The Fox News Defamation Lawsuit: “Money, Ideology, Truth, Lies—It’s All Right There”

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Episode: “The Fox News Defamation Lawsuit: ‘Money, Ideology, Truth, Lies—It’s All Right There’”
Date: March 4, 2023
Host: Susan Glasser
Panelists: Jane Mayer, Evan Osnos

Overview

In this episode, Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos examine the stunning revelations emerging from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News. The panel unpacks never-before-seen depositions, emails, and texts that expose the network’s internal acknowledgment of election misinformation after 2020, the interplay between money, politics, and media, and the larger implications for the conservative movement and American democracy. The tone is sharp, analytical, and occasionally incredulous as the panelists walk listeners through a “real-life episode of Succession” playing out in American media and politics.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. How Did We Get Here? (03:16–04:43)

• Dominion Voting Systems became the focus of Fox News’s post-2020 election coverage, accused falsely of facilitating voter fraud.
• The lawsuit, filed in March 2021, claims Fox’s coverage was not just damaging to Dominion and its employees, but democracy itself.
• Evan Osnos: “What’s really remarkable about this case…is that it gives you the thing we almost never get, which is the conversation among the participants, behind the scenes…” (03:41)

2. What Was Said On Air vs. In Private (05:07–07:14)

• Fox hosts amplified baseless fraud claims from figures like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.
• Privately, key Fox figures did not believe these claims. Carlson called Powell “lying, a crazy person, an unguided missile” (06:20), and Rupert Murdoch described Giuliani’s statements as “really crazy stuff and damaging” (06:55).
• The gap between public promotion and private skepticism is a central element of the Dominion lawsuit.

3. Discovery Unveils Fox’s Internal Calculus (07:14–10:15)

• Unlike most corporations, Fox didn’t settle the suit, allowing damning internal communications to become public.
• Jane Mayer: “Dominion is not accepting settlement. They actually want this dirty laundry out there. And I think it’s to all of our benefit.” (07:39)
• The result is unprecedented access to Fox’s internal deliberations—“basically like a real-life episode of Succession.” (08:28)

4. Revelatory Details from the Filings (08:44–13:58)

• Evan’s pick: Murdoch’s suggestion that top hosts could “stop the Trump myth” by accepting Biden’s win, but CEO Suzanne Scott warned against “pissing off the viewers”—so no action was taken (09:15).
• Jane’s pick: Murdoch’s statement about “MyPillow man” on Fox: “It’s not red, not blue, it’s green” (10:32) — underscoring that profit, not ideology, is paramount.
• Susan’s pick: Murdoch’s post-Jan 6th email: “We want to make Donald Trump a non-person,” acknowledging his desire to pivot the network away from Trump, but finding it impossible due to audience loyalty (11:19).

5. Who Really Controls Fox and the Republican Party? (12:36–17:38)

• The panel agrees it’s the base, not Trump or Murdoch, driving Fox’s direction.
• Fox’s failed attempt to pivot to Ron DeSantis highlights their struggle—despite network backing, the audience remains pro-Trump.
• Jane Mayer: “You…have spun up [the base] into such an angry mob that they then have to keep catering to them…for fear that they’ll lose the viewers and then start losing money.” (12:36)
• Jane: Describes Fox’s efforts to manufacture enthusiasm for DeSantis, but with little evidence the audience is budging (16:08).

6. Legal Stakes and the Issue of Malice (19:21–22:21)

• Achieving a “actual malice” legal standard is hard, but evidence here is unusually strong.
• Jane Mayer: “If this is not actual malice, it’s hard to say what is…you can see…Fox…understood that what they were saying was false and they decided to say it anyway.” (19:46)
• Evan Osnos: “This is a case in which the emails and the text messages…tell the tale.” (20:57)

7. Is Fox News Actually "News"? (21:55–30:07)

• Debate over whether Fox deserves the label “news,” given documented internal disregard for truth.
• Jane Mayer: “Fair and balanced…was invented to confuse people.” (29:47)
• Panel agrees that the lawsuit helps distinguish serious journalism from organizations prioritizing profit or politics over truth.

