Welcome to the beat. I'm Ari Melbourne. We begin with Fox News facing this new legal heat in a billion-dollar case over lies and conspiracy theories. The chief over there, Rupert Murdoch, and top anchors are now facing legal demands to go do something you really rarely see in modern media, which is take the stand of the actual trial to explain, defend, or perhaps confess to why they

erred lies that in many ways led to or soften the ground for an insurrection.

That is why this is a media story, but far more than a media story.

The evidence has already shown that many knew Trump was lying about the election, but they, quote,

endorsed it anyway,

and that word comes from Murdoch himself. Now, the reason this is in court is not because of the GM6

committee or Congress or Media Matters, which is a Fox kind of critic group. The reason is that somebody

says they were legally hurt and defamed by Fox, specifically

one of the voting machine companies. You may have heard of them, Dominion. Well, today there's

damaging new evidence from this Dominion case as the pressure heats up. More emails that show

the internal Fox News fact-checking department.

They have one of those.

It is supposed to provide some guardrails.

And that it had fact-checked in advance and alerted that some of the claims about this plaintiff,

the Voting Machine Company Dominion, were just false.

And then this won't surprise you if you follow the story, Fox News went ahead

and aired it anyway. And again, that's not somebody outside the company fact-checking them or the

Washington Post and the New York Times. That's their own journalistic or media process, or in this

case, I suppose, a failed attempt to journalism because journalism means you fact-check

and follow the facts you find. This is kind of the opposite, at least according to Dominion's

newly obtained evidence. So this is what they'll face the trial. Now here's some of the key people

that could take the stand, Murdoch, Bear, who hosts the 6 p.m. hour over there.

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