Citizen Cartwright

The Fox, Dominion settlement

As a packed courtroom was waiting for opening statements to begin on Tuesday, "gasps filled the air" when Judge Eric Davis told the jury shortly before 4 p.m. that the two parties had resolved the matter, says The New York Times. 

 

Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. had agreed to settle the case for $787.5 million.

 

The settlement, one of the biggest ever in a defamation case, came with this admission from Fox News:

 

"We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

 

Dominion Voting Systems had alleged that Fox stars, executives, journalists and guests defamed the election tech company for segments in which conspiracies held it had switched votes for then-President Trump to Democratic challenger Biden.

 

"Dominion started this case because Fox's defamatory statements had severely damaged its reputation,” says Tom Wienner, a retired Michigan corporate litigator who's been following the case closely at the request of NPR. "By largely trying its case in the court of public opinion, Dominion has gone a long way toward restoring its good name. In the process, of course, Fox's own reputation has been seriously undermined.”

 

It's uncommon for defamation suits to get to trial, in part because the bar for proving “actual malice” — the legal standard that requires plaintiffs to show that defendants knew what they were saying was a lie, or had a reckless disregard for the truth — is so high, says the Times. It's rarer yet for one to feature the volume of evidence that Dominion had amassed against Fox.

 

In the run-up to trial, Dominion publicly released internal communications among Fox executives, hosts and producers that revealed how the country’s most-watched cable news network set in motion a strategy to win back viewers who'd tuned out after Trump’s loss. 

 

Those communications showed how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud.

 

Some Fox hosts privately described their colleagues as “reckless” for endorsing Trump’s false claims, acknowledging that there was “no evidence” to back them up. Yet for weeks, Fox continued to give a platform to election deniers despite the doubts about their credibility. Dominion challenged statements that were made on multiple programs on multiple nights. Typically, defamation cases involve just a single disputed statement, the Times says.

 

The settlement deal is a significant amount of money, even for a company the size of Fox, says The Associated Press. It represents about a quarter of the $2.96 billion the company reported earning last year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — a figure often used to approximate a company’s cash flow.

 

The settlement is about half of what Dominion was asking for in the trial. But Elie Honig, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says, “I didn’t think there was any way they would get $1.6 billion — even when they proved their case, even if they proved it overwhelmingly to a jury. Let’s remember, by its own estimation, Dominion valued the entire company at somewhere between $30 and $80 million. This settlement is 10 times the value of Dominion as an entire company. That’s how strong a statement this is with this number.”

 

Fox faces a separate $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic USA, a voting-machine company that’s making claims similar to Dominion's. 

 

I’m not seeing any mention of the settlement on Fox News' main web page this morning. Here is what I found when I searched the site.

Conservative mobilization around transgender issues

When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives lost an issue they'd used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors, says The New York Times. 

 

"Today, the effort to restrict transgender rights has supplanted same-sex marriage as an animating issue for social conservatives at a pace that has stunned political leaders across the spectrum. It has reinvigorated a network of conservative groups, increased fund-raising and set the agenda in school boards and state legislatures,” the Times says.

 

It may be easier for Republicans to talk about transgender issues than about abortion, the Times says. The Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion created a backlash among Democrats and independents that's left many Republicans unsure of how — or whether — to address the issue.

 

An Associated Press article makes the same point:

 

"Privately, at least, strategists involved with Republican presidential campaigns concede that the GOP is on the wrong side of the debate as it currently stands,” AP says. "While popular with Republican primary voters, public polling consistently shows that the broader collection of voters who decide general elections believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.”

 

A separate Times article says that before this year, just three state legislatures had enacted full or partial bans on the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and transition surgery for people under 18.

 

Ten more states in the past three months have passed such prohibitions. 

 

And bans have passed at least one chamber of seven more state legislatures on the way toward enactment this year, the Times says.

 

GOP state legislators have called gender-affirming care experimental and harmful and say children aren't mature enough to make permanent decisions.

 

Major medical organizations in the United States support the care, however. And opponents of the prohibitions say they infringe on the rights of young people, parents and doctors, and pose significant mental health risks to a vulnerable population.  

Frank Luntz advice to GOP candidates on beating Trump

The longtime pollster and GOP strategist says he’s run two dozen focus groups on why Donald Trump still inspires so much loyalty and how someone else can win the Republican nomination in 2024.

 

Here is his advice for GOP candidates, in a New York Times guest essay:

 

— While Trump’s GOP support is wide and deep, "roughly a third of Trump voters prioritize the character of the country and the people who run it — and that’s enough to change the 2024 outcome.”

