This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shimita Bessu. Today, the lawsuit against Fox News and what it means for the future of media.

It is famously extremely difficult to win a defamation lawsuit against a media company in the United States,

but legal experts watching Dominion voting systems sue Fox News say Dominion has a really strong case.

The voting technology company says Fox defamed it by spreading false claims that Dominion rigged the

2020 election by flipping millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Fox says

it's protected by the First Amendment. Dominion wants 1.6 billion dollars in

damages. The trial is scheduled to start on April 17th. But even before the trial

gets going, the discovery phase of this lawsuit has surfaced pages and pages of texts and emails between Fox producers, hosts, and even executives, messages that show many of them didn't believe what they were promoting on the air.

This puts it on the record and exposes the network in a way that's never happened.

For Brian Stelter, this has been a surreal few months.

The former chief media correspondent at CNN

has spent years talking to people at Fox,

mostly as anonymous sources, about the inner workings of the organization.

He wrote about it in his last book, Hokes, which came out in 2020.

And he'll be covering the Dominion Fox News trial for Vanity Fair and plans to write a book about the trial to follow.

Brian told me, even with all the access he's gotten over the years to various Fox insiders,

these newly released messages from Fox insiders. These newly released messages from Fox employees shocked him.

Reading through hundreds of pages of documents, these texts and emails,

it brought Fox News to life like I've never seen before.

As I was going through these pages, I was thinking,

Fox is never going to be the same.

And frankly, the media world is never going to be the same.

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