8. Broader Implications: Media, Power, and Access (25:44–28:53)

• Republicans increasingly bypass independent media, funneling information through ideological channels like Fox.
• Jane Mayer: “The actual serious, fair-minded news organizations are being shoved out…because the conservative wing of the Republican party won’t deal with them anymore.” (27:15)
• Brief note: Defensive comparison to Democratic presidents, with panel cautioning against false equivalence.

9. Lessons & Likely Aftermath (30:07–33:50)

• Internal Fox documents will serve as a “storehouse of information” for understanding American political history (30:07).
• Expect “someone to be tossed overboard” as Fox seeks to deflect and contain the fallout (30:54).
• Relationship between Fox and Trump remains transactional; if Trump becomes the GOP nominee, Fox may fall “right back in again.”
• Jane Mayer: “If that’s where the viewers are and that’s where the dollars are.” (33:29)
• Susan Glasser closes: “Evan, the color is green.” (33:50)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “What’s really remarkable about this case…is that it gives you the thing we almost never get, which is the conversation among the participants, behind the scenes…”
  —Evan Osnos (03:41)

• “Dominion is not accepting settlement. They actually want this dirty laundry out there. And I think it’s to all of our benefit.”
  —Jane Mayer (07:39)

• “It’s not red, not blue, it’s green.”
  —Rupert Murdoch (as quoted by Jane Mayer) (10:32)

• “We want to make Donald Trump a non-person.”
  —Rupert Murdoch (as quoted by Susan Glasser) (11:19)

• “The people running Fox have no compunction about lying. They are trying to figure out how many lies do they need to tell in order to keep their audience so that they don’t lose the ratings.”
  —Jane Mayer (10:15)

• “Turns out it’s not really either [Murdoch or Trump]. It’s the base. It’s the viewers who they have created…”
  —Jane Mayer (12:36)

• “If this is not actual malice, it’s hard to say what is.”
  —Jane Mayer (19:46)

• “There is a way in which he [McCarthy] knows that by releasing this information, it’s going to be a massive distraction from what is actually the heart of American politics…”
  —Evan Osnos (26:23)

• “Fair and balanced…was invented to confuse people.”
  —Jane Mayer (29:47)

• “We have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem.”
  —Rupert Murdoch to Lachlan Murdoch (as quoted by Evan Osnos) (32:08)

• “If Donald Trump takes off again…you will see Fox buy right back in again if that’s where the viewers are and that’s where the dollars are.”
  —Jane Mayer (33:29)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:16–04:43 — Historical background to the lawsuit.
• 05:07–07:14 — What Fox aired vs. what was believed internally.
• 07:14–10:15 — The impact of discovery and why Fox didn’t settle.
• 08:44–13:58 — Panelists’ favorite damning details from the case.
• 15:03–17:38 — Fox’s attempted pivot to DeSantis and the challenge of the pro-Trump base.
• 19:21–22:21 — The legal challenge: actual malice.
• 21:55–30:07 — What counts as “news”; the lawsuit’s media implications.
• 25:44–28:53 — Media bypass and the implications for political communication.
• 30:07–33:50 — Lessons, possible Fox responses, and the ongoing Trump-Fox dynamic.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a clear-eyed, often caustic, and thoroughly informed analysis of the Dominion-Fox News suit, the internal machinations exposed by court filings, and what this all means for the future of political media, the Republican Party, and American democracy. The revelations show a network motivated by profits and ratings, not facts—a reality its executives both admit and struggle to navigate as their audience’s priorities reshape right-wing politics in real time.

Transcript

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[Evan Osnos]

What are the kids into?

[Jane Mayer]

Oh, Santos. They're finally doing a tactics investigation.

[Evan Osnos]

Keeps on giving.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, you know, I read that Santos is actually planning, of course, to run for reelection already because he's gotten so much publicity. And that really is the aim of it, isn' What a country.

[Jane Mayer]

Wait a minute.

[Evan Osnos]

What a country.

[Jane Mayer]

Not just reelection. There's someone who works for him who's planning his presidential bid.

[Evan Osnos]

Oh, God. Are you serious?

[Jane Mayer]

Serious?