 

— There’s a clear way to appeal to Republican voters firmly focused on the future rather than on re-litigating the past. It starts with a simple campaign pitch along the lines “We can do better. We must do better.”

 

— GOP candidates should get endorsements from Trump voters who have a message like “Donald Trump had my back in 2016. Now, it’s all about him. I didn’t leave Donald Trump. He left me.”

 

— Compliment Trump’s presidency while you criticize the person.

 

— Appeal to Trump’s elderly voters by making it about their grandchildren: “We mistake loud for leadership, condemnation for commitment. The values we teach our children should be the values we see in our president.”

 

— The increase in the annual deficit under Trump is the third-biggest, relative to the size of the economy, of any presidential administration, Luntz says. A campaign pitch he suggests: “We can’t afford these deficits. We can’t afford this debt. We can’t afford Donald Trump.”

 

— During his 2016 campaign, Trump condemned President Obama repeatedly for his occasional rounds of golf, promising not to travel at taxpayer expense, Luntz says. Yet Trump played nearly 300 rounds of golf on his personal courses, costing taxpayers about $150 million in additional security. This could be lethal on the debate stage: “While more than half of America was working paycheck to paycheck, he was working on his short game. And you paid for it!”

 

— Trump surely loses if Republicans come to believe that a vote for him in the primaries means the election of Biden in the general.

 

— You need to get at least one conservative commentator on your side by being as tough as Trump but more committed publicly to traditional conservative ideology like ending wasteful Washington spending. “Some people want to make a statement. I want to make a difference.”

Wisconsin voters flip control of state Supreme Court

In what could be "the most consequential race of 2023,” according to CBS News, liberals on Tuesday gained control of the court for the first time in 15 years, when Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Justice Dan Kelly.

While the court is technically nonpartisan, the results of the election determined whether the court — which could weigh in on politically charged issues in the battleground state — would have a conservative- or liberal-leaning 4-3 majority.

The race had gotten national attention because of its potential implications for Issues including abortion and voting rights.

The court also is to hear challenges to existing election laws, as well as cases that might relate to recounts, absentee ballots and other facets of election administration that could have material impacts on the outcomes of close elections — including the 2024 presidential election, says NBC News.

Ben Wikler, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, says this election could "shape the rules that will affect the 2024 presidential race, the fight for the House majority, and the fight for the Senate majority."  

"We're living in a national environment in which state supreme courts are being given the opportunity by the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on these extraordinarily important and consequential issues," says Howard Schweber, political science and law professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Other issues that could make it before the court in the coming years are challenges to Act 10, a law enacted under then-GOP Gov. Scott Walker, that eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers. It could also hear cases about redrawn legislative maps. The current map, approved by the current state Supreme Court last year, is one of the most gerrymandered in the nation, NBC News says.

The race was the most expensive state Supreme Court race ever, at about $45 million, according to WisPolitics.com.

How journalists should cover the 2024 election

Thanks also to the reader who sent me this tweet from media critic and New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen:

 

"Not the odds, but the stakes.
That's my shortand for the organizing principle we most need from journalists covering the 2024 election. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.”

Trump’s CPAC speech and the future of American democracy

The initial reporting I saw on last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference seemed to treat it as more-or-less a political sideshow.

 

AP: "While CPAC was once a must-stop for candidates mulling Republican presidential runs, DeSantis and other major likely contenders skipped this year’s gathering amid scandal [involving CPAC host Matt Schlapp] and as the group has increasingly become aligned with Trump.”

 

But as this week has progressed, I’ve come across more articles on why we need to pay attention to what Trump said.

 

(I ran out of time putting this blog together yesterday because the only transcript of Trump’s speech was by Rev, with which I wasn’t familiar and wasn’t sure I could trust. And the audio of Trump’s speech ran an hour and 45 minutes. By the way, I read the Rev transcript as I watched the speech, and Rev only made a couple of minor mistakes.)

 

On Wednesday morning, The New York Times email of top headlines included an article about Trump’s speech: "Framing the 2024 election as a dire moment in an us-versus-them struggle — “the final battle,” as he put it — Mr. Trump charged forward in an uncharted direction for American politics, talking openly about leveraging the power of the presidency for political reprisals.”

