Dominion v Fox - Dominion Voting Sues Fox News for $1.6B over 2020 Election Claims in Delaware

[Phoenix520]

Ooooh, maybe!

[humblescribe]

I did a little poking around earlier today.

Fox Corp. has a June 30 year-end. I looked briefly at their 2022 form 10-K and their second quarter (12/31/22) for 10-Q for disclosures regarding this and their other lawsuits.

At both dates the disclosure was the boilerplate word salad from the lawyers asserting that the Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits were without merit and that they are vigorously defending themselves in court. (I wonder, is there another kind of defense other than vigorous, like maybe half-assedly?) The disclosure goes on to say that if there were some sort of determination that any determination would be immaterial.

So, even though a lot of progress had been made by the end of last year, the lawyers informed the accountants that there was nothing to see here.

Let's take a peek at Fox' balance sheet and income statement. For FYE 6/30/22 Fox had net income of $1.233 billion. Fox has $22.1 billion of assets, about $11 billion of debt and about $11 billion of shareholders' equity. About $9 billion of shareholder equity consists of "paid-in-capital," while the balance is retained earnings (that is accumulated profits less dividends paid since day one.) Paid in capital is the catch-all account for monies received by corporations that are in excess of the "par" or "stated" value of their stock when originally issued.

I think that we can be fairly confident that Fox is going to lose this suit or settle this suit for a bigly number. Then, they will have to figure out how to stanch the bleeding with the Smartmatic suit. If we assume a conservative $1.5 billion cash settlement for both suits (and I think it will be more), that amount is 6.8% of assets; 13.6% of shareholders' equity; and 121% of their June 30, 2022, net income.

This is material no matter how you slice it. I think their third quarter 10-Q is due in mid-May; I'll be curious how they address these suits and whether they have recorded a liability for their estimated loss.

Cheer up, Rupert. Legal payments like this are tax deductible when paid, not when accrued.

[humblescribe]

I just saw where the judge appointed a Special Master to investigate whether Fox lied and whether their lawyers facilitated any alleged mendacity.

I guess if the legal fees are large enough, there are no rules.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/media/fo ... index.html

[Luke]

From that story:

The 11th-hour drama escalated Wednesday when Dominion played previously unaired tapes of Fox News host Maria Bartiromo talking in November 2020 with then-Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

In the tapes, Giuliani told Bartiromo he “can’t prove” some of his allegations about Dominion, and Bartiromo expressed interest in promoting Powell’s fundraising website on her broadcast.

Dominion lawyer Davida Brook said Fox had only turned over the material last week, after Bartiromo’s former senior producer Abby Grossberg revealed in a lawsuit that the recordings existed.

“We keep on finding out about missing documents in this case, not from Fox, but from others,” Brook said.

The judge agreed that the material was “extremely relevant” and chided Fox yet again, in what has become a near-daily occurrence as the case careens toward trial.

“Abby Grossberg is not Dominion’s problem. It’s not my problem. Abby Grossberg is a Fox problem. She was an employee at Fox. She is relevant to the case,” Davis said. “These tape recordings… they relate directly to one of the statements we are litigating… The question is, are there other documents like that out there?”

[SuzieC]

https://www.businessinsider.com/rupert- ... ays-2023-4

Don't know whether this is accurate, but way to get out of testifying.

[much ado]

https://www.businessinsider.com/rupert- ... ays-2023-4

Don't know whether this is accurate, but way to get out of testifying.

Report seems to be about old events. Broken back was in 2018...

Rupert Murdoch reportedly fell and sustained serious injuries while aboard his son's yacht in 2018, an incident that led the media mogul to spend a night in a European hospital parking lot, waiting under a tent until he could be flown back to the US.

A lengthy new report from Vanity Fair detailed several previously unreported health scares experienced by the 91-year-old CEO and chairman of News Corporation, including a broken back from the yacht fall, a torn Achilles, seizures, and bouts with pneumonia and COVID-19.

