“Fox’s $787 Million Lie.”

Ron DeSantis lets a wave of Home State endorsements slip through his pudding fingers, and later, strict scrutiny's Leah Lippman stops by. To break down the legal implications of the Dominion settlement and talk about new Supreme Court developments in the fight to keep abortion medication legal. But first, we are extremely excited to release the trailer for Pod Save the UK. Hosted by comedian Nish Kumar and journalist Coco Khan, this hilarious and brilliant podcast will be your go-to source for all the political developments across the pond.

And the first episode will be out just in time for the coronation of King Charles Perfect. We're producing this with our friends at Reduce Listening, they are such pros, they are so smart.

Lovett and Tommy and I recorded an episode with them ago last week. Could not stop laughing the whole time. I think Lovett made a lot of, you know, 1776 jokes. There's some real, you know, it's everything you'd expect. But the good thing is they are brilliant, they are funny and we are very, very excited about the podcast.

Can't wait for you to hear the show. Listen to the trailer now wherever you get your podcasts, and don't forget to subscribe. Also if you're looking for a binge-worthy podcast and still haven't checked out, stiffed, now is the time. This is the eight-part series from Crooked Media and iHeartRadio about the rise and fall of Viva. The erotic magazine for women that rocked the publishing world in 1973, with a team of feminist writers and editors behind it, Viva had everything from full-frontal nudity.

How many times can I say full-frontal nudity in the housekeeping? For Pod Save America, that's the test, that's the test. At least twice a week is basically where we are at least twice a week.

With Porn King, I see too much full-frontal nudity with Porn King publisher Bob Guccione at the helm. Were they always destined for failure? Find out now by listening to the first half of Stiffed, available for free on your favorite podcast platform. Don't miss out on this podcast. All right, let's get to the news.

The media trial of the century ended before it began this week as Fox News paid Dominion voting systems $787.

5 million in a last-minute settlement that.

Of six weeks in court where Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo and other fox bozos would finally be exposed as lying grifters who treat their viewers like morons. But, alas, Dominion gets the largest media settlement in history, worth ten times the value of their company. And we get nothing. No squirming under oath, no admissions of guilt, no on-air apologies. Just a statement from Fox that says they quote, acknowledge the court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. Dan, Why did Dominion and its lawyers rob us of this joy? Do they hate content?

It's our fault for getting our.

I mean, of course they settled, why wouldn't they settle? Fox had every incentive to settle. Dominion, as you said, it was a company that was worth 80 million dollars a few years ago. A private equity firm has majority stake in the company.

It's being represented by lawyers who get a cut of the settlement. Why would they not take the largest settlement in media defamation history right there without having to go through any risk of losing?

They are a business and even though they had a very high chance of winning, it wasn't certain. It wasn't certain at all that they would get that much money, the amount of money they did. And, like you suggested, it probably would have taken years to go through the appeals process to get all this money or less. Or an apology from them. Based on, like, just all the different. They could have gone, they probably would have ended up at the Supreme Court and who knows what they would have done. So, you know, they took, they took the money, which is, again, it's a business. What are you gonna do?

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, look.

Look, you know, Lovett's basically a professional comedian. Tommy's out here just bringing songs and AI stuff. I'm just trying to bring something to the table here. It can't just all be data for.

Do you have a eulogy for this trial, like Tommy did for Mike Pompeo's campaign, because it's going viral? I know I helped it, I.

They make over a billion dollars a year in net revenue, so they can afford this. But it's bad, much like the conversation about Donald Trump getting indicted. No one's ever a winner when they're paying eight or a million dollars. In terms of their behavior, hard to say. They do not want this to happen again. They're gonna be more careful.

They're certainly gonna stop texting about all of their crimes. I imagine that will be the case. Yeah, maybe.

Don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy.

And think about it, put yourself in this position. They're not gonna become fair and balanced. They're not gonna, you know, they're not gonna get rid of the conspiracy theorist blowhards in primetime and the media. And they're not gonna. The propagandists are not gonna become mediocre journalists. In the daytime, it's gonna stay basically the same. But imagine a situation where Donald Trump we are in October and November of 2024, and Donald Trump is pushing more conspiracy theories about the election. Fox is gonna be this much more careful about that because this costs them almost a billion dollars.

They're facing another, they're facing more lawsuits. The price tag of the of the lies around the election is gonna be quite high for them. And there may be just a wee bit of hesitancy before they do it again.

Yeah, I mean, I think.

A lot of people are saying that there's some, there's some stuffed ballots somewhere and I don't know. And like, they're gonna do all that. And they're just gonna be a little bit more careful about how they lie, because they don't want to actually defame. Specific.