 

So I looked around for more. Former GOP Rep. Joe Walsh writes in The Bulwark this takeaway from CPAC: 

 

"The Republican Party voting base has been radicalized. They no longer believe in truth, they’ve given up on democracy, they want to destroy their political opponents, and they want an authoritarian to give them back the America they long for. This radicalization was on full display these past four days. From ‘Joe Biden is not the legitimate occupant of the White House’ to ‘COVID was a hoax’ to ‘transgender Americans need to be eradicated’ . . . the lies, disinformation, misinformation, attacks on our democracy, cultish calls for an authoritarian, and utter cruelty—it was all there. This radicalism is not a bug; it is a core feature of today’s GOP.

 

"Donald Trump is a big problem. The millions and millions who support him are an even bigger problem. But the millions and millions who still don’t know how or why anyone could support Trump are the biggest problem. The base of my former political party needs to be defeated. And in order to defeat them, we need to understand them and take them seriously."

 

I encourage you to scan the Rev transcript.

 

Here is the video of Trump’s speech, from C-SPAN. 

 

And here is the transcript, from Rev.

More on why the midterm election ‘red wave’ didn’t happen

I’ve been meaning to summarize this New York Times article from Dec. 31:

 

Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality —but they also conducted fewer polls than in the past, according to a Times review.

And “that paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that more readily suited the needs of the sprawling and voracious political content machine — one sustained by ratings and clicks, and famished for fresh data and compelling narratives,” says the Times.

 

"The skewed red-wave surveys polluted polling averages, which are relied upon by campaigns, donors, voters and the news media,” the Times says. "It fed the home-team boosterism of an expanding array of right-wing media outlets — from Steve Bannon’s 'War Room' podcast and 'The Charlie Kirk Show' to Fox News and its top-rated prime-time lineup. And it spilled over into coverage by mainstream news organizations, including The Times, that amplified the alarms being sounded about potential Democratic doom."

 

Other pollsters lacked experience, such as two high-school juniors in Pennsylvania who started Patriot Polling and quickly found their surveys included on the statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight, the Times says.

 

Fox News' own polling unit, "respected throughout the news industry for its nonpartisanship and transparency," wasn't detecting a Republican wave, says the Times. But in September, Sean Hannity’s prime-time show began showcasing pollsters Robert Cahaly of Trafalgar and Matt Towery of InsiderAdvantage, who predicted that the GOP would win races in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, among other places.

Unmentioned was that the Fox News Poll, covered in the network’s straight-news programming, showed all those races leaning Democratic.

 

“The culture of programming does not take kindly to narratives of ‘we’re behind’ or ‘we’re losing,’” says Jason Damata, founder and chief executive of Fabric Media, a media and advertising consultancy. “Fox has a profound understanding of what’s going to keep audiences coming back and being engaged.”

 

"Shaping perceptions across the ideological spectrum, the steady flow of data predicting a red wave prompted real-world decision-making that members of both parties now say could have tilted the balance of power in Congress,” the Times says.

“These frothy polls had a substantial, distorting impact on how people spent money — on campaign strategy, and on people’s expectations going into the election,” says Steven Law, chief executive of the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, which spent $280 million on the midterms. Its own private polling didn’t show a red wave, the Times says.

 

"There were ample reasons to expect a strong 2022 for Republicans,” says the Times. "A president’s party tends to lose congressional seats in midterms. Soaring inflation and Mr. Biden’s languishing approval ratings only added to GOP hopes. But the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and the stolen-election fantasies of right-wing Republican candidates blew unexpected wind in Democrats’ sails.”

Kevin McCarthy says there’s no way he’ll drop his bid to be House speaker

So what’s his way forward, after losing three votes Tuesday — the first time since 1923 that a nominee for speaker didn’t win on the first ballot (it took nine ballots then)?

 

More concessions?

McCarthy’s defeats came after a weeks-long lobbying campaign, in which he worked to appease his right flank by taking a hard line against legislation to fund the government and avert a shutdown and calling on Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to resign or face potential impeachment.

Over the weekend, McCarthy put forward his most significant offers yet, unveiling a package of rules governing the way the House operates, including the so-called Holman rule, which allows lawmakers to use spending bills to defund specific programs and fire federal officials or reduce their pay, according to The New York Times.

His biggest concession was agreeing to a rule that would allow five lawmakers to call a snap vote at any time to remove the speaker, the Times says. That had been a top demand of conservatives who'd previously used the procedure to drive out Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

But it wasn't enough to satisfy the right flank of his party, which wanted any single lawmaker to be able to force such a vote. 

 

Then, on Monday night, members of the ultra-conservative Freedom Caucus presented McCarthy with their final offer, which included demands for certain committee assignments in exchange for their votes, The Associated Press says.