[Susan Glaser]

Welcome to the Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glaser, and this is the favorite part of my week when I'm joined by my colleagues, Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer. Hi, guys.

[Jane Mayer]

Hey, Susan.

[Evan Osnos]

Hi there.

[Susan Glaser]

So, look, it's fair to say that all three of us have been absolutely hooked on the revelations about Fox News, which have been coming out of the Dominion Voting System's defamation lawsuit. The filings are a remarkable peak. You might even call it an X ray at the inner workings of one of the most powerful TV networks in America. Not to mention a window into Republican politics today and in the future. In A bombshell filing this week, we saw text messages and emails from inside Fox itself revealing what we suspected, but didn't yet have proof of that. Fox hosts and executives didn't seem to believe what their own network was saying about the 2020 election. No less than Rupert Murdoch himself admitted as much in a deposition released this week. So the stakes here, of course, could not be higher for Fox News itself. Depending on the outcome of this case, they could be on the hook to pay something like $1.6 billion in damages that Dominion is asking. But I also think it's an important story about where politics are right now and looking ahead to the 2024 presidential contest. But, Evan, let's start a little bit with a brief history. How did we even get to this point?

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah, this is a case that if you were not paying attention to it at the beginning, you are definitely paying attention to it now. You know, filed in March of 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems, people remember that they became a kind of favorite target on Fox News in the aftermath of the election. They were being accused of all kinds of ridiculous and wild accusations. I mean, that they were being controlled by Venezuelan dictators. And you know, as they laid out in their complaint at the time, they said this led to death threats, there were harassment within the company. But also, interestingly, they said that really this was about more than just them and their employees. It was about democracy. And you know, at the time that sounded like, okay, maybe that's just sort of high minded legal language that they're going for. But actually what we've since learned is this extraordinary narrative of what was going on inside the company. I mean, what's really remarkable about this case and the reason why I think it sort of demands so much attention, why we've devoted a whole show to it, is that it gives you the thing we almost never get, which is the conversation among the participants, behind the scenes, among the executives, among the hosts actually saying out loud to one another, questions about what do they really believe? Or how much does it matter what they believe? How much is it gonna cost them? All of these issues about money, ideology, truth, lies, it's all right there.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, the lawsuit, of course, comes out of the 2020 election and Donald Trump's refusal to accept defeat in it. I and the question here is whether Fox's own coverage contributed to the events of January 6, 2021. If you actually listened to Fox News in that period of time, Evan, what would you have heard? What are we actually talking about in this lawsuit?

[Evan Osnos]

If you had turned On Fox News in that period and watched people like Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. What you would have heard over and over again is that there is this potentially catastrophic crime being committed against the United States.

[Sidney Powell (quoted)]

Several days ago, Dominion came under heavy fire after allegations that their machines caused thousands of votes in one Michigan county to be switched from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Giuliani suggested that electronic vote counting is an invitation to fraud. And he's right.

[Evan Osnos]

There has to be a bipartisan examination of everything that went wrong in this election.

[Sidney Powell (quoted)]

Many Americans do not believe that this election was fair. And make no mistake, every American has a right to feel that way.

[Evan Osnos]

I feel that way and that over and over, day after day, that was the message.

[Susan Glaser]

And so you had people like Sidney Powell remind who was she again?

[Evan Osnos]

Sidney Powell was a lawyer who was very prominent in promoting some of the most wild and crazy theories about what these voting systems might have done.

[Jane Mayer]

It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flipped them to President Biden.

[Evan Osnos]

Meanwhile, internally, inside Fox, you had people saying to one another that Sidney Powell, in Tucker Carlson's words, is lying, a crazy person, an unguided missile. But that's not what you were hearing on their.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, remember, she was the one who said, we want to release the Kraken. Well, good, because whatever that is, mythic monster, the Kraken. We're still waiting for the Kraken. Rudy Giuliani, he was another one who appeared often on the airwaves after the election.

[Evan Osnos]

And he was on the airwaves. He was sort of allowed to spout his theories.

[Sidney Powell (quoted)]

And we have a machine, the Dominion.