[Dr. Ken]

[Lani]

https://www.businessinsider.com/rupert- ... ays-2023-4

Don't know whether this is accurate, but way to get out of testifying.

Report seems to be about old events. Broken back was in 2018...

Rupert Murdoch reportedly fell and sustained serious injuries while aboard his son's yacht in 2018, an incident that led the media mogul to spend a night in a European hospital parking lot, waiting under a tent until he could be flown back to the US.

A lengthy new report from Vanity Fair detailed several previously unreported health scares experienced by the 91-year-old CEO and chairman of News Corporation, including a broken back from the yacht fall, a torn Achilles, seizures, and bouts with pneumonia and COVID-19.

Covid first arrived in New York in March 2020, so that is a more recent event.

[neonzx]

Seems like Rupert Murdoch could have been "PATIENT 0" back then and spread the Covid.

[keith]

https://www.businessinsider.com/rupert- ... ays-2023-4

Don't know whether this is accurate, but way to get out of testifying.

Report seems to be about old events. Broken back was in 2018...

Rupert Murdoch reportedly fell and sustained serious injuries while aboard his son's yacht in 2018, an incident that led the media mogul to spend a night in a European hospital parking lot, waiting under a tent until he could be flown back to the US.

A lengthy new report from Vanity Fair detailed several previously unreported health scares experienced by the 91-year-old CEO and chairman of News Corporation, including a broken back from the yacht fall, a torn Achilles, seizures, and bouts with pneumonia and COVID-19.

That accident was on Lachlan's yacht in the Caribbean. He was flown directly to LA. And did not go anywhere near Europe.

[Tiredretiredlawyer]

Seems like Rupert Murdoch could have been "PATIENT 0" back then and spread the Covid.

Have you notified your local FOX News?

[Foggy]

Today is jury selection, if they manage to get that far.

[Volkonski]

Jury selection begins in defamation lawsuit against Fox News

https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dom ... 99661cadf9

Jury selection began behind closed doors Thursday in a defamation lawsuit seeking to hold Fox News responsible for repeatedly airing false claims related to the 2020 presidential election.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis previously made clear that the selection would be done out of public view to ensure the privacy and safety of potential jurors.

“Because of the nature of the case and under the statute, I can take those steps to protect jurors,” the judge said Thursday, noting that the case has received international attention.

“I need to make sure that the jury remains unaffected by this,” Davis added.

Jury selection in Delaware is usually done in public but occasionally is closed to protect jurors, such as in high-profile criminal cases or those involving alleged gang activity.

The judge met privately with potential jurors and handed out forms asking several routine questions, including whether those in the jury pool have ever worked for Fox or Dominion Voting Systems, the Colorado-based voting machine company that filed the defamation lawsuit.

He began Thursday’s proceeding by denying a request by certain media outlets for permission to record and rebroadcast a live audio feed of the trial. The outlets sought similar permission for the jury selection, even though it is being done in private without audio access.

[Kendra]

Oh shit. Fox “News” just issued a formal apology to the judge in the Dominion lawsuit for a “misunderstanding” & promises that it will do better going forward. In other words, Fox knows they lied & they know they are in deep trouble for their actions.

[Luke]

I thought Volkonski's posting of the judge denying audio was the end of it (and super disappointed), but Axios just published...

Look ahead: Opening arguments are expected to begin at 9am ET on Monday, with a live audio stream available to those outside the courtroom.

More about the trial and ramifications: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/16/fox-do ... -amendment

Guess that's just for courtroom overflow but still don't understand why they wouldn't let a media trial be broadcast by media. Imagine there will be lots of after-the-fact information, but really wanted to hear it live. Hope somebody records it

ETA: Booooooo although... audio line? Story is from Vanity Fair and before the judge's ruling on Friday.

Please Fogbowzers, as a favor to me, please look around Twitter or elsewhere for the call-in number and post it. I'll tweet Charlotte to see if she knows and will post that too also.

