← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
With the Fox-Dominion Settlement We’re Still at the “Mercy of a Billionaire Dynasty”
00:39:40
With the Fox-Dominion Settlement We’re Still at the “Mercy of a Billionaire Dynasty”
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- [00:00]
A
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B
I don't know if we're in the chit chat stage of our.
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C
Please commence chitchat.
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B
Okay. A situation has emerged. Some big news has broken. Just as we were coming here.
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D
What?
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B
I. I received a phone call from one Theo Baker who said you. Blue check marks are gone.
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D
Mine's gone.
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B
Mine.
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D
Yours is gone. Mine.
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C
Yours is gone. Mazel tov, everybody.
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B
No, yours is gone too.
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C
I just think that's exciting. We all wanna be de checkmarked. Otherwise, you're one of those people that pays for the checkmark.
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B
I know that's true. It would be humiliating to be like.
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D
Would you be a person Than to pay the richest man in the world to have a check mark next to your name.
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C
I have to say I don't mean to celebrate anybody's misfortune, but his giant rocket blew up today.
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D
Schadenfreude.
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B
Kind of surging, distracting us journalists from the rocket blowing up.
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C
Oh, wow.
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B
With the blue check mark.
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C
Well, it's working. Evidently. But I'm trying to bring it back to the matter at hand, which is the explosion of his metaphor.
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B
Well, it's also the explosion of his bank account. Never have I seen anyone spend more money, more reckless.
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C
Well, he's been on a bit of a media sort of romance tour recently, trying to be very calm and mature. How's that going?
- [02:29]
B
Yeah, I don't think so. I just saw that they're having to cut the price of Tesla's, like, again.
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C
And again and again.
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B
Now, of course, I don't think I would be in the market for a Tesla at this point, but.
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C
Or a SpaceX rocket from the look of it.
- [02:43]
D
Yeah. Really? Do you want to buy a car from this man? But do you think I've been seeing that launch? I don't know.
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B
I know we're all like, sort of cheering, like his epic fail on Twitter, but I have to say, I still come back to the idea that here's this incredibly valuable news platform that's being broken and I just don't see anything that's replacing it. I mean, that post news and Mastodon and I mean Instagram for that matter, those are just not substitutes.
- [03:11]
D
But at the same time, it's amazing. He has ruined it. I just. It has none of the snap, none of the same sort of smart people to kind of bounce back and forth. I mean, it still serves a purpose of showing you a little bit about what's breaking.
- [03:26]
B
Right. But that's a very significant. I mean, I'm just saying that I know we are bemoaning the things that are lost, but I feel like, in a way, we're inured to, like, the really big thing that's being lost, which is there's nothing else. There's nowhere else where we can get, like. Think of all the people that I follow who are in Ukraine covering the war, or who are China hands in Asia. I don't see any way to reassemble that ability to get that amount of information and news, not the commentary.
- [03:55]
C
But I think these things, you get the social media platforms that you deserve and Facebook became a reflection of us as a society, and Twitter ultimately became a reflection of a certain kind of oligarchy. I mean, the fact that he was able to buy it and destroy it felt kind of topical and appropriate. I think actually one of the lessons is these things come and go and something will fill that vacuum. It's not gonna linger.
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B
I actually think that's. Although I don't ever. We've never seen anything like the news value that Twitter was able to put in a relatively kind of low bells and whistles, kind of paired, stripped down.
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D
I would argue that in a way, you've just gotten months, maybe years of your life back. All that time that went down the tube.
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C
Welcome to the Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Hi to you, Beau.
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D
Hi, Evan.
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B
Hey, there.
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C
There is an old Washington joke about spending which is often attributed to Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, which goes like this. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. Well, that joke was on my mind this week when it was announced that Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for three quarters of a billion dollars. It's one of the largest, if not the largest defamation settlements ever, ever reported. But will that payout, which comes without a formal apology, I'll remind you, will that change anything about Fox moving forward? And is that staggering sum of money large enough to constitute real money if you are Rupert Murdoch? So before we get too deep into the Fox Dominion settlement, we have to start with the report that the MyPillow founder and election denier Mike Lindell has to pay out $5 million over his wild claim to have data showing Chinese interference in the election. At the time, you may have forgotten this, he even held a contest called Prove Mike Wrong. And on Wednesday, somebody did, it turns out, according to an arbitration panel. So, Susan, I'm curious what you make of that Is nature healing itself. What do you make of the Mike?