[Evan Osnos]

Machine, that's as filled with holes as Swiss cheese and was developed to steal elections. Meanwhile, internally, Rupert Murdoch was describing Rudy Giuliani, and I'm reading here from this material as saying, quote, really crazy stuff and damaging. But you sure weren't hearing that on Fox's Airways.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, and what's amazing, of course, Gene, is that this is, you know, normally you don't have this kind of discovery in a case. Right. The conventional wisdom is for a company like Fox, of course, you don't let a case like this proceed. You would settle it, do anything, rather than to have these embarrassing revelations about your own executives come public as part of a discovery process. So why didn't that happen, James?

[Jane Mayer]

Well, Dominion is not accepting settlement. They actually want this dirty laundry out there. And I think it's to all of Our benefit. Because what you're getting to see is the most extraordinary thing. It's kind of what we all suspected might be going on inside Fox. You know, I've spent months at times writing about Fox News. And you imagine that this might be what happens in the, you know, the C suites there. But you could never really see it except for a case like this. And Dominion won't settle, won't take the money. They want to just keep pushing. And so we've actually got a deposition from Rupert Murdoch himself. He's 92 years old, one of the most powerful people in the world, and even he has to sit there and answer the questions and wow, it was really something.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, I know. So, okay, so here's our own. It's basically like a real life episode of Succession that we're seeing here in Rupert Murdoch's own words. There's so many details, I have to say, like it's almost 200 pages.

[Evan Osnos]

This week's favorite details.

[Susan Glaser]

The other filing was well over 100 pages. I've sort of gobbled up all of it. I want to ask everybody what is their favorite of these damning details? I know my own. But Evan, you jump in first.

[Evan Osnos]

You know, I think there was a particularly telling moment that was right before the January 6th insurrection. And at one point Rupert Murdoch understood that there was this opportunity for Fox to do something, to kind of put out the message across their devoted viewers where they could change the narrative, where they could say, you know, what if Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham all got on the air and said something like the election is over and Joe Biden won. And he said at the time, he said, you know, he hoped that it would go a long way to stop the Trump myth, that the election was stolen. By the way, that is him acknowledging that it was a myth. And yet the reaction he gets from Suzanne Scott, the CEO, is, and I'm quoting here, that those hosts are, quote, privately, they are all there, meaning they agree that this is a myth, but, quote, we need to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers. And so they made no such statement. That's an extraordinary thing. I also feel like we have to say Fox's claim here is that they were exercising their First Amendment and that what they were doing was simply reporting on the news, as wild as those claims were. And what you get in this case is this line by line refutation of that argument.

[Jane Mayer]

I mean, what you can see is there's a calculation. The people running Fox have no compunction about lying. They are trying to figure out how many lies do they need to tell in order to keep their audience so that they don't lose the ratings. They're afraid of losing the ratings.

[Susan Glaser]

All right, but what's your favorite?

[Jane Mayer]

Okay, my favorite, I think the iconic phrase that came out of this from my standpoint was Rupert Murdoch saying, when they put on my pillow, man, and he goes there and tells preposterous lies about the election. It's not red, not blue, it's green. What we are hearing is the head of Fox News saying, hey, it's not about helping one side or the other in politics. It's about the money. You know, and he even, I think if you look at this, he thought that was going to be something of a defense. He's trying to say, well, you know, it's not really malice. We weren't trying to push one side for political views. It's just a business. In fact, that statement from him just shows just the pure venality of this operation.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, you know what's so remarkable? I have a different Murdoch quote, because it really is amazing to hear Murdoch himself, right. And to hear him saying this. And the thing that is incredible to me is that he has an email just a couple days after January 6th to a former Fox executive in which he says very clearly, well, we're done with Donald Trump. And he uses, he says, we're, quote, pivoting, unquote. But he says, we want to make Donald Trump a non person. That's, quote, a non person, which is just such a cutting statement by Murdoch. But I think it's also, it reflects something that puts us right back in the incredibly awkward, tense politics of the moment for Republicans right now and in the aftermath of January 6th. They want to pivot, at least the establishment, the Murdochs of the gop. They want to pivot from Donald Trump, but they can't. They can't. You know, they created this monster and they can't figure out how to extricate themselves, in part because of Jane's quote, the green. The green is a problem because they made an audience of Trump junkies. And then the Trump junkies don't want to stick with the news channel. They prefer Trump's alternate news. And it's just, it's such an amazing thing.

