The news business has never been a particularly glamorous one, as any young journalist discovers the moment she steps into her first cluttered, coffee-stained, dimly lit newsroom.
But over at Fox News, we're learning about some downright dirty work playing out among executives and on-air personalities. The kinda stuff that obligates me to put the word "news" in quotation marks.
As part of Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6 billion lawsuit against the right-wing channel, hundreds of pages of text messages, emails, and other material were made public Tuesday night. The documents put in black-and-white what many media analysts have long suspected: That Fox executives and hosts knew full-well that the pro-Trump conspiracies they advanced on air were bogus, but they kept the stories going because they drove ratings.
The Dominion lawsuit is one of two separate cases brought by voting technology companies against Fox News that collectively seek $4.3 billion in damages, posing a serious threat to the highly profitable arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
The election lies "transformed Dominion into a household name" and caused "irreparable economic harm," Dominion argues in its lawsuit.
Fox News has denied the claims.
Here are some of the highlights from the most recent trove of documents to be made public, as reported by my colleague Oliver Darcy:
Tucker Carlson "passionately" hates Trump.
The prime time host repeatedly expressed his disdain for Trump in private communications. In one conversation, two days before the January 6 attack, Carlson says: "We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can't wait ... I hate him passionately."
Rupert Murdoch, Fox's chairman, rejected conspiracies about Dominion Voting Systems being manipulated to sway the 2020 election.
In his January deposition, Murdoch was repeatedly asked about various electronic voting conspiracy theories — and he rejected all of them. "You've never believed that Dominion was involved in an effort to delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump, correct?" a Dominion lawyer asked at one point. "I'm open to persuasion; but, no, I've never seen it," Murdoch replied.
Top hosts probably "went too far."
In an email to Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott, Murdoch conceded that some of the network's hosts probably crossed the line in the aftermath of the 2020 election. "Maybe Sean [Hannity] and Laura [Ingraham] went too far," Murdoch wrote Scott, in an apparent reference to election denialism after Trump's loss.
Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy mocked Fox's journalists.
In a series of November 2020 text messages, Hannity and Doocy attacked the reporting from their colleagues on the "straight news" side of the network.
Hannity: 'News' destroyed us.
Doocy: Every day.
Hannity: You don't piss off the base.
Doocy: They don't care. They are JOURNALISTS.
(Side note: I'm having a laugh imagining a conversation between myself and my boss where I argue we have to do another Taco Bell Mexican Pizza story to appease "the base" lol.)
Maria Bartiromo refused to call Biden "President-elect."
In text messages to Steve Bannon after the election had been called for Biden, Bartiromo said she wants "to see massive fraud exposed … I told my team we are not allowed to say pres elect at [all]. Not in scripts or in banners on air. Until this moves through the courts."
'Weak ratings makes good journalists do bad things.'
After the 2020 election, Fox News' then-DC managing editor Bill Sammon decried the network's coverage of false election claims in private messages to a colleague. "It's remarkable how weak ratings makes good journalists do bad things," Sammon wrote then-political editor Chris Stirewalt. Stirewalt replied: "It's a real mess."
Bottom line
It doesn't matter, legally, whether Fox News lied. Under American free speech laws, journalists are allowed to get it wrong. But Dominion's case hinges on the argument that Fox employees demonstrated a reckless disregard for the truth — that they knew the election fraud claims were false and promoted them anyway. The trove of documents released this week appear to be the strongest evidence yet of that behavior.
RELATED: The White House lashed out at Carlson in an extraordinary rebuke of the late-night commentator who has been airing false depictions of the January 6, 2021, attack this week.
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