Charlotte Klein @charlottetklein Apr 14
You won't be able to watch the Fox v. Dominion trial, which kicks off Monday. I wrote about the implications of the media restrictions:

The Dominion v. Fox News Trial Will Not Be Televised: “It’s a Gift to Fox News”
The Judge in the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has banned audio and video recordings at trial. Reporters worry the restrictions will dampen the impact of major testimonies and increase the risk of reporting mistakes. “We’re basically, on some level, screwed,” says one.
BY CHARLOTTE KLEIN APRIL 14, 2023

The trial for Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News, which legal experts are calling the most consequential defamation lawsuit in decades, is set to start Monday. The verdict will decide whether Fox News will be held accountable for spreading 2020 election lies—conspiracies that were fundamental to Donald Trump’s Big Lie. It could be the only time the likes of Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch will be forced to answer for the outlet’s democracy-damaging coverage in a public setting. Some of the network’s top stars, like Tucker Carlson, are also expected to take the stand. It’s worth watching live. Except, unless you’ve made the trip to Wilmington, Delaware, and managed to get a seat in the courtroom, you can’t.

The trial will not be televised. The only way Americans will be able to know what’s going on inside the courtroom—outside of getting one of the roughly 200 seats available in the courtroom—will be by calling into an audio line provided by the court. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s not much better,” says Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin. Grueskin recalls his experience listening to the audio line for Sarah Palin’s defamation case against The New York Times last year. “You can’t tell who’s talking half the time, especially when the lawyers start arguing a point, or you come into the testimony part way through,” he said.

Not only will the trial not be televised, the court has banned any recording or rebroadcasting of the audio feed—hampering outlets’ abilities to playback the proceedings on the radio or TV. A group of media outlets, including the Times, CBS, ABC, NBC, and ProPublica, wrote to Judge Eric Davis seeking to record the audio stream of the trial, and to use excerpts of those recordings in their news programming. Davis has not expressly ruled on that request, but said during a pretrial hearing Thursday, as the Associated Press reported, that he’d “gone as far as I can go with response to access,” and, signaling the Delaware Superior court’s traditionally restrictive rules over public access, that the outlets were “getting the most access of any media in a Superior Court case in Delaware.” Fox’s lawyers filed an opposition brief to the media outlets’ letter, which, in a statement to Vanity Fair, Fox called “an 11th hour request that risks compromising the integrity of the trial proceedings.” Dominion Voting Systems declined to comment.

“It’s a gift to Fox News that this is not going to be broadcast live, because it spares them from the nightmarish scenario of the visual of some of their leading anchors being cross-examined and confronted with their own texts, which are contrary to what they’ve said on air,” former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig tells me. In the lead up to the trial, internal communications—obtained through the discovery process—have spilled out into the public, offering a damning look at Fox executives and stars dismissing unfounded claims and unreliable Trumpworld sources behind closed doors. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in one private message, of the conspiracy-peddling Trump lawyer whom Fox repeatedly booked during the post-election period. Fox News’s attorneys appear aware of the power and stakes of live testimonies; they have actively tried to keep Rupert Murdoch off the stand, citing hours of deposition he already gave.

“All the in-room narrative reporting in the world can’t measure up to an actual audio-visual feed—the imagery—of a witness on the stand,” says Honig, who pointed to the way images from trials like that of Derek Chauvin over George Floyd’s murder have been cemented in the public consciousness. “There’s something lost” when the public can’t see the trial, Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, says. The visual aids can be particularly “critical when you’ve got two entirely different stories from both sides,” says Tobias. “Hopefully the press can fill in, but it just won’t be the same.”