[Jane Mayer]

I totally agree. I mean, all this time, people have been trying to figure out, is Trump really the power that's running Fox or is Murdoch the power that's running Trump? Turns out it's not really either. It's the base. It's the viewers who they have created, who they have spun up into such an angry mob that they then have to keep catering to them for fear that they'll lose the viewers and then start losing money. And I mean, the other along those lines along with the it's not red, it's not blue, it's green. I will never forget, I think the quotes from Tucker Carlson, who's absolutely in a panic about the possibility that Fox's stock price is falling because after they've called the election, honestly in Arizona for Biden, who's won the state, viewers are getting mad and they're going over to a rival right wing news operation, Newsmax, and Tucker Carlson, who goes out every night looking like he's so tough and you, you know, bullying everybody else, it turns out he's in a meltdown over the possibility that they might earn less money because they're losing their couple of their viewers. It's really just incredibly revealing.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, to go back to this question of, you know, sort of the Fox predicament being the Republican Party's predicament right now, it does strike me, Evan, that the panic is not just over money, but it actually is. Like the Trump trap is the audience, is the voters themselves they've created. It's not Trump that's even the biggest problem for them. It is their own audience. And it's very indicative to me that basically the strategy for the Fox empire these last two years has been to freeze out Donald Trump. And yet they haven't disavowed sort of that Trumpism. Tucker Carlson is still essentially ranting about the same things that he was ranting about before. They've just transferred their affections almost entirely to Ron DeSantis who has literally been on hundreds of times on FOX since, in the last two years since they've frozen out Donald Trump. And I wonder what you make of that. You know, they're not disavowing this kind of Trumpism because that seems to be what their audience wants. They just want to get rid of the troublesome guy.

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah. One of the things that is really fascinating to watch and this has been partly exhumed by reporting in places like the Tampa Bay Times and in Politico is the process of the wholesale generation of a campaign phenomenon around Russia. I mean, if you haven't been following the details, you really have to understand what happened here. An email, for instance, that was produced by the Freedom of Information Act. This is about communication between the Ron DeSantis operation and Fox News quoted One of the people inside Fox News as Saying to Ron DeSantis, people, quote, we see him as the future of the party. Now you might say, okay, well that's just, you know, the journalist trying to get this guy on the air. But if you actually add up all of the different times that he went on the air, you know, he was on Hannity eight times, Tucker Carlson six times. And in fact, one of the unforgettable details is that he appeared on Laura Ingraham's show seven times, which is the same number of times that he met with his own lieutenant governor, according to his public calendar. So if you want to understand his priorities, it was Fox, Fox, Fox.

[Jane Mayer]

And if you want to understand Rupert Murdoch's priorities, It's DeSantis, DeSantis, DeSantis. And you can see that in all of his media properties. So you can see in the New York Post they're calling him the future possibly. Remember that was their one pun. And when Trump decided to announce his bid for reelection, they belittled him as Florida man says he's running for president and stuck it in like page somewhere stuck inside the newspaper. So they're doing their best. But actually, I don't know if any of you have seen the film clips. It was quite funny where one of the Fox hosts is on location in DeSantis hometown and at at a diner and goes around and asks everybody in hopes of showing this incredible boom for DeSantis that Fox wants to portray. And they go from table to table saying, who are you favoring for 20, 24? And one diner after the next says, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Finally, the interviewer goes up to a woman wearing a DeSantis T shirt, hopefully thinking, well, at least here's one for him, and asks, and she says, yeah, maybe Desantis, maybe Trump. Whether Fox can really create this kind of wave for someone is really going to be an interesting sort of political science question, because they couldn't be trying harder.