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B
Well, first of all, I think it shows that we all should have entered this contest because probably it might not have been as hard as we to earn $5 million, because, in fact, it's actually not that hard to prove that crazy, insane claims are crazy, insane and baseless. Every single investigation, it should be said again and again, every single investigation of the 2020 election from Lindell, from Donald Trump himself in the States, everybody who's investigated it at any level, whether it's the claims about Dominion voting machines or about foreign interference in the election, they've all been disproven.
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C
And it's starting to get expensive to people. And so that gets us to actually happened earlier this week, Jane, we were all prepared for a trial to get underway, a trial that was described as the super bowl of media defamation trials. So why did Fox and Dominion settle at the last minute?
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D
Well, there were obvious things that appealed to each of them. It's a tremendous amount of money for Dominion. Dominion's made an incredible investment in this case. They're getting back just multiples of money for themselves and for Fox. It was worth that much money to never have this trial and never have to put this incredible amount of dirty laundry out there in public. But I've seen it argued both ways. Who won? Was it Fox? Was it Dominion? You could argue it either way. But I think the bottom line from my standpoint, the question that really matters is who really didn't win? And I think that is the American public, and I think that is American democracy. The only metric I think of what really matters here is whether Fox will stop sell telling lies to make money and polluting American discourse with disinformation. Spoiler alert.
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B
No.
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D
And, well, I mean, and you can, as Susan just said, look at the statement that they put out with the settlement. It's complete doublespeak. Far from saying we're sorry, it's saying this just proves what a high commitment we have to high standards of journalism.
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C
But before we get into what the settlement says, I think we have to remind some people who have not been following on every syllable of this case the way that some of us have, just a few of the actual details of this lawsuit that we've already seen that were already brought to light. Susan, when you look back on this, what are some of the highlights that came out in the pre trial element that turned out to be in its own way, totally explosive?
- [08:53]
B
Well, I think you're right, Evan, to point this out because that's one of the weird things about Fox deciding to settle at the very last minute because if they were willing to pay this much money, you'd think they would have been willing to pay this much money maybe a couple months ago in order to stop what by any measure has got to be about the most damaging discovery that I've ever seen in a court case. Right. You know, we have had evidence emerge as a result of this $1.6 billion lawsuit that was directly from Rupert Murdoch himself, correspondence with his own son, with his top executives from Fox with many of the bold face name Fox hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. What did it show? It showed in writing, in their own words that they knew that the election lies and that Trump's bogus claims not only about Dominion but more broadly about the rigged election were kooky, dangerous, wrongheaded. That's the Fox people in their own words.
- [09:50]
D
And false, mostly, most importantly, that they knew it was a lie.
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B
Absolutely, they knew it was a lie. And it began to establish in the evidence that became public the possible motive for the crime, if you will. Right. The Motive being to hang onto their audience, which was so fanatically supportive of Trump. Fox feared that they were going to defect in large numbers to rival much smaller right wing channels that would freely embrace Trump's lies about the election.
- [10:25]
D
I mean, I would argue that, I agree with Susan that the discovery was incredibly damaging. I think not, since basically since Toto pulled the curtain off of the wizard of Oz and you got to, you see the little man there on earth. Have we seen, you know, that's what happened to Rupert Murdoch. We saw the little man at his cash register worrying that he was gonna make less money, surrounded by other little.
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B
Men like Tucker Carlson sitting there saying, oh my God, the stock price is going down.
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D
And then talking about Trump as a demonic force.
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C
That was the key, that was one of the absolute key moments. I mean there was like, if you had to really pick a couple, I think that the demonic force line from Tucker Carlson as a keeper, amazing. But there was also this moment when you actually got to see the sort of Patient Zero, the origin of this ridiculous lie about Dominion, which was this letter, this email that in its own presentation described the theory as wackadoodle. And then that sort of goes through the whole system of Fox and ends up on the air over and over again. So, you know, in some ways I think part of what you're both vocalizing is this sense of letdown that we had all kind of collectively as a public culture decided that this case was actually almost like a democratic instrument, lowercase D, meaning that it was gonna finally achieve some kind of public airing of not just the lies around the 2020 election, but this whole movement of deception, this whole kind of idea that you could say anything and get away with it. Cuz I think that's really what this was about, this notion that we were living in an era when it just doesn't matter what the MyPillow guy says, it doesn't matter what Fox says, they can do it with total impunity.
