We don’t know how serious his injuries are yet. Maybe we’ll learn something later today.

The latest on the Fox News-Dominion story. The “journalists” on the “news” side of Fox are pissed off.

Justin Baragona at The Daily Beast: Fox News Journalists Sound Off on ‘Soul-Crushing’ Dominion Filings.

“I think no regular person could read this and look at Fox like a news organization at this point.”

In the wake of bombshell legal filings showing that Fox News executives and stars seemingly sought to pacify their disgruntled MAGA viewers by airing election lies, while punishing and censoring the employees attempting to deliver the actual truth, the above observation has become commonplace within media circles.

Pierre Auguste Renoir, By the Water or Near the Lake 1880

But some of the shots are being fired from within the conservative cable giant.

According to nine Fox News staffers and insiders, the pre-trial filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News further impugn and sully the reputation of the network’s “straight news” journalists, especially since they show Fox was “operating out of fear” over losing viewers to smaller right-wing competitors following its Decision Desk’s early (and accurate) Arizona election night call for President Joe Biden.

“We are not happy,” one reporter told The Daily Beast.

At the same time, five sources familiar with the situation say that despite the very public reputational harm resulting from the Dominion documents, the news side has been kept in the dark on the filings, with no communication from Fox’s corporate management or human resources department.

“It’s just a really bad time to be working here,” one news producer said.

The prime time entertainment stars have waged war on the “journalists,” despite the fact that everyone from Rupert Murdoch down knew that Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen were complete nonsence.

More than anything, the tranche of internal messages and texts Dominion obtained from Fox executives, hosts, and producers show a network in full-blown crisis over the fear of losing its relevance within the conservative movement—and a network whose top stars loathed the fact-driven journalists on the “hard news” side.Rupert Murdoch, the head of the Fox empire, privately conceded that Trump’s claims were “really crazy stuff,” and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott warned shortly after the election that they shouldn’t “give the crazies an inch.”

Even stars like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham privately trash-talked Team Trump’s “insane” fraud claims. But despite all that, the Fox hosts were simultaneously boosting them on the network’s airwaves in the days and weeks after the election.

More than anything, the tranche of internal messages and texts Dominion obtained from Fox executives, hosts, and producers show a network in full-blown crisis over the fear of losing its relevance within the conservative movement—and a network whose top stars loathed the fact-driven journalists on the “hard news” side.Rupert Murdoch, the head of the Fox empire, privately conceded that Trump’s claims were “really crazy stuff,” and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott warned shortly after the election that they shouldn’t “give the crazies an inch.”

Even stars like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham privately trash-talked Team Trump’s “insane” fraud claims. But despite all that, the Fox hosts were simultaneously boosting them on the network’s airwaves in the days and weeks after the election.

Other hard news Fox hosts such as Neil Cavuto and Leland Vittert also found themselves in the crosshairs for pushing “anti-Trump” narratives in the days following the election.

There’s much more on the “news” vs. entertainment war at the link above.

Field Flowers, Andrew Wyeth

Brian Stelter at Vanity Fair: “We’re All Embarrased”: Inside Fox News as Dominion Revelations Rattle the Network.

Stelter writes that Fox has been holding workshops for its employees on libel law, including the concept of “actual malice.”

Insiders say the workshops have happened for years. Indeed, legal refreshers are routine at major media companies—make sure you ask for comment, choose your adjectives carefully, attribute incendiary claims. But there is nothing routine about this moment in Fox News history. Every new legal filing in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit sets off a wave of coverage, criticism, and mockery, from the front page of The New York Times to the cold open of Saturday Night Live. More revelations came Tuesday, including Tucker Carlson saying of Donald Trump, “I hate him passionately,” and Rupert Murdoch saying “I hate our Decision Desk people”—the ones who accurately projected that Joe Biden had beat Trump.

From a corporate HR standpoint, some of the most destabilizing texts show Fox’s most powerful opinion hosts—Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham—dumping on their colleagues on the “news” side. New court filings show the opinion hosts derided numerous Fox reporters by name. “We thought they hated us,” one correspondent said, “but now we know it in their own words.”

For the people caught up in the case, whose private messages are being exposed and ridiculed, the process is “excruciating,” an on-air personality said. However, they have had months to prepare for this moment, since the discovery procedures and depositions ate up much of last year.

A Fox News spokeswoman declined to comment on Vanity Fair’s reporting about the recent legal training classes—or whether stars like Hannity had to participate. But in a statement Tuesday about the new filings, Fox accused Dominion of distorting the truth “in their PR campaign to smear FOX News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.”