[Evan Osnos]

This gets to something that Susan, you raised earlier, which I think is kind of the subtext of this whole topic, which is about the way in which this phenomenon, the sort of Fox effect on the viewer, just jumped the boundaries of the laboratory and kind of wandered out like this Frankenstein out into our political lives. There was a moment, actually kind of a prescient note that Dana Perino wrote to one of the Republican strategists in which she said, and I'm reading here, this day of reckoning was going to come at some point where the embrace of Trump became an albatross. We can't shake right away, if ever. So they knew what was happening, and yet they were either unwilling or incapable of stopping again.

[Susan Glaser]

The political scene will be back in just a moment.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial Director.

[Evan Osnos]

I'm Michael Kolori, Wired's Director of Consumer, Tech and Culture.

[Susan Glaser]

And I'm Lauren Good.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.

[Susan Glaser]

And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Katie Drummond]

And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.

[Jane Mayer]

Right.

[Evan Osnos]

So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.

[Katie Drummond]

Affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[Susan Glaser]

There seems to be a pretty strong consensus out there in legal expert land that Dominion really has got Fox on the ropes here. It's very hard under our legal system to prove defamation, to prove actual malice. That's the standard. It's really hard to do that. But this is the kind of evidence we've almost never seen. What do you make of it? Do you think that Fox is really in trouble? Would they have to pay 1.6 billion doll billion dollars?

[Jane Mayer]

Well, I mean, as one media lawyer said, looking at this, if you had to choose which shoes you want to be in, you'd rather be in Dominion's shoes than in Murdoch's. I mean, you could, I think it would be foolish to say for sure this is a shut case. You know, it is a very high bar to reach. But if this is not actual malice, it's hard to say what is. Because as we know as reporters, what the definition really is, people think it's not just having a malicious attitud. What it really is is knowing that something is false and damaging and saying it anyway, publicizing it anyway. And you can see in all of these texts that the people who ran Fox and their most famous hosts understood that what they were saying was false and they decided to say it anyway. And it's all laid out there in these documents. So, I mean, this is going to be a hard case to defend.

[Susan Glaser]

Do you think, Evan, that this is. I mean, are you worried about this as a journalist? Does it concern you from a free speech, speech point of view? There's always the classic, right, like bad cases make bad law. I'm a Little worried that bad law comes out of this.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, there is a degree to which we should all be vigilant against. The idea of people bringing unscrupulous lawsuits against news organizations simply because they don't like the way they're being described. That's not what's going on here. I mean, this is a case in which the emails and the text messages and the communications themselves at the time, I find them actually even more persuasive, Jane, than the deputies deposition because deposition is something you do after the fact. It's kind of this self curated presentation. The emails at the time, the text messages tell the tale. Tucker Carlson describing Sidney Powell, Trump's lawyer, as lying, a crazy person, an unguided missile, dangerous as hell poison. I mean, that's what they were saying and they were talking about Rudy Giuliani. Crazy stuff. I mean, it's just one thing after another. It becomes very hard to see how they're then gonna say, we didn't know if what they were saying was true or. And we were just reporting the news.

[Susan Glaser]

So should we even call it Fox News? I saw that this was a point that CNN's media analyst was making.

[Evan Osnos]

Look, I think that let's leave it to the courts to decide what they think. I mean, this is why we have the law. This is, you know, there's gonna be a trial that's set for April. I mean, all of this, everything we're talking about is just the pretrial elements of this. So we'll know eventually. But I think one thing we do know for sure.

[Susan Glaser]

Sure.

[Evan Osnos]

Is that they had a set of motives here, that they in effect saw themselves as a political party and they saw themselves as a money generator. And news, if it was in there somewhere, seemed to have been a lower priority.

[Susan Glaser]

So Jane, I want to go back to this question of just how exceptional or off was the behavior that's at issue in the Dominion case and in what Fox did after the 2020 election. Because obviously this is not the first time that there's been a pretty big case of gaslighting Americ from Fox News. And I'm wondering, you've studied the history very closely, done amazing reporting on how this network works and the power that it wields over our politics. I remember Barack Obama and the birther controversy that was given a platform by Donald Trump and Fox News. There was this great line that Obama loves to use. I think he used it once on the Bill Maher show. He said, if I was listening to Fox, I wouldn't vote for me. Either. So is this lying actually different than what we've heard before?