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B
And can there ever be accountability for Donald Trump's sins when Donald Trump himself is not held accountable? And that once again, there's a headline that kind of encapsulates this, right, Rupert Murdoch pays for Donald Trump's lies. And of course he's also self interestedly paying in a way for the privilege of keeping his audience by lying to it. So it's not entirely just paying for Trump's lies. But again, we come back to this idea that I feel like it's the source actually of a lot of the pent up and unexpressed sort of inchoate rage that exists in the center and the left in this country around the entire Trump era. And that is the idea that until and unless there is some form of accountability directly that falls on the shoulders of Donald Trump, that it's not enough to put the sort of flagpole wielding goons of January 6th into jail if the people who told them to go there never face a moment of reckoning. And I think that's what you're seeing in some of the commentary after this settlement. But it really, it does reflect also the gap between the legal culture in this country and the political culture. And I've seen so many lawyers quoted in the last few days saying, listen, if you wanted that kind of accountability, you were never gonna get it. In our system, it's all about the money, and it's money that talks. And in the love language of the legal system, Rupert Murdoch has really had to pay up a lot. But you're basically naive if you think that there's any other kind of accountability that could result here.
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D
I feel like in some ways it was as if the whole country had seen the previews for this show that we were gonna see. And then they, then they brought down the curtain and they said, you know, no popcorn, go home. And so there are a lot of people who were waiting for something more. I mean, you're right that the lawyers have said, first of all, that this is a tremendous amount of money and that, you know, so that Dominion did very well and Fox took a very big bite. I mean, but, you know, as someone who used to work for the Wall Street Journal, I have to say, take a look at Fox. It's a pretty healthy company. It's got a market capitalization of, I think, 17.3 billion or something like that. And it had 4 billion plus just in cash and cash equivalents sitting around. So 787.5 million is painful, but it's not going to be life changing for Fox. But again, going back to what the lawyers say, they've also said there were risks going forward. Even if you wanted to see Dominion win in this case, it's possible that they might not have. If they had lost, it probably would have made a lot of people want to rethink the libel laws in this country, including the Supreme Court. And you never know what would have happened on appeal. You don't know what would have happened if it had made it to the Supreme Court. And it would have taken years and years. And so this is money up front. So that's how the lawyers look at it.
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C
That gets to the key question, which is their finances are what they are very strong. And I think one of the arguments that's come forward in the last couple of days, put forward, particularly by Jack Schaefer at Politico, is that in some ways, this is not a bug for Fox. This is a feature. This is how they do business. And he kind of reminds us of all of these different suits that they've had over the years. Whether it was in one case, it was $50 million for women at Fox News who alleged sexual harassment. In fact, there was one that I forgot about $500 million for some supermarket coupon trade secret lawsuit. And yet they soldier on. So my question sus is does this in fact change the culture at Fox News in any way? Does this bend the curve of ultimately, is it bad enough for business that they need to say, try something different?
- [15:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, always listen to Jack Schaeffer. That's another political principle we can all observe. Jack is right. This is how Rupert Murdoch does business. It's a cost of doing business. In this case, it's a particularly high cost. And we should note that it's not even the final amount of money. Smartmatic, which is another voting machines company, currently has a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox treading on much of the same territory. When the settlement came out the other day, I noticed with interest that smartmatic's CEO said, well, Dominion started the job and we're gonna finish it in our case. So it might not even be the final amount of money that Fox is required to pay here. But that being said, I think it reminds me really of Donald Trump's habit of serially using the courts and lawsuits to serve his own business and now political interests by tying disputes up in the courts, by seeing this essentially as a cost of doing business rather than any kind of external deterrent to proceeding one way or the other. I mean, does anyone actually think that Fox is gonna be totally different? If anything, they're bragging about their continued strength in the ratings among cable news outlets, bragging in the statement about their commitment to journalistic standards, which seems to have been pretty comprehensively debunked in the evidence that has emerged in this case. And I think it's a story again about the distorting effect that lies have in our politics. And it seems to me that with Donald Trump as the front runner, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, two and a half years after the events that are covered in this lawsuit, his stature in the race has gone up, not down, in the period of time when these revelations from Dominion have been made public. He is having a moment in which his continued dominance of the Republican Party has meant that even Murdoch and his network, which tried to quit Trump after 2020, they're back to offering Trump basically slave. I suggest that listeners, if they can stomach it, look at some of the Tucker Carlson interview with Donald Trump that he did last week.