The family of Seth Rich, the murdered DNC staffer, who they slandered and claimed that he was murdered because he leaked documents to WikiLeaks. Which was obviously completely not true. Let me just put it this way, the legal risk of being in the lying business has gone up. And because of this settlement, there are gonna be more lawyers and more potential plaintiffs looking to bring suits. And so it's very possible that if Fox continues its business as it has been doing, it's gonna get more expensive to do so. And that is not cost-free. They are in a dying business. Every day, more people come to court, literally.

Yeah, literally, I mean their audience, yes, demographically, but the number, but they they make their money from carriage fees. Based on the number of people who have cable, the number of people who have cable is going down every day. And so they are already managing a very profitable. But a decline nonetheless. And that's gonna get more expensive as more lawsuits come. Because you know, there are a whole bunch of people who just watched the Dominion. Lawyers get quite rich. And they're gonna lawyers gonna be out looking for plaintiffs to do the same thing. This is what.

I don't want to diminish our.

And so would it have been fun? Yes, would any amount of embarrassment for Tucker Carlson be a net benefit for society? Yes, would it have, would it change the calculus or end, you know, reverse the radicalization of Republican voters?

I.

They thought that the audiences would just leave them for somewhere else.

That's probably why they didn't want all the hosts on the stand and they didn't want to do the on-air apologies. Not because they think they're gonna create a bunch of Libs, but because those people are just gonna go to Newsmax or OAN or somewhere else. Yeah, so yeah, I think liberals, like, sometimes have this.

They're getting at most four and a half million viewers at a time, and that's that is a fraction of it. Like, that's not a number that is electorally significant in a national, you know, in terms of the overall national electorate, but if you? But their point is is that you have to look at the overall audience. Not how many people are watching it at any given time, how many people, different people over a period of days, and that number is actually quite large now. Some questions I have with that study is, is that? As I understood the summary, CNN is included in the partisan audience? And I'd like to understand. And I understand that. The reason for that is that Republicans have been told that CNN is a partisan audience. We have a lot of debate about what life was like at CNN under Jeff Zucker, under New Leadership, etc. But I think that is a that. There's a real. It's that isn't even apples to oranges, that's like apples to, I don't know, lug nuts or something like. It's just they're just very different things that are hard to compare. The one thing I think we also sort of underestimate with Fox is the osmotic effect of it because it is on. It's not just people tuning in at home, like if you go to rural America, it's on. If when you're getting your oil changed in the waiting room, it's on the doctor's office, it's on everywhere, and it's being. And it's also just the people who watch it are then talking about what happened down there. I. I've seen other studies that are older than this one that raise some real questions about the number of persuadable voters who were there.

There's a difference between persuadable voters and not strongly aligned partisans. Like there are people who identify, yeah, who identify as. And this may be adjusted in the in the other 59 pages of the study that I did not read. But there are. But, you know, you can be, you can call yourself a Democrat or an independent and vote with Republicans 100 of the time. And so you have to look not at their party registration or their self-identified party identification, but their actual voting habits and their beliefs. To know if there are actually, if there are as many movable voters there as we think, and one.

7 billion dollar lawsuit from SmartMatic, another voting technology company whose lawyer released a statement right after the settlement, promised the company will expose more of Fox's misconduct. And quote hold them accountable for undermining democracy. You getting your hopes up again. Is Smartmatic the new media trial of the century that's gonna finally take?

Both Fox's response and SmartMatic's is to posture. Fox is like, See, we're not scared of this.

Dominion validates us so we're not gonna settle, and Smartmatic is saying we're gonna make this as painful for you as Dominion did so. So it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out. Taking place in New York instead of Delaware, because Delaware has a very specific corporate court system there, New York will be taking place in the regular court system there. That's potentially a very bad jury pool for Fox.

But also, Smartmatic is a much smaller business than Dominion, so their legitimate claims of amount of damages if they were to go to court are potentially smaller than.

That is not the work of the courts, that, unfortunately, is the work of politics, and in democracy, it is work that never ends. Whether it's Bob Mueller, Trump indictments, none of this shit's gonna save us. We shouldn't expect the New York Times to save us, the mainstream media. We have to do the hard work of persuading people. And I do think, just to end this media conversation. You have written about this in all of your books, that the real solution is to build progressive media.

This is why we started crooked, because instead of just spending all our time trying to take Fox down, we have to go out there and actually persuade people. And we are competing with the right-wing media ecosystem to make sure that more people aren't, you know, radicalized by those media outlets. And simply trying to shut them down is not going to work, we actually have to do the hard work of.

