The Dominion lawsuit against FOX News and the depths of depravity

A brief peek behind the curtain

Last week, the public got access to Dominion Voting Systems’ most recent filing in its defamation lawsuit against FOX News. The lawsuit stems from the “stop the steal” conspiracy theories that emerged in the aftermath of the 2020 election. The new Dominion brief asks Delaware state superior court judge Eric Davis, who is hearing the case, for summary judgment. That means Dominion believes the evidence it has presented is so strong that no reasonable juror could come to a different conclusion about the case, therefore precluding the need for a trial. FOX, for its part, adamantly disagrees. 

The essence of the suit is that FOX hosts, news directors and Rupert Murdoch himself knew unequivocally and repeatedly communicated among themselves that the stolen election claims were a total fabrication. Indeed, in their internal communications, FOX elites repeatedly derided and ridiculed some of its major proponents, including Rudy Giuliani and the lawyer, Sidney Powell.  Nevertheless, over and over again, in the weeks after the election, FOX hosts credulously aired and amplified baseless claims against Dominion Voting Systems, whose allegedly compromised voting machines became central to the larger conspiracy theories about the stolen election. 

One amazing aspect of the story dates to an appearance by Powell on Maria Bartiromo's show on November 8, five days after election night and the day after all major news organizations called the election for Joe Biden. During that appearance, Powell laid out for Bartiromo the basics of the conspiracy theory that Dominion machines had a vote switching algorithm that cost Trump the election. As the Dominion lawsuit explains, the basis of Powell's claims was an email that Powell, as well as FOX host Lou Dobbs received, detailing allegations against Dominion. Bartiromo had interviewed Powell the day before Powell came on her show and knew that the email was key source material for Powell, but never revealed that fact to her audience. And at her later deposition in the Dominion lawsuit, Bartiromo acknowledged the email was "nonsense.” According to the lawsuit, the email claimed that, among other things, FOX founder Roger Ailes and current FOX Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch huddled on most days to figure out how to portray Donald Trump in the worst possible light. This would be newsworthy in itself, since Ailes died in 2017. The email's author introduced herself in the following terms: "Who am I? And how do know all of this? I've had the strangest dreams since I was a little girl...I was internally decapitated, and yet, I Live. The Wind tells me I'm a ghost, but I don't believe it." In the lawsuit's words, "The full force of the email's lunacy comes across by reading it in its entirety."

To repeat, Maria Bartiromo helped launch Powell's conspiracy theories about Dominion to the wider world, which included the claim that it was owned by a company that Hugo Chavez created to rig elections (Chavez died in 2012), on the basis of source material that Bartiromo knew to be utterly preposterous. 

As the lawsuit details, to one degree or another, all of the key on air luminaries at FOX, including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, considered the allegations to be, as Carlson texted in a group chat that first night, "absurd."

But the kicker in all this isn't just that an alleged news organization would repeatedly amplify the most outrageous disinformation. It's *why* FOX did so. As FOX impresarios made crystal clear in communication with one another, they were losing market share to One America News Network (OANN) and Newsmax, two far right entities that would be unabashed in their promotion of election conspiracy theories. FOX incurred the wrath of its audience because it was too slow out of the gate in the immediate aftermath of the election to fully get on board with Trump's insistence that the election was being stolen.

Recall that on election night, the FOX political desk, whose polling and data experts are serious and credible, called the state of Arizona for Biden, despite the fact that other news organizations believed it was still too close to do so. The result of that decision was a firestorm in which many FOX viewers reacted with absolute fury at FOX. The audience’s revolt became a crisis at FOX. As FOX mainstay Sean Hannity texted during the peak of this meltdown: “In one week…they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

According to the suit, FOX execs went onto war footing to try to limit the damage. But when in the midst of that, FOX journalist Jacqui Heinrich "...tweeted an accurate fact check of a false WH claim about the election on November 11, Tucker Carlson texted Hannity, ‘Please get her fired. Seriously What the fuck ? actually shocked It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." The cravenness could not be more stark.

Regardless of the outcome of the lawsuit, it's worth dwelling on what we're talking about here. Based on literally nothing and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many millions of people were repeatedly told that the most far-fetched claims were plausible, if not fact. FOX elites knew it. But they literally felt they had no choice but to hop on the crazy train. When FOX News was initially slow to affirm the baseless basis for Trump's refusal to concede defeat, its leadership faced the wrath of the Frankenstein monster the network had created (Trump, of course, had become arguably its most voracious and certainly its most noteworthy consumer). And that wrath threatened its entire business model. This may all be unsurprising to many of you. But to see it laid out so starkly was, at least for me, bracing. And I do think that for most people, it's hard to fully fathom what cynical elites are capable of, the conscience-less depths to which they will sink to further their interests. We may know it in the abstract, but if someone speculated for you that this is what was going on behind the scenes, I suspect many would think the account was a bit too conspiratorial sounding for their liking. Most people don’t move through the world so cynically. The Dominion lawsuit, therefore, is worth dwelling on, even for just a moment, because it does provide at least a brief glimpse at what the depths of elite political depravity can look like.

(If you want to see the Dominion brief, here you go).