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D
Again, you would never know that he secretly felt that Donald Trump was a demonic force.
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E
We spent more than an hour with Donald Trump today and we were struck throughout the course of the conversation how his grasp of foreign policy, this man who was supposedly stupid, his understanding of world affairs, is so much more nuanced and sophisticated and pro American than the moronic neocons currently in charge. It was remarkable.
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D
It's always been a deal. Basically, we know that Rupert Murdoch had called Trump from the start an effing moron. And from the very beginning, even way back in the 80s, it's always been a deal. The deal is that Donald Trump gets publicity, he gets famous, he gets power, and Rupert Murdoch gets readers, viewers, clicks which translate into money. And that has been this pas de deux that has run straight through the Trump administration and they've enabled each other.
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B
By the way, a use of pas de deux in a podcast.
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D
Thank you. I get tired of guys always use sports metaphors. That's true. So I have made a practice of trying to use ballet and fashion metaphors. I think the time has come.
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C
The political scene will be right back. And when we return, we'll look at the succession like dynamics in the Murdoch family.
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A
America is changing and so is the world.
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D
But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
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B
Asma.
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A
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington D.C. i'm.
- [20:10]
D
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global story.
- [20:14]
A
Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
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D
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:27]
C
All right, so it seems like the consensus here is that this settlement, as large as it is, is not gonna fundamentally change what Fox is. But now you've brought up the question of the Murdochs themselves. This compl. Complicated chemistry of personalities, of generations of power and ultimately of money. All of us are thinking about what the future holds for this family. Even if you weren't watching succession, which I'll remind you, by the way, the working Title of that script apparently was Murdoch. So this is not a remote abstraction of the family. It is exactly as close as you're probably going to get in a fictionalized form. So, Jane, you have written a lot about this topic. You've thought a lot about the players, you've interviewed. A lot of them paint a portrait for us for a second of who the Murdochs are. Who are the key players and what roles do they play in the future?
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D
Well, this is an incredibly colorful dynasty. And even before we get into it, I just want to say, apropos of the idea that succession is fiction, there was a divorce settlement recently involving Jerry hall and Rupert Murdoch. And there was a fantastic piece about it in Vanity Fair by Gabe Sherman. And one of the little tiny items in it was that Jerry hall is forbidden from talking to the cast and the writers of Succession and providing plotlines.
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B
Explicitly as part of her divorce. I thought that was the key. Basically, it seemed to me that it was confirmation that this is in fact, as a form of dramatized documentary rather than dramatic invention of any sort.
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D
Absolutely. So at the pinnacle of this dynasty is the Nonagerian. Excuse me, nonagenarian. Is that how you pronounce it? Okay, but how old is he really? I'm trying to remember. 90.
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B
He's 90.
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D
Hold on.
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B
Well, he's older than Logan Roy, although we don't want to spoil that. So, by the way, if there are any listeners who haven't watched, you should tune out now.
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D
Okay, 92 year old Rupert Murdoch, who has built this empire, he's Australian, he's always been an outsider pushing his way in, and he's made billions and billions and billions. And he has several sets of children. Wife number one had one daughter. Wife number two had three children, and wife number three had two children. Only the first four children get shares in the company. They are Prudence, his daughter from the first wife, and they are Elizabeth, Lachlan, and James, his three children from his second wife. Each of them has one share. So they have, between the four siblings, four shares. Rupert Murdoch has four shares. What happens if Rupert Murdoch dies? Those shares will be evenly distributed among the four children that he's got that already have the shares. What does this mean? There could be an unbelievable power struggle within the dynasty. And the question is, how will those siblings line up? And who will have the power? Who will have the majority? And apparently, Rupert Murdoch, much like succession, likes to play the siblings off against each other. And we've seen over the years, some are up, some are down, and some are friendly with their father, and some are on the outs, and then they're on the outs with each other. Right now, Lachlan Murdoch is running Fox and his brother James is on the outs. They don't speak to each other, reportedly, but James, who is much more liberal than his father and his brother Lachlan, has designs.