Such official dismissals aren’t shutting down the chatter inside Fox, though employees are cautious about when and where they gossip about the latest cache of private exchanges made public. “We’re very careful when we’re miked up,” said the on-air personality. “And we’re not texting about it.” Half a dozen Fox employees found other ways to share insights for this story. All were granted anonymity because they would never be allowed to address such a sensitive subject on the record. Even the network’s own media analyst, Howard Kurtz, has been muzzled: He disclosed on February 27 that “the company has decided that as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now.”

Again, you can read much more about the internal war at the network at the Vanity Fair link.

There’s also a battle raging between Fox News and Donald Trump.

The Washington Post: Inside the simmering feud between Donald Trump and Fox News.

Donald Trump got a tip-off on Saturday that the Fox News Channel would be taking his Conservative Political Action Conference speech live, a switch from the network’s largely indifferent posture toward the former president since he helped send it into crisis after the 2020 election.

Piet Mondrian, Amaryllis, 1910

Trump decided he could not pass up the opportunity to send a message.

“I hope Fox doesn’t turn off, but we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016,” he said in an apparent reference to the false election claims that were at the center of many of the network’s controversies, including a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News that has led to a massive release of internal company documents.

It was just another volley in a low-grade war — some of it public, much of it hidden — that has emerged as one of the defining dynamics in the Republican Party as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway. Trump’s advisers see in Fox News leadership a clear adversary in their march back to the White House and have sought to foster a divide between executives and “the brave and patriotic” opinion hosts with whom he continues to have relationships.

Trump attacked Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch by name this month, calling him and his executives a “group of MAGA hating Globalist RINOS” who are “aiding & abetting the destruction of America.” Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. — noting that he had not been invited on the network in six months — accused Fox News leaders last week of harboring an “America Last, war forever, garbage, fold-to-the-Democrats agenda.” Other allies, such as Stephen K. Bannon, have shredded the network in public.

Documents uncovered by ongoing litigation have also revealed the extent of the ongoing hostility toward Trump from Murdoch and other top executives, both before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Fox News boss emailed a former company executive in early 2021 that the goal was “to make Trump a non person.” Fox News board member Paul D. Ryan, a former Republican House speaker, told another Fox executive around the same time that he had communicated to both Rupert Murdoch and Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch that there was a “huge inflection point to keep Trump down and move on.”

Good luck with that. Trump is never going to stop making trouble for all of us until he finally kicks the bucket.

The New York Times: Records Show Fox and G.O.P.’s Shared Quandary: Trump.

“Do we have enough dead people for tonight?”

It was a week after the 2020 elections, and Tucker Carlson — along with Fox News executives and other hosts — had watched with panic as Fox viewers, furious and disbelieving at President Donald J. Trump’s defeat, began to turn against the top-rated network. The viewers believed Mr. Trump’s claims that a widespread conspiracy of voter fraud was behind his loss. And as Mr. Carlson’s nightly 8 p.m. hour approached, the host pushed his producers to give the viewers what they wanted.

He demanded examples of dead people voting in Nevada or Georgia, even offering to call the Trump campaign personally to ask for help. That night, he trumpeted the evidence, borrowed from a Trump campaign news release: Four allegedly dead Georgians had cast ballots. Within days, though, the campaign’s spoon-fed examples began to fall apart. Three of the dead Georgians were actually alive. And Mr. Carlson was forced to partly retract his allegations, while insisting to viewers that “a whole bunch of dead people did vote.”

Alfred_Sisley, The Small Meadows in Spring

Mr. Carlson’s frantic effort to appease angry Fox viewers, revealed in texts and emails released as part of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, underscore the central quandary faced both by Fox and the Republican Party in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat and still today, as the former president mounts another campaign for the White House.

Like the Republican Party more broadly, Fox wants and needs the support of Trump fans, who both dominate party primaries and form the core of Fox’s viewership. And like the party, Fox has found it difficult to quit Mr. Trump even as his manic efforts to relitigate his defeat have hobbled the party in subsequent elections.

Fox News has been the most trusted and watched source of information for conservative America for decades, and its frequent symbiosis with the Republican Party is well established. But the internal documents released in recent days have provided an unprecedented glimpse into network decision-making as its dual imperatives — to keep its base audience of conservatives satisfied and meet its promise to maintain journalistic standards of fairness and factuality — came into conflict as never before.

This is one of those long, gossipy articles, mostly focusing on Tucker Carlson. Read the rest at the NYT.

For more on Carlson’s struggles, you can also read this piece at Politico by media reporter Jack Shafer: Opinion | The Tucker Carlson Schtick Melts Away. We finally know what the Fox News host really believes.

Also check out this story by Olivia Beavers and Sarah Farris at Politico: McCarthy’s GOP tries to move on from Tucker Carlson-Jan. 6 drama.