Traditional press could serve as a bulwark against disinformation, like what comes from Fox are over. And you're gonna have to beat it by competing with it, as opposed to hoping someone's gonna do it for you.

Overall, overall, unless we do what they say, they say they're gonna default unless I agree to all these wacko notions they have.

Wacko notions. There's so much awful shit in this plan, it's hard to know what to focus on. Does he really think that making it easier for rich people to cheat on their taxes and jacking up the cost of prescription drugs is a political winner? What's going?

It is about continuing to stitch together the 218 votes. He needs to remain speaker and that that is forcing his hand to do something the public has no appetite for, his voters have no appetite for. In the long history of dumb, dangerous shit, Republicans have done. This is near the top of the list because at least in previous debt-sealing battles in the Obama era, there was, they were. The congressional leaders were responding to, like a fervor in the base.

Like a real reaction to government, right? Particularly in the wake of the bank bailouts and the Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act. That there there was this like that spending, and I use that in the air, quotes sense possible, but government really was a driving, motivating force. The Republican voters do not give a shit about that.

Nate Cohen has this amazing stat that he said he wrote a few months ago about how in all, they did open-ended questions to ask people what they cared about. In the in the New York Times, Siena College polls, and I think it was two people out of 1,500 respondents mentioned government spending as a top concern. It's not about that, and so this is about keeping his caucus, not his voters, but his caucus aligned with him.

But when you dig into what these cuts would mean.

Cancer research, food safety, law enforcement. The repeal of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act could put a hundred thousand clean energy jobs at risk, most of them in red states. And, you know, increase energy bills, take away food assistance for older people. And then, of course, you know, the I.R.S thing, which is just I've always thought, is the most ridiculous hobby horse of the Republican side. It's like it's literally more IRS enforcement to stop rich people from cheating on their taxes. Also, we're going through tax season right now.

People have been like, because there's more IRS agents, people find it easier to do taxes. It's been like a better process for people. You repeal this, it's going to increase the deficit and let more rich people cheat on their taxes. This is what they're going to the mat for. I just it's, it's wild to me.

It's wild, you think this passes the house, probably.

It's, I mean, I guess they can only lose four. There's two goobers who said, No, I'm never raising the debt ceiling ever, I guess. Like George Santos says, he's a no right now, but that he could be open to coming around to yes from his from. You've got to trust what he says. Yeah, you've got to trust what he says.

But then they like, they've interviewed some House Freedom, Caucus, Yahoos, plus some of the more establishment Republicans, and they.

And so you can see that if they're going to break, they will break at the end, not the beginning of the fight.

So I think Biden should continue to hold the ground.

Do you think this is a feasible solution? Do you see any other way out? Are we just fucked? What's going on?

And his caucus is this is one of the dangerous consequences of gerrymandering. Is that the vast majority of these people, of these Republicans, have much greater fear of a primary than a general election. So, from their own political point of view, put aside the idea that they might care about the country or the economy from their own personal point of view. Voting to lift the debt ceiling is more dangerous than crashing the economy, and that's a bad place to be. If the end result was a fake commission, they got one vote in Congress and the economy stayed on track.

Great job, Josh Gottheimer. I'm for it, like, who cares, as long as there's no teeth, right?

Now, McCarthy still might decide not to bring it to a vote. A discharge petition at that point, towards the end, will probably take too long. So I don't, I don't know how that works.

The.

Caucus solution is that it's coming out too soon. These are the kind of things you want to come out in the last minute, when everyone's desperately looking for a face-saving exit. But now that it's out here now, everyone's going to say no to it and then they can't back off. So then we will need another different, hopefully toothless, escape hatch at the end.

The person was his former secretary of state in Florida, now a House Republican from Florida, and he lost at this count. It's Thursday. By the time you hear, this could be more lost. Seven House members to Trump from the Florida delegation, including one Yahoo, who literally walked out of a meeting with DESantis and announced that he's endorsing Trump.

I saw this morning he lost another one. This guy currently represents the district that DeSantis used to represent in Congress. lost that guy, too. Why is DESantis getting his ass handed to him by a twice impeached criminal defendant who lost the last three elections for the Republican Party? Well, I'd like to read you a quote.

It seems like you might have picked the wrong business.

I mean, it is still early. And there is still going to be a place for one person not named Trump to make a real go of this. Because Trump is incredibly vulnerable. And everyone has assumed that that was going to be Ron DeSantis. But the first few months of this campaign have offered some real, I would say, warning signs. That he doesn't have what it takes to play that role. And that's worrisome if you don't want Trump to be the nominee, because the rest of these people running definitely don't have it.