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B
Well, and by the way, James actually hosted a Democratic fundraiser last year that one Joe Biden attended at his home. And so this question is obviously going to be ripe if there is a plot twist a la succession, and Rupert Murdoch finally faces his end at some point. In fact, interestingly, I just looked up the fictional Logan Roy was only either 82 or 84 years old, depending on which Internet source you believe. Where is.
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D
I mean, the thing about Murdoch is that longevity runs in his family. So he might.
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C
His mother lived to be over 100.
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D
Well over a hundred.
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C
And also, I will say, and Rupert has said that he's, as he put it at one point, convinced of his own immortality. I think that's more than just rhetoric. I mean, what we know, as Jane described, Lachlan, of course, is running the company. James is no longer involved. There was one of the details in Gabe Sherman's reporting that was quite compelling, was that on some level that the joy of running the company has been sapped now that it's no longer a fraternal competition. And so one of the questions that I think people have is what about these other two players, Elizabeth and Prudence? And is there any sense of how the choreography to the pas de deux, as Jane would say, how that lines up if they find themselves in a moment of realignment?
- [25:33]
B
Well, I think this is actually where you can circle right back to the beginning of this conversation about the payout dominion and possible payouts to others, which is to say, do you get to the point where the kind of disastrous political choices and the compromises that are required in the Trump era of Republican politics are an era that is not only not finished, but very much still in progress, where that actually affects the value of the business and the decisions that Rupert Murdoch will have to make as long as he is still in charge. I definitely was thinking about this convergence between sort of fact and fiction. And this week there's this scene in the current season, if you've been watching it, which is the final season of.
- [26:14]
C
The session, I've been reading Proust.
- [26:19]
B
I don't want to upset you with this, but there is a moment where Logan Roy is confronting in person, his three renegade children who have broken with him and he is once again trying to be the crafty dealmaker even with his own kids who he, he does not hesitate to betray at every possible turn. And he says to them, well, you know, I don't do apologies, but you know, to the extent that you feel that one is necessary, I'm sorry. And then they immediately realize that, you know, he hasn't said what the heck he's sorry for. And I just, that was literally the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw the non apology apology, sorry, not sorry from Fox this week. Right. It's exactly the same thing. It's an entire company that doesn't do apologies. They'll pay for their screw ups. As Doc Schaefer listed all the ways in which Rupert Murdoch will pay for the screw ups. But they'll never say, I mean, that is the title.
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C
Fox doesn't do apologies. I mean that is in its own strange way where this thing nets out.
- [27:24]
D
And what we're waiting for in this whole country is a huge apology for what's happened in the last few years.
- [27:30]
B
Would that make you feel better, do you think, Jade, if they would just like, you know, forget about like, you know, I mean, we're not getting the money. Right.
- [27:36]
C
But on a serious note, note it is also about forcing onto the public record the video demonstration of one star of Fox after another saying to their people, I lied to you, I knew something and I didn't tell you. I told you the opposite. Do you think that would actually have any effect in breaking the spell?
- [27:57]
D
I think it would help to hear them all admit that they lie for a living. Instead they're up there picking up just where they left off. I wanted to say since we were going down through the children that the daughter, Elizabeth Murdoch is said to be very, very bright. And I think she has produced a number of successful television shows on her own. She was married to one of the, I think a grandchild of Freud, the psychiatrist.
- [28:27]
C
That could come in handy.
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D
She might need it in this family.
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B
I feel like Shiv was the character who was meant to be like her succession but she always disappointed. Right. There's this. The very last thing that Logan Roy ever says to these children of his is I love you, but none of you are serious people.
- [28:49]
C
Yeah, it's an amazing moment.
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B
It's incredible.
- [28:52]
D
Well, I think. Okay. And to say something, you know, serious about what this situation amounts to is, I mean, looking at it from stepping back is it's kind of incredible that this country is at the sort of mercy of a billionaire dynasty and we're waiting for the succession to see whether the next generation of politics is going to be dominated by a hard right, reactionary Australian family or by, you know, a different wing of the family that believes that climate change is real and that that would have so much influence over American politics. Gives you an idea of what the concentration of wealth in this country has and of the concentration of media in this country.
- [29:37]
B
Well, it also resembles and the fusion of a particular political party and ideology with a television network and a news platform. Because really, like when we were going back and trying to write the story of Trump's four years in office, it ended up again and again and again being a story about a remarkable synthesis, almost a fusion between an administration and a television network in a way that actually had no precedent in American history.