 
But McCarthy said rejected that. “For the last two months, we worked together as a whole conference to develop rules that empower all members, but we’re not empowering certain members over others,” he told reporters.

 

Getting to 213 votes?

With all members of the House present and voting, McCarthy needs to get 218 votes to become speaker. But lawmakers can skip the vote, or vote "present," which reduces the vote number needed.

 

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, N.Y., the incoming House Democratic leader, got the 212 votes of Democrats on Tuesday.

 

If McCarthy could win 213 votes and persuade the remaining naysayers to vote present, he'd be able to lower the threshold required under the rules to get the majority.

It’s a strategy former House speakers, including outgoing Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Boehner used when they confronted opposition.

McCarthy said late Tuesday: “You get 213 votes, and the others don’t say another name, that’s how you can win.”

 

“Doomsday scenario”

Breitbart News reported on Tuesday that several sources on both sides of the aisle were beginning to talk about a “coalition government” – something pro-McCarthy conservatives were calling the doomsday scenario.

 

Under that scenario, Democrats would deliver the votes necessary to elect a moderate establishment Republican as speaker in exchange for changes to the House rules that include eliminating the ability for the new GOP majority to issue subpoenas to President Biden and his family. 

Part 4 of NYTimes editorial series on violent extremism in U.S.

As I mentioned in my Dec. 13 post, I try to run the most balanced information I can find on what’s going on and tend to avoid opinion articles and media editorials. 

 

But the Times’ series on violent extremism is trying to point out all the levers to protect our democracy from political violence and seems to me worth our attention.  

 

“One of the most effective ways to deter political violence is to make it unacceptable in public life. To do that, all political leaders have an important role to play,” says the Times in its Nov. 26 editorial.

 

"Leaders in politics, law enforcement, the media and elsewhere have an obligation to do everything they can to remove from public life those who participate in or endorse political violence.

 

"The onus falls on Republicans. While voters this month rejected some of the most extreme candidates, the party is still very much under the spell of Mr. Trump and his brand of authoritarianism. Two prominent Republicans who have been outspoken about right-wing extremism and baseless lies, Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have been driven out of office. Meanwhile, the spread of conspiracy theories that have already inspired violence continues unabated from politicians and conservative media.

"Even if Mr. Trump doesn’t become the party’s nominee for president, the party and many of its supporters seem to have convinced themselves that the spread of extremism in service of their causes is not an urgent concern. Those who can influence the direction of the party — its voters and its biggest donors and supporters — must do everything they can to convince them otherwise. American democracy depends on it.

 

"Democrats, too, have a role to play. They should not spend money on far-right fringe candidates in the primaries with the hopes of beating them in general elections. To do so only further pollutes the public square, even if it can lead to Democratic victories, as it apparently did this year. Rather than giving in to the temptation to tar the entire party with the actions of its worst members, Democrats should continue to find opportunities for bipartisanship whenever possible.

"The alternative is allowing extremism to run rampant until the degradation of American politics is complete.

 

"Political disagreement need not include the menace of violence. Americans, and their political leaders, have the ability to choose a different future.”

The significance of Tuesday’s Georgia runoff election

Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker are vying in an election with major symbolic and practical ramifications, says The New York Times.

 

Warnock is the first African American U.S. senator from Georgia, having broken the color barrier for one of the original 13 states with a special election victory in January 2021, almost 245 years after America's founding.

 

Now he hopes to add another distinction by winning a full six-year term. Standing in the way is Walker, another African American.

 

The men have common upbringings in the Deep South in the wake of the civil rights movement and would make history as the first African American elected from Georgia to a full Senate term. 

 

Yet Warnock and Walker have taken different paths and offer clearly opposing visions for the country, including on race and racism, says The Associated Press. Warnock, the senior minister of the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King preached, echoes traditional liberal notions of the African American experience. Walker, a University of Georgia football icon, speaks the language of white cultural conservatism and mocks Warnock’s interpretations of King, says AP.

A Warnock victory would deliver Democrats a 51st vote in the Senate, where the party has for the past two years relied on Vice President Harris to break 50-50 ties. If Walker wins, Republicans would maintain joint control of Senate committees and two Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, would continue to have effective veto power over all legislation in the chamber.

 

A victory for Warnock would solidify Georgia’s status as a battleground in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, says a separate AP article. A win for Walker could be an indication that the Democratic gains in the state may be somewhat limited, especially given that Georgia Republicans swept every other statewide contest last month.

 

More than $380 million has been spent on the race, the most of any election this year, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics. The runoff is taking place because neither candidate got 50 percent of the vote in last month’s general election.