Dominion case pulls back curtain at Fox

NEW YORK — It wasn’t critics, political foes or their bosses that united Fox News stars Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham when they gathered via text message for a gripe session shortly after the 2020 election.

It was their own network’s news division.

“They’re pathetic,” Carlson wrote.

“THEY AREN’T SMART,” Ingraham emphasized.

“What news have they broken the last four years?” Hannity asked.

The Nov. 13, 2020, conversation was included among thousands of pages of recently released documents related to Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox for its post-election reporting. Like much of what was uncovered, the exchange ultimately may have little bearing on whether Fox will be judged guilty of libel.

Instead, the material offers insight into how Fox’s stars and leadership responded at a time of high anxiety and how giving its audience what it wanted to hear took precedence over reporting uncomfortable truths.

The revelations have bolstered critics who say Fox News Channel should be considered a propaganda network rather than a news outlet.

Yet while Fox’s news side has seen the prominent defections of Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace in recent years, it still employs many respected journalists — such as Jennifer Griffin, Greg Palkot, John Roberts, Shannon Bream, Bryan Llenas, Jacqui Heinrich and Chad Pergram.

They’re left to wonder whether the raft of recent stories about Fox — from the Dominion documents and from Carlson’s use of U.S. Capitol security video to craft his own narrative of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack — will make their jobs more difficult. Will fewer people want to work with them because of the dominance of Fox’s opinion side?

Fox says it has increased its investment in journalism by more than 50 percent under Suzanne Scott, Fox News Media CEO, and usually leads its rivals in ratings during major breaking news stories.

“We are incredibly proud of our team of journalists who continue to deliver breaking news from around the world and will continue to fight for the preservation of the First Amendment,” the network said in a statement.

Some of the information revealed in recent weeks illustrates how, in many ways, Fox has become less of an agenda-setter than an outlet that follows its audience, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.”

To date, no one in Fox management has talked about the Dominion case to its journalists, leaving some wondering whether there is anyone standing up for them, said one Fox journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution.

In a brief filed Friday, Fox said that many of the exhibits that Dominion has introduced were internal communications, “often inflammatory and headlinegrabbing, but irrelevant to any issue in dispute.”

“There is some fine journalism still being done at Fox News today,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She cited the transition of “Fox News Sunday” from Wallace to Bream.

The fallout from the Dominion case, however, leaves open the question of whether Fox journalists will be allowed to do their jobs unconstrained by other forces, she said.

“It would be useful for Fox News, at this point, to make a clear statement that the news division has complete and total autonomy and that a clear line is drawn between it and the rest of Fox,” Jamieson said.