So absent a better candidate? Like, there was a playbook today that said, somewhere I read this little story that was like, Desantis's stumbles give an opening to Christie. I was like, really.

So I don't know when you say, when you talk about DESantis's stumbles, are you talking about his press conference where he continued his attack on Disney by threatening Disney world? Can we play a clip of that? Now? People are like, well.

Someone even said, like, maybe you need another state prison, who knows? do you think that?

There is just. He is reeking of desperation. The way he handled the Disney thing suggests he doesn't really understand what his rise was in the first place. He didn't even have a plan going into it. He just held an where he was like pretending to be angry. But not really without any real solutions that seemed real.

The idea was that he was Trump without the chaos, that he was a smarter, more effective version of Trump. And it turns out that he is none of those. Thus far. This campaign, not smarter, not more.

We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die. I mean, that's his.

Yeah, look, I also.

No, I still think it's a little early, just because, you know, there's like a million lifetimes and a billion news cycles between now and Iowa. This is also like we are focusing on the national media narrative. We don't know what's going on in Iowa, We do know that evangelicals in Iowa, like, aren't thrilled about Donald Trump. Donald Trump didn't win the Iowa Caucus last time.

You could imagine a path for DeSantis where he wins over evangelicals, plus the college-educated set in Iowa, that's.

To win the Iowa caucuses. New Hampshire is a much better state for Desantis because college educated, heavily college-educated there, he does better with college-educated Republicans, and then it sets him up better for South Carolina. So you could imagine this. But like, I don't know all the stuff he's trying to do. Go harder.

At Disney, the endorsements are You can't talk to people's trying to mingle more. To me, like, the only thing that matters is how he handles Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is just the elephant. Or he's the only thing in the Republican Party, he's the biggest thing in the Republican Party. And the idea that DeSantis is not going to take him on, not going to make his electability argument about Donald Trump in an explicit way.

It's all these like oblique comments about electability or Trump's indictment, or he's trying to be subtle here and there. And like, again, I get that DeSantis can't piss off a lot of these voters who love Donald Trump, but I don't even think he's trying to.

I mean, I had been on the key. I my, he hired me for that campaign and I was one of the earlier groups of people hired. Unlike you were coming from a Senate office ten days before that, that announcement. Because he knew, and we as a team knew that we had momentum. There were donors who wanted to be for Obama, there were thousands, tens of thousands of people all over the country who worked for Obama, who wanted to volunteer for him and he.

We had to give them a place to go. DeSantis had that in November. He has a lot less of that now and that might be a mistake. And could he change it? maybe?

But it is very hard to get the stink of being a loser off of you, especially if your argument is that you're a winner. And he, and Trump is very Donald. Trump seems to have done a pretty good job of that. Well, Donald Trump has won, right? And he, I mean, it's he. Donald Trump has a lot of skills as a understander of a manipulator of Republican political sentiment and Republican media. That don't, Rhonda.

He had issued extending the stay on the court-ordered ban on the abortion until 1159 on Friday. Which should help us understand this. But just let's begin with where is that case right now in terms of how it's progressing and access?

And then the Court of Appeals said, Well, maybe it's not technically an unauthorized drug, but they can't distribute it in the way they currently have been. And basically, you need to relabel all the drugs, so no one's going to be able to access this drug for like, at least several months while the F.D.A. figures it out. And now the Supreme Court is figuring out what they are going to do, so it's kind of technically in the Supreme Court, while there is still litigation ongoing in the Court of.

You know, whatever you want to call it and say, of course, you know, this lower court ruling should be stayed in its entirety. But you know, what is happening is, you know, these justices don't much care for the law. When it gets in the way of, you know, forcing women to undergo childbirth when they don't want to. And so I think, you know, you probably have some of the justices thinking, you know, can I put lipstick on this pig to make it a little bit more palatable? While still restricting access to medication, abortion? And there's probably some negotiations going on, with justices wanting to get more justices on board, you know, in either direction. And so they couldn't work it out before Wednesday.

It's so ridiculous and laughable that it is taking them more than two seconds to just say. This entire thing made us all dumber while we had to engage with it.

You know, various restrictions on Mifa-Pristone, including the Court of Appeals, you know, take on the restrictions from going into effect. At any point in the litigation before the, you know, litigation ultimately reaches the Supreme Court, which usually takes several years. And so, you know, that's one option, another option is they say, well, we'll stay this, but we're gonna put this case on our calendar, you know, for us to hear oral arguments and decide what to do. Another option is they, you know, don't stay the Court of Appeals or district Court ruling, and they add the case to their calendar. So they reserve the possibility that they might actually put it on pause, but they let it go into effect in the interim.