Mere hours after Tucker Carlson’s latest segment minimizing the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, House Republicans were eager to change the subject from the Fox News host’s riot revisionism.

While Carlson continued to roil Washington, many GOP lawmakers who gathered Wednesday morning were celebrating their unexpected win on a bill rolling back progressive D.C. crime laws and plotting their response to Thursday’s White House budget.

Carlson didn’t come up at all during House Republicans’ meeting, according to four members in the room who spoke on condition of anonymity. And not a single GOP lawmaker asked about it when given the chance to speak. In fact, some members were privately surprised by the amiability of this week’s first closed-door huddle — generally because there is usually some drama, but particularly since the Fox News segment has publicly reopened painful cross-party fissures over Jan. 6, 2021.

Yet Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to let Carlson access thousands of hours of Capitol footage from the riot has left a lingering cloud over his own leadership team, which was repeatedly pressed about the move as Carlson continues to downplay the violence of the siege by supporters of former President Donald Trump. Senate Republicans heaped criticism Tuesday on Carlson’s portrayal of the riot, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (though few directly dinged McCarthy).

“It seems like some in the press want to talk about Jan 6 every day. So do Democrats. They only want to talk about certain parts of it, though,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told reporters during a press conference where every question focused on the Fox News footage.

Spring Flowers, 1884, by Claude Monet

Other House Republicans are planning to “investigate” the January 6 Committee investigation. NBC News: Republicans launch an investigation into the Jan. 6 committee that examined the riot.

A Republican-controlled House committee launched an inquiry Wednesday into the Democratic-controlled Jan. 6 committee, which a staff member said will review whether pertinent information about the riot was omitted from the high-profile examination of the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Many House Republicans were vocal critics since the creation of the Jan. 6 committee, and the inquiry seems to make good on lawmaker campaign trail vows to investigate the investigators.

The House Administration’s subcommittee on oversight will be combing through the massive amount of records collected by the Jan. 6 committee, which was dissolved in January, said the staffer, with the goal of analyzing how the panel conducted the investigation….

The subcommittee — made up of four Republicans and two Democrats — will be looking into roughly two million documents and records, the source said, which the House Administration Committee obtained from the House Rules Committee after the Jan. 6 panel was dissolved.

The subcommittee will be led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., a Trump ally who had his own run-in with the Jan. 6 committee. The panel accused Loudermilk of giving tours of the Capitol in the days leading up to the riot.

Video footage showed Loudermilk guiding a tour of House office buildings during a time when the complex was closed off to visitors because of pandemic restrictions. Loudermilk has strenuously denied that the group he was leading was using the tour to inspect the facility ahead of the riot.

I suspect this “investigation” will be about as successful as Jim Jordan’s “weaponization of government” subcommittee.

One more January 6 story from Politico’s Alexander Burns: A Startling Document Predicted Jan. 6. Democrats Are Missing Its Other Warnings.

Weeks before the 2020 election, a secret 87-page document outlined in matter-of-fact language the threat posed by Donald Trump’s still-to-come campaign of election denial. The private paper — the existence of which has not been reported before — forecast with chilling confidence the likelihood of violence during the presidential handover and proposed a far-reaching set of political reforms to thwart Trumpism in the future.

Americans remember that dark winter well. But the impetus for structural change has faded, even among Democrats who still privately seethe about the country’s broken political system — and fear an uglier meltdown could come in 2024 or beyond.

The report carried a plain title: Plan D. Reading it, I wondered if the D stood for “doomsday.”

Actually, the letter was not a cipher. Plan D was the fourth of several studies organized by an opaque advocacy group, known as the Hub, to prepare for the depredations of the Trump era. The Hub is known in Washington for its sophisticated dark-money interventions in electoral politics. During the 2020 campaign, it also gathered up strategists, lawyers and activists to draft plans for a different kind of conflict.

The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump’s opponents to “assume the worst” would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president but with “institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.” The document forecast “militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden administration.”

Plan D is sobering reading even today. It is a catalog of the defects in America’s electoral process and political culture that made it vulnerable to a rampaging demagogue— defects that some Democrats wanted to fix with drastic measures.

Should Biden lose narrowly, the report said, “layers of illegitimate structures and interventions will have contributed to it.” It closed with a warning against complacency even if Trump were to be defeated.

“A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy,” the document argued, continuing: “Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis but rather in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy.”

It’s a long read, and pretty dispiriting.

A few more stories, links only:

The New York Times: Former Army Private Sentenced to 45 Years in Neo-Nazi Plot to Kill Soldiers.

The Washington Post: GOP operative comes forward as accuser in sexual misconduct claim against CPAC head.

NBC News: 6-year-old who shot teacher won’t face charges, prosecutor says.

The Washington Post: The fear and fury of these Florida parents.