- [30:06]
C
It was a joint venture, really.
- [30:07]
B
Yeah, absolutely exactly right.
- [30:10]
D
A joint venture.
- [30:11]
B
So many people, even in Trump's own cabinet would say that they would actually go on Fox in order to send a news and a message to the President because that was the only thing that he cared about that he took seriously. I will never forget early on in our reporting for the book, when one White House official who worked for Trump in the White House said, you know, it was as if Donald Trump turned took the role of Mike TV in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory seriously. And Mike TV is the little American kid, remember the kid with the cowboys, who is so convinced that television is everything. All he wants to do 24 hours a day is watch television. He actually asked Willy Wonka to put him inside the tv. And imagine that this is a White House official saying that this is how Donald Trump interpreted the job. And for him, of course, the TV in question was actually just all Fox tv, Fox tv.
- [31:05]
D
I mean, and don't forget that Bill Shine, who was one of the top executives at Fox, went into the White House, become sort of one of the top executives in the Trump White House. I mean, they were interchangeable parts. The only thing that seemed to show that there was any difference was where they were drawing their paychecks from.
- [31:24]
C
So in a way, I mean, what we learned even in the pre trial phase of this was that Fox is in some ways kind of now captive to the monster that it created when it comes to its base where it kind of is too timid to disappoint them. I think that leads us naturally to this question of all right, in a post Dominion suit world where we're kind of, as we are here, more or less lamenting the fact that even the arguably largest defamation Settlement in history may not actually mean a whole heck of a lot. What does it take to change this? What has to be described as a kind of culture of disinformation that we're living in right now. Is there any. Anything that could honestly do that?
- [32:06]
B
The science.
- [32:06]
C
I was counting on you, Jane. You're gonna lift us up.
- [32:11]
D
I think I will argue that. I think these kinds of huge sums of money in damages help. They send a message through a newsroom, even a newsroom like Fox. Any newsroom that sends says there is a third rail. You can't go too far. You can't know that you're lying and call it journalism. You can't be protected by the First Amendment for lying about news purposefully. And I think. I mean, that message came through. I think that Fox obviously didn't want it to come through too loud and clear, which is why they didn't go for a trial. They didn't want to think it's true.
- [32:54]
C
It's just undeniable that so much of what we talk about, about in politics as driven ultimately by money, by the bottom line means that we also have to put on the other side of the ledger. When things like this do happen, they do have a signal effect. I mean, they just ripple through the consciousness of people who are deciding how to behave in the future. And let's remember this is not the last case of this kind. I mean, they are facing at least four other lawsuits. And then there are all of the little foxes out there. And so my question, Susan, is do you think that they are in some subtle way, if you're a line producer or you're the general counsel or you're CEO at one of these companies or companies that haven't even fully formed yet, do you say, all right, I gotta find a business line that's a slightly more prudent route?
- [33:40]
B
Evan, I'm gonna leave it to you to make the case for that prudence is actually good for business. Quite the opposite. I mean, I have to say, guys, first of all, the lesson here is that crime pays. The big lie about the 2020 election was really one of the most extraordinary political things that's happened in any of our lifetimes politically in the United States. And the message here is that Donald Trump and Fox got away with it. They had to. You know, Fox ultimately had to pay. We don't know yet how much because it could be more even than the nearly billion dollars. But it's already too late to go back and convince the millions, the tens of millions of Republicans who believe, believe that the 2020 US presidential election was not legitimate and that you can't undo the damage, the incalculable, by the way, damage to the US political system. This is the first time in American history that any president, Democrat or Republican, refused to concede defeat and to accept the lawful results of an election. And as part of that, Fox essentially entered into a conspiracy with him along along with other outlets. And rather than being the sort of prudent niche, quite the opposite. What we saw about conservative media, in fact, was that it was a race to an ever more dangerous bottom in which Fox was up against people who defined their business niches as being more dangerous, more disruptive. Because in fact, there's a business model that says, well, let's get the political audience for it right now, and if there's some damage to our business later, we'll pay it as a cost of doing business. Because actually having an audience to them is more valuable from a business perspective than paying whatever fines result from the recklessness that they believe their audience is requiring them to engage in.