[Jane Mayer]

No. I mean, honestly, anybody who says they're surprised by this shouldn't be. We've seen this. It's as you were saying. You know, the birther lie about Obama was spread by Fox in 2011. That was a long time ago. Now. They've been at this for quite a long time. And we also shouldn't be surprised that Rupert Murdoch was willing to trade away what he thought was true and what he supposedly believes in in terms of his political ideals in exchange for audience and serving Trump, because we've seen it before. In 2015, Rupert Murdoch denounced Trump, actually because of Trump's views on immigration. Rupert Murdoch is an immigrant to America, and he criticized Trump's xenophobia, and he didn't support Trump. But when Trump won, we saw Rupert Murdoch just sort of flip and turn his whole network, really, into the closest thing we've ever had in America to state tv. So we have seen him do this before for the ratings, for the money, for the power, for the closeness to a president. People who know Rupert Murdoch say he's always wanted to be really close to a president.

[Evan Osnos]

One of the things that comes to the surface, I think, has to be maybe a political scene rule about Washington, which is never underestimate the risks that somebody will take to get proximity to power. That is in some ways the underlying fact for so much of what we talk about on this show. We were talking about it about Lindsey Graham, we're talking about it about Trump. And part of the reason why Rupert Murdoch says that he's turned on Trump is not because he disagrees with his ideas or he finds him repellent. It's because he's a loser, and he thinks that DeSantis might be a winner. And so getting Fox, in effect, into that clinch again with the winner is actually just proving the rule. I find that to be one of those sort of durable principles that can explain a lot of actions that otherwise look inexplicable.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, and of course, just this week, we have. Speaking about access and power, it goes two ways. Republicans are still desperate to get the approval and approbation of Fox. Just this week, we had Speaker Kevin McCarthy giving Tucker Carlson exclusive first access to 40,000 hours of footage from the Capitol of the January 6th insurrection. I should point out that Carlson has repeatedly portrayed the events at the Capitol on January 6th as if that was nothing much that happened. He has cast doubt on the, you know, official narrative of the day. And, you know, even many Republicans are very uncomfortable with McCarthy's decision to do that. What do you think that tells us?

[Evan Osnos]

You know, I think McCarthy recognizes that that's where his people are, to use the term that J.D. vance used to describe people in Ohio. I mean, I think there is a way in which he knows that by releasing this information, it's going to be a massive distraction from what is actually the heart of American politics and what people are voting on. It can go in every different direction. And he's, I think, making the gamble that it redounds to their benefit. But it is a tremendous gamble.

[Jane Mayer]

I mean, I think there's a real concern here also, and it's something we're seeing more broadly than in just this particular instance, which is a number of conservative political figures are really completely bypassing the mainstream media at this point. You've got DeSantis who won't give an interview to any of the independent news organizations that might criticize him and that he can't control. He's only playing footsie with organizations like Fox. And I think he just gave an interview to another Rupert Murdoch property, the News of the World English newspaper. And you've got McCarthy just making a private deal, taking footage that is one of the most historic and terrible events that's happened in American history and handing it all over to a completely slanted news organization that he knows is going to edit it down in some way that serves his political agenda and feed some version of disinformation probably to the American public. You know, and McCarthy basically said, oh, you're just jealous to the rest of the press. There's a principle beyond that, which is that the actual serious, fair minded news organizations are being shoved out of covering a whole portion of American politics because the conservative wing of the Republican party won't deal with them anymore.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, I would point out that Joe Biden hasn't given a ton of interviews either. And in fact, both Biden and Obama have taken a pretty different approach to presidential communications as well in terms of increasingly speaking in venues and to people who are perceived to be more favorable to them. I think that's a matter trend in our politics and it's part of what's driving us apart.

[Jane Mayer]

You know, I mean, I would. Okay, just disagree. The thing is, in order to accept that as a sort of an equal, you know, two siderism thing, you have to suggest that the New York Times, for instance, is the moral equivalent of Fox. And that, you know, to go back to an earlier question about whether this suit is an important thing or a Bad thing for the press generally. I am reflexively the anti defamation suit, anti libel suit in favor of the press. I think it's a very important and possibly positive development in separating out organizations like Fox News from the actual real and serious news media that actually does care what's true.

