Tuesday brought another “document dump” in the highly watched Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News defamation case. The lawsuit is set to go to trial in April. But before a jury is even seated, the parties are racing toward a March 21 summary judgment hearing that could decide the case in Dominion’s favor without a trial. In preparation for that hearing, a judge has unsealed hundreds of exhibits, composed of thousands of pages of texts, emails, documents and correspondence, almost all of which seem (at least to me) to support Dominion’s claims that from the top of the corporation to the bottom, its owners, executives, hosts, anchors, producers and even fact-checkers knew that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and that there was no credible evidence of election fraud.
As these exhibits continue to roll out, we see consistent signs of a kind of civil war brewing within Fox.
Fox News lawyers predictably disagreed in a statement: “Thanks to today’s filings, Dominion has been caught red handed using more distortions and misinformation in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press,” the statement said. “We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to twist and even misattribute quotes to the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”
Nevertheless, as these exhibits continue to roll out, we see consistent signs of a kind of civil war brewing within Fox, with star hosts like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and Bret Baier battling with the Fox News decision desk journalists who were trying to accurately characterize 2020 election results. Those hosts complained about the fallout from Fox’s calling Arizona early for President Joe Biden, about how viewers were angry and about how ratings were dropping. According to the unsealed emails and communications, executives like Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott seem to have agreed that hosts had to…
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