A note about the Chick-fil-A controversy of earlier this week: Former New York Times opinions staffer Adam Rubenstein wrote in the Atlantic that he was scolded in a 2019 orientation session for citing the chain’s crispy chicken sando as his fave. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… An HR rep said, “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” To which, attendees “started snapping their fingers in acclamation,” wrote Rubenstein. The incident was the lede of a feature titled, “I Was a Heretic at The New York Times.”

Those documents and materials include communications relating to an NPR report by David Folkenflik regarding host Bret Baier’s proposal for a special on election lies during the time relevant to the trial. That matter, said the Dominion lawyer, was “smack in the middle of the relevant time period and to the best of my knowledge, we just don’t have documents about this.”

I’m back in Wilmington, Del., for the second day of pretrial hearings in the defamation case Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News. Trial is slated to begin next Monday. This morning, Judge Eric Davis delivered a sustained scolding of lawyers for Fox News/Fox Corp. over an issue that arose yesterday.

More from the courtroom in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News from the courtroom of Judge Eric Davis in Wilmington, DE: A lawyer for Dominion this afternoon issued a stern rebuke to how Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp., have behaved on one key item in this case. 1/ At issue is who are the corporate officers of Fox News, which is critical to discovery procedures in civil litigation. Lawyers for Dominion asked Fox News higher-ups in depositions about the matter of who the officers are. 2/

Judge Davis warned lawyers not to make any argument in opening or closing that contradicts the judge’s ruling in the summary judgment phase of the litigation. “I will stop you,” he said, pledging to instruct the jury that the statement was erroneous. 3/ Some tart exchanges took place when the topic of newsworthiness came up. Fox News has argued time and again that the broadcasts that Dominion has attacked in its lawsuit were newsworthy stuff advanced by former President Trump and lawyers working on his behalf. 4/

Update on the Dominion-Fox News defamation suit: Fox News has filed its application to maintain the redactions that pop up passim in the summary judgment documents that have drawn such great public interest. 1/ Fox News argues that Dominion has jammed the docket with 700 exhibits. The "kitchen-sink approach," writes Fox, has been successful in prompting "dozens and dozens of news articles commenting on a subset of Dominion’s splashy (but legally questionable) defamation “evidence.”

An update on an important dimension of the Dominion v. Fox News lawsuit: Fox News has redacted large swaths of discovery material, as the filings/exhibits have shown in recent days. 1/ A filing today by NPR/New York Times, which are seeking to unseal the redactions, indicates that Fox News is seeking to maintain redactions by asserting a so-called "proprietary journalistic process" category. 2/

Updates on the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News case today: A bunch of redacted exhibits are being released, offering a fuller picture than the snippets excerpted in previous filings. I'll be highlighting some stuff. 1/ Here's an interesting back-and-forth from mid-November 2020, when the election-theft claims were peaking. Top Fox News opinion hosts were fretting that network PR chief Irena Briganti was trying to drum up support for Fox News's controversial election-night Arizona call. 2/

Today is the annual State of the Times, an all-day event at @nytimes at which Publisher A.G. Sulzberger makes opening remarks generally focusing on the best journalism of the past year: nytco.com/press/2022-sta… 1/ @nytimes In today's remarks, Sulzberger highlighted the "types of harassment that our journalists have faced," according to a Times spox, and in that context noted that a Times employee was spat upon last month in public. 2/

Fox News today issued a statement regarding the Dominion filing: Some additional defense from a Fox News spokesperson:

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.

A federal judge in Kentucky today granted summary judgment motions from five media companies (NYT, ABC News, Gannett, CBS News and Rolling Stone) in defamation cases from Nick Sandmann. The suits stemmed from a January 2019 encounter when Sandmann, then a student at Covington Catholic high in Kentucky had an encounter on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with Nathan Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder.

The Wall Street Journal has added an editor's note to its editorial regarding the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim who had to travel to Indiana for an abortion 1/: wsj.com/articles/an-ab… The editor's note leaves an astounding juxtaposition, as it cites the Dispatch as confirming a story that the Journal itself had characterized with this headline and subhead 2/:

A lot of people are asking why Judge Rakoff would decide this case while the jury is still deliberating. Very good questions. Here's what he said: "The more I thought about it over the weekend, the more I thought that [waiting] was unfair to both sides," he said. "We’ve had very full argument on this. I know where I’m coming out and I ought to therefore apprise the parties of that."

Judge Rakoff has ruled in favor of the New York Times in Sarah Palin's defamation suit. The jury will continue its deliberations in the case, but Rakoff has determined pursuant to the Times' Rule 50 motion that there's not enough evidence to support Palin's claim. Such motions are common in these cases, though I cannot speak to how common it is to issue a ruling while the jury is still deliberating.

Judge Rakoff in the Palin v. NYT case is now ruling on the newspaper's Rule 50 motion, which seeks a ruling in favor of NYT based on the contention that Palin hasn't provided enough evidence to support a claim under the law. He says that Palin and her attorneys have not presented enough evidence that James Bennet either "knew that challenged statements were false or [that there was a] high probability that they were false and he recklessly disregarded that high probability."

More Rakoff: "And certainly the case law is clear that mere failure to check is not enough to support 'reckless disregard' in the context of any libel claim. But that where the assertion is that someone incited murder: That is such a strong statement... "...that even under a reckless disregard standard it calls for more assiduous checking than would be normally the case." Rakoff said that he didn't see any cases that either side pointed to that discussed that question.

We're back reporting on the Palin v. NYT trial, via audio link from Judge Jed S. Rakoff's courtroom. The jury began deliberating in the case on Friday. David Axelrod, counsel for the New York Times, raised an issue relating to...Project Veritas, the James O'Keefe-led video-sting operation.

Palin attorney Ken Turkel gets the final word, and he drills right into a word used by NYT atty today: "I never used the word conspiracy once in my closing," says Turkel, wondering where the word came from. I don't remember, either, that word getting bandied about much in this trial, if at all, though I don't have a transcript to search. My impression of the Palin case is that the NYT staffers did a bunch of research, and then...

We are back after a break in the Palin v. NYT trial. David Axelrod, arguing for the New York Times, has 38 minutes remaining in his closing argument. Axelrod: "It's not enough...to prove that the newspaper made a mistake...it's not enough to prove that they should have done better." He's leaning on the "actual malice" standard, outlining the high bar that Palin has to prevail in this case.

David Axelrod, a NYT attorney who works at Ballard Spahr, is now delivering his closing argument for the newspaper. Axelrod is tearing into how Palin's attorney, Ken Turkel, portrayed James Bennet's testimony regarding how he interpreted the word "incitement."