[Susan Glaser]

So it seems to me, Jane, that you are saying that you agree with CNN's media person that they shouldn't call it Fox News anymore because it's not really news.

[Jane Mayer]

I mean, they can call themselves whatever they want. But I don't, I think that, you know, I don't think that fair and balanced has ever been, which was the old motto for Fox News, has ever been taken seriously by anybody who really understands the news. It was invented to confuse people.

[Susan Glaser]

Well, it's not their motto anymore. Right.

[Evan Osnos]

You know, what I think is amazing about this set of documents is that it now becomes, in a sense, a storehouse of information about how we understand the inner workings of these places. Meaning there will always be a quote. You know, we sometimes joke that there's always a tweak for Trump. You can always go back and find something.

[Susan Glaser]

There's always something from.

[Evan Osnos]

There will always be something in there now that kind of explains what is sometimes impossible to understand. And, you know, I think this thing is going to live on. Whatever happens in the trial, whatever happens in the case. We've now gotten, I think, some pretty important substance to fill in a chapter of American history. It's really as grand as history in trying to understand sort of what happened to politics in the last 25 years of American politics.

[Jane Mayer]

You know, I mean, my guess, though, as someone who's watched Rupert Murdoch, is he's going to pretty quickly try to figure out how to sort of pretty up the picture by tossing someone overboard and saying, oh, well, maybe it'll be Suzanne Scott's time for defenestration, or maybe Jeanine Pirroult. Or they'll say it's not really the rot at Fox. It was just a mistake that somebody made. And they will get rid of them and suggest that they've cleaned themselves up.

[Susan Glaser]

So there's one. I think there's history here in both directions. But let's bring it back to Donald Trump, the man himself, because part of the problem with Murdoch's theory of how Fox might get out of this is that dumping Trump hasn't proved to be all that easy for them, not to mention that it's gotten them embroiled in this $1.6 billion right now, right now, while Trump is basically banned from Fox, he continues to be the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. So, I mean, how do we see this tumult around Fox actually affecting Trump himself and his candidacy?

[Evan Osnos]

You know, I think it is meaningful that he's not going to be on those airwaves in the way he was before. I don't think there's any way that doesn't have an impact. But I think that the train has already gone so far down the track on this when it comes to the public attitudes that really it's the base that's leading the network. And I do want to draw attention. At the risk of announcing a second thing in here that I found incredibly interesting. There was one exchange that you just have to focus on, which is between Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan. At one point, one of the board members had said, is the there a way in which we can in effect, signal to the public, signal to the base that it's time to take a stand against these deceptions? And Lachlan Murdoch, who's running the company, asks his father for advice. And his father replies, we have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem. Which in the end was his way of saying, we're not going to do anything. But at this point, they recognize that they're not really driving this train.

[Susan Glaser]

So, Jane, I'll give you the last word. You've seen many iterations of this. Is it possible that Fox and Donald Trump might reunite once again after all?

[Jane Mayer]

So possible. I mean, if Donald Trump takes off again, Evan leads the pack in the Republican 2024 presidential race, you will see Fox Buy right back in again. If that's where the viewers are and that's where the dollars are.

[Susan Glaser]

Evan, the color is green.

[Evan Osnos]

I'm not going to be able to see anything clearer than that.

[Susan Glaser]

All right, Evan, Jane, thanks very much.

[Jane Mayer]

Thanks, Susan. Great to be with you.

[Susan Glaser]

This has been the Political Scene. I'm Susan Glaser. We had production assistance today from Alex d' Elia and Dan Richards. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. So we're taking a break next Friday, but we'll be back for the following week. We hope you'll join us then. And thanks so much for listening.

[Katie Drummond]

What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this at Wired? We're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.

[Evan Osnos]

I want a shark that that eats.

[Katie Drummond]

The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.

[Evan Osnos]

So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.

[Katie Drummond]

Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False.

[Jane Mayer]

Tell me more.

[Katie Drummond]

Listen to the Big Interview right now, in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

[Susan Glaser]

From. PRX.