from FOX NATION."
Tucker Carlson's team discussing an upcoming interview with Mike Lindell -- "He's definitely crazy" but "has bailed us out loads of times when no one else would" with ads.
Here's a November 20, 2020 email from Jeanine Pirro's executive producer to Fox executives saying that a pre-taped Pirro monologue "is rife w conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example why this woman should never be on live television."
We've got another Dominion slide deck from its March 21 hearing.
Interesting tidbits follow.
The Fox News Decision Team sent a memo to "Those Concerned" on November 3, 2020, laying out how many states with early Trump leads in the early hours would subsequently shift to Biden which "does NOT mean that there are problems with the integrity of the vote count."
In this 11/11/20 email -- previously redacted -- Fox CEO Suzanne Scott says that after Fox's Arizona call for Biden "A trust has been broken and it's our jobs to help them through this to the other side ...and certainly speaking to the audience with respect is critical."
Does Florida under DeSantis have a particularly distinguished record in crime reduction?
I'm asking because the question isn't answered by this long New York Times report telegraphing a DeSantis attack on Trump as "soft on crime." nytimes.com/2023/03/29/us/…
Two true statements:
1) Crime data is notoriously difficult to grapple with, many factors go into its rises and falls.
2) Crime went up under Trump and is going back down under Biden.
Assessing DeSantis' record might be particularly difficult because "Florida and California had the lowest percentages of law enforcement agencies turning over crime data to the FBI last year." axios.com/2022/11/26/flo…
Fox's advertiser upfront pitch includes Jeanine Pirro, who was taken off the air following the 2020 election because execs thought she would promote election conspiracy theories, then brought back for segments Dominion is suing over in their lawsuit. mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-p…
Fox executives do not think they did anything wrong after the 2020 election and they only thing they plan to do differently going forward is curtail accidental truth-telling.
What Fox advertisers are actually paying for is a propaganda channel that tries to elect Republicans -- it's not just me saying that, it's Rupert Murdoch! mediamatters.org/foxdominion-la…
I can't tell if this is happening more frequently or if I'm just noticing it more often, but I don't love the argument strategy where people criticize a policy initiative aimed at a specific problem because it wouldn't solve a broader, more complex social ill.
Ex: Forcing TikTok's sale won't fix "disinformation" or "social media." True! But it seems like a fix for the discrete problem of "the Chinese government can control TikTok." If you don't think that's a problem, or don't think that would solve it, argue that.
Ex: Keeping people from smoking fentanyl on public transit won't solve drug addition or homelessness -- but the point is solving the narrow problem of "people won't use public services if they don't feel safe."
Got some bad news for Republican leadership — even if their dumbest members shut up and stay off TV, the party’s infotainers will still be telling its base that SVB collapsed because it was too “woke.”
Also it’s not like this argument is exclusive to uninformed backbenchers — this is the chairman leading the GOP’s investigations!
The right's culture war obsession has totally swamped its interest in policy -- you can see this starting in the beginning of the Biden administration, when the attack on Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus proposal was that .06% went to "social justice stuff" mediamatters.org/coronavirus-co…
Tucker Carlson's Newsmax competitors have devoted nearly 7 times (!) as much coverage as his Fox colleagues to his Jan. 6 footage. mediamatters.org/fox-news/newsm…
The rest of Fox has devoted 32 minutes to Tucker's Jan. 6 revisionism.
Major shows like Hannity, Fox & Friends, and The Five have totally ignored it.
Newsmax has given it... 3 hours 34 minutes, across 18 different shows.
Newsmax often tries to lure viewers away from Fox by attacking it from the right.
In this case, it appears to be leveraging Carlson’s hero status among Trumpists – and even using his own network’s unwillingness to promote his shoddy work to suggest that Fox is being dishonest.