And then another option is, you know, they let either the district court or the Court of Appeals ruling into effect, and they just don't really do anything other than that. And, you know, those are just some of the options. But there's a lot of wiggle room as to whether or not either of the rulings go into effect. As well as whether they add this case to their calendar and therefore preserve the possibility that they would change, you know, their initial actions sometime in.

I'm.

And then there's also some sense that I think some of the justices who care about preserving their own authority have a sense that, you know, people are really reacting to the Dobbs ruling and the consequences that that has had on people's lives. You know, you see the results in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, you saw the results in the midterms. And so I think there is some hesitation about basically going, you know, full speed ahead on judges effectively ordering nationwide abortion bans. Out of some concern that maybe that will finally be the thing that pisses people off enough to do something about the federal courts. And that might cause, you know, Brett Kavanaugh, the chief Justice, to say, like, whoa, we need to slow.

Pivoting to the the settlement reach earlier this week in the Fox Dominion case. Last time you and I spoke on the show, I feel guilty about this. But I asked you to pretend to be Donald Trump's lawyer. I will not ask you to be the Murdoch's lawyer this time around, out of guilt. But is. Are you surprised that settlement reach? What's your reaction to how, that, how that case?

On the other hand, it did avoid probably pretty embarrassing cross-examinations. Where you confront, say, you know, the Murdoch's with these emails and texts, and ask them why. They allowed this to go on, as well as what they thought was a pretty grueling trial. And, you know, you also avoid the possibility of punitive damages, so it's not that surprising, you know? And I think on the other side, you know, Dominion, their interest was always kind of recovering the harm done to them, and that is a harm that can be quantified in money. And so, you know, the incentives on kind of both sides are really to settle.

So it wasn't that surprising, a little bit surprising, that there was that amount of brinksmanship and delay that, you know, led to the settlement.

Obviously, this has to affect their financial calculus about what the most rational business model is for them, you know? They obviously concluded that it was in their interest to have a business model, you know, basically facilitating these lies and that would keep their viewership. On the other hand, they now have some costs, right? That they have to incur when they engage in these kinds of lies that they think will secure and preserve their viewers. So it's a little bit difficult to know. I mean, maybe they try to lie better and a little bit less recently going forward. But at least initially, it doesn't seem like this is going to cause any sort of major changes.

There, the Alex Jones, you know, has over a billion dollars in damages he has to pay. Is this specific to what's happening here, or is there any? Do you see any sort of change in the environment, legal environment or the legal risk profile for media entities and personalities who push these lies or push disinformation as part of their business plan?

That is like, intentionally lying, or they knew that they were lying. And so it's possible that we will see some additional movement on that front. With these plaintiffs trying to encourage, you know, more judges to speak out against. New York Times versus Sullivan. And make it easier to criticize, or make it easier to sue entities that are criticizing public officials, you know? And Clarence Thomas has already signaled he wants to revisit that standard, you know, with the additional negative media coverage of him, you know, he might be additionally motivated, you know, to revisit New York Times versus Sullivan. So I was gonna say, but seems like you, I mean, as he.

One of the funniest plans we had, which wasn't really a plan, our our fearless for senior producer Andy Gardner Bernstein, who's here with me now. Hi Andy, Hey John. Andy took it upon herself to to make some puppets. Yeah, I made sock puppet, to make sock puppets of fox personalities. Because, of course, we weren't gonna be able to see the trial, there's no cameras in the courtroom, yeah, and they weren't.

Andy, show us, show us what you show us.

I don't know if the camera can get it, so Tucker's feature to me was his eyebrows, so we got it right there. And then he always wears, you know, the Gingham shirt. And luckily, my kids had graph paper from math, so I use that for. This is a craft podcast now, and my husband let me use the end of his tie to.

Okay, so the next one I did was Rupert Murdoch, and, as I'm sure you can imagine, his greatest, you know, physical attribute of the glasses. And so in the wrinkles. I, Yeah, so I made this little guy. I don't know if you can see him quite right, but it's. We use cotton for his hair and we use a pipe cleaner to make his glasses.

Yeah, this was an American girl sweater that I just took from, you know, an old box from back in the day when my kids liked American girl dolls. And yeah, we even use some fake eyelashes to get this one going. This is amazing, I mean, I do.

But I had actually, like, really, I like crafting and like my kids do a lot of crafting, so like this, we had all most of this stuff already on hand, but I had.

Enjoy the sock puppets, I will, and and we'll see y'all next week. Bye everyone.

Pod Save America is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner Bernstein. Our producers are Hayley Muse and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis.

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