- [35:32]
D
I mean, but not every news organization can afford a damage settlement of this size. I mean, and we have seen. I had high hopes for the Alex Jones trial, and that was where we did get a trial. And you can see the problem is the courts are tangles of years worth of tying up money and it's very hard to get any accountability again. But I am thinking, as usual, slightly more optimistic. I'm not really optimistic on this because I do think Fox has proven that there's a market for disinformation, there's a market for extremism. If they were knocked out out, some other organization would come right in and do it too. But I don't think that responsible news organizations want to get anywhere near doing what Fox has been doing. And they're still very responsible news organizations. They weren't.
- [36:27]
B
But that's the problem. Exactly. I mean, that's like. It's like. It reminds me of the old joke, like, well, sir, to Adlai Stevenson, a woman runs up to him, she says, well, every thinking person is for you. And he says, well, that's the problem. That's the problem. I need a majority. I mean, the responsible news organizations are not the problem. We're in an environment in which this kind of disinformation and demagoguery sells and it spreads faster and more potentially lethally to our democracy than ever. And I also think, Jane, you made a great point earlier about that's really important, that there are potential really scary precedents that could come from this kind of litigation anyways against news organizations, no matter how flawed they are. And to a certain extent, there is a little bit of a sigh of relief that they settled the case, if only because I don't really wanna see how far the Supreme Court is willing to go when it comes to defending the New York Times v. Sullivan precedent.
- [37:26]
D
Two of the justices have made quite clear, basically, they've said they wanna revisit Times v. Sullivan, which is the opinion that really protects news organizations when they make hon. They don't want to. They want to kick that down. And that's Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, both of whom have had big beefs with the news media during their lives. And people will know.
- [37:48]
C
Thomas case but what is Gorsuch's beef with the media? That may be his.
- [37:51]
D
I think it goes back to his mom, who was, you know, the EPA commissioner during the Reagan years, and she got some really rough coverage. And I think, you know, it was a serious situation for him growing up as a young teenager.
- [38:08]
C
And you've seen him already in recent opinions in which he, as he said at one point, our nation's media landscape has shifted in ways few could have foreseen since 1964. So he's already sort of opening the door to the possibility of some big change as we wrap it up. That is actually in some ways perhaps one of the more foreboding questions that we're still contending with, which is that if a big defamation case goes to the Supreme Court, do you think we are sitting, Susan, now on the sort of doorstep of a new era in which not only would we have news organizations that think it's okay to get away with disinformation, but then you also have a court that is willing to side with them.
- [38:47]
B
Well, you know, Evan, I do. I think that just as we've seen in recent years, the Republican Party radicalized, and that has meant radicalized members of Congress, a radical, disruptive president in the form of Donald Trump. And I think we now have a radical Supreme Court that is willing to chuck out previous precedent in a way that is something we haven't seen really in our lifetimes. And when I think about the Supreme Court, it's also at all the lower levels as well. When we were just starting out as journalists, it was seen as a pretty fixed, a pretty settled matter. It was not the age of the gigantic libel suit. It was a sense that as long as you were writing about a public figure, you were pretty protected. That is no longer the sense. And you talk to First Amendment lawyers and I admit to sort of a conflict of interest in this case. My brother is the lawyer for the Los Angeles Times. And the age of threatening lawsuits to big media organizations is back. And I think in part that reflects an emboldened class of would be plaintiffs who sees that the Supreme Court at some point or another might be willing to revisit this landmark 1964 decision.
- [40:03]
C
Well, at the risk of leaning into our stereotypes here, you know, I do confess that Susan sometimes persuades me with a more cool headed approach. The optimist in me says that what this also does is separate out different kinds of news organizations where the fact is there is a fundamental difference between a place that does fact checking that goes through the kind of sometimes crazy rigor that goes into a piece of the kind that you do read in our humble pages that is just fundamentally different. And it's all called news. But these are completely different animals. Am I being too optimistic, Jane?
- [40:38]
D
No, I think you're right. And I guess I think that we still live in a country where the truth is the ultimate defense and you can get charged a lot when you lie.
- [40:50]
C
And we learned that this week. Well, guys, this has been a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you, Jane. And thank you, Susan.
- [40:57]
D
Great to be with you.
- [40:57]
B
Great to be with you, too.
- [41:04]
C
This has been the Political welcome to the Musical Scene. I'm Evan Osnos. 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. Thank you so much for listening. Enjoy your weekend and we'll see you next week.
- [41:25]
F
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [41:56]
D
From prx.