Reporters will do their best to try to translate this moment. Among them is the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, who was in the Wilmington courtroom this week covering the pretrial hearings. “The idea that you have to go to Wilmington just to see or get a visceral idea of what’s happening in a courtroom is not really very democratic,” Wemple tells me. The court has tried to accommodate members of the media in other ways, Wemple said, like letting them bring their computers into the courtroom to take notes (which “is better than many other courts,” he notes). But the restrictions on recording could really complicate the reporting process, especially if reporters aren’t in the room, Grueskin noted. “It’s much easier to get things wrong from a disembodied audio feed than from a good video feed,” he says. Wemple agrees. “Mistakes can be made, quotes can be mangled,” he tells me. “We’re basically, on some level, screwed.”

Wemple tells me he’s planning on working from the overflow courtroom Monday, where a camera feed has been set up and reporters are allowed to live-tweet the proceedings. (Reporters in the courtroom, on the other hand, can’t use the internet.) “There’s a reason why cameras are in the overflow room for press, and that’s so people can get some feel for facial expressions and body language in the moment of testimony and questioning—which indicates that there is some value to a visual representation” and “letting people hear words in the voices of the witnesses and participants themselves,” says NPR media correspondent and Murdoch expert David Folkenflik, who is also covering the trial. There’s a “richer media experience that we’re just not going to get,” Wemple notes, adding the restrictions are “not exclusive to Delaware by any means; this is a problem all over the place.”

“These are the circumstances we labor under,” says Folkenflik. “It’s going to be an additional responsibility of the press corps covering this to render it accurately and fairly, but also to do what we can to capture a bit of the atmosphere of what it’s like to be there in this high stakes drama, and to convey the intent of what people say in a way that may not be fully captured simply by words on a page.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04 ... -televised




I like this idea:

[p0rtia]

MeidasTouch says that the audio will be available for a call in. Recordings are restricted.

If they are right, I'm going to be incommunicado for the duration.

[Luke]

That's awesome. Did Meidas provide the call-in number yet?

[p0rtia]

That's awesome. Did Meidas provide the call-in number yet?

No. My guess is there isn't one yet--if it's going to happen.

[humblescribe]

How soon after the day's events is the transcript available?

It may not be the Official Transcript, but it will be pretty gosh darn close. Can't the transcript be purchased? I have to assume the lawyers will get a copy so they can do their lawyering.

At least with a copy of the transcript the media can pore through the day's testimony and ferret out what was good, bad, and indifferent.

[realist]

How soon after the day's events is the transcript available?

It may not be the Official Transcript, but it will be pretty gosh darn close. Can't the transcript be purchased? I have to assume the lawyers will get a copy so they can do their lawyering.

At least with a copy of the transcript the media can pore through the day's testimony and ferret out what was good, bad, and indifferent.

As bob would say, it depends.



If the parties (or either one of them) ordered daily copy, there will be a transcript at the end of each day. If not, it depends. If the same reporter is doing the entire trial and daily copy was not ordered, it could be it's not available until after the trial. It depends on a lot of things.

Yes, it can be purchased, but you do not want to be the first to do so. And just because one can make arrangemenets with the reporter (or clerk, depending on their rules) does not mean it would be available on Pacer, though if someone has bought and paid for the original, the per-page cost goes down considerably, though it's still not cheap.

Normally, within 90 days, after time being given to the parties for (different things, like maybe redacting SS numbers and the like) it can be purchased onling for (last I knew) .10/page.

[Dave from down under]

I would think it could be worthwhile for a news organisation to by it, do there reporting with links to the doc and frame them with advertising.

Should pay dividends and increase sales.

[Kendra]

The Dominion v. Fox News trial starts tomorrow -- and The Post has launched a pop-up newsletter anchored by
@sarahellison
that will go out each evening with a newsy, quote-heavy, scene-setting recap of what happened in court that day.

Sign up here:

[Lani]

Signed up! (First day back at work - hope I have time to read it.)

[humblescribe]

Thank you, Realist, for your timely and accurate reply.

With billions of dollars on the line, one would assume that the lawyers have already signed up. I am not a lawyer, but I do appreciate 10⁹ dollars.

[MN-Skeptic]