“We’re litigating history in a way: What is historical truth?” said Lee Levine, a noted First Amendment lawyer who has argued several major media defamation cases. “Here you’re taking very recent current events and going through a process which, at the end, is potentially going to declare what the correct version of history is.”

The case has caused palpable unease at the Fox News Channel, said several people there, who would speak only anonymously. Anchors and executives have been preparing for depositions and have been forced to hand over months of private emails and text messages to Dominion, which is hoping to prove that network employees knew that wild accusations of ballot rigging in the 2020 election were false. The hosts Steve Doocy, Dana Perino and Shepard Smith are among the current and former Fox personalities who either have been deposed or will be this month.

Dominion is trying to build a case that aims straight at the top of the Fox media empire and the Murdochs. In court filings and depositions, Dominion lawyers have laid out how they plan to show that senior Fox executives hatched a plan after the election to lure back viewers who had switched to rival hard-right networks, which were initially more sympathetic than Fox was to Mr. Trump’s voter-fraud claims.

Libel law doesn’t protect lies. But it does leave room for the media to cover newsworthy figures who tell them. And Fox is arguing, in part, that’s what shields it from liability. Asked about Dominion’s strategy to place the Murdochs front and center in the case, a Fox Corporation spokesman said it would be a “fruitless fishing expedition.” A spokeswoman for Fox News said it was “ridiculous” to claim, as Dominion does in the suit, that the network was chasing viewers from the far-right fringe.

Fox is expected to dispute Dominion’s estimated self-valuation of $1 billion and argue that $1.6 billion is an excessively high amount for damages, as it has in a similar defamation case filed by another voting machine company, Smartmatic.

A spokesman for Dominion declined to comment. In its initial complaint, the company’s lawyers wrote that “The truth matters,” adding, “Lies have consequences.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/business/media/fox-dominion-lawsuit-first-amendment.html

In April, Johnson Johnson’s shareholders voted against a proposal to stop sales of the talc baby powder in global markets such as Asia and South America — a request that had been fueled by concern about the company’s legal and reputational woes. Last year, the company faced $1.6 billion in talc-related litigation expenses and had set aside $3.9 billion the previous year. Reputation tracking firms said Johnson Johnson’s once-pristine name had been tarnished among consumers by the accusations around talc.

Talc-based products account for a tiny sliver of Johnson Johnson’s sales of consumer products, which also include Band-Aid bandages and Listerine mouthwash, but are responsible for an enormous portion of its legal headaches. In one talc case, Johnson Johnson was ordered to pay $4.69 billion to 22 plaintiffs in one of the largest personal-injury verdicts ever.

The company has tried to limit its legal exposure via an elaborate corporate pirouette known as the Texas Two-Step. In February, a bankruptcy judge in New Jersey cleared the company to move ahead with the maneuver, which gets its name from a foxtrot-inspired dance style and derives its convoluted structure from a quirk of Texas business law.

The reorganization process, which involves partitioning off assets and sealing them away from creditors, has been tried only a handful of times since being conceived in 1989, mostly by companies facing asbestos exposure claims. If successful, it could shield Johnson Johnson from billions of dollars in legal claims while also demonstrating an escape route for other companies swamped with personal injury litigation.

The gambit has put the Johnson Johnson talc lawsuits in stasis and could leave claimants, some of whom are extremely ill, with a smaller pot of funds for payouts. Plaintiffs’ lawyers have filed an appeal to try to stop the maneuver and said the next hearing is scheduled for September.

“After decades of selling talc-based products the company knew could cause deadly cancers to unsuspecting women and men, J.J. has finally done the right thing,” said Leigh O’Dell, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/11/business/johnson-and-johnson-talc-corn-starch.html

“What we’re going to be dealing with in 2022 is more of a citizen corps of conspiracists that have already decided that there’s a problem and are now looking for evidence, or at least something they can twist into evidence, and use that to undermine confidence in results they don’t like,” said Matthew Weil, the executive director of the Elections Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “When your entire premise is that there are problems, every issue looks like a problem, especially if you have no idea what you’re looking at.”

Mr. Keshel, whose post as Captain K inspired the Arizona gathering, said in an interview that monitoring drop boxes could catch illegal “ballot harvesting,” or voters depositing ballots for other people. The practice is legal in some states, like California, but is mostly illegal in battlegrounds like Georgia and Arizona. There is no evidence that widespread illegal ballot harvesting occurred in the 2020 presidential election.

“In order to quality-control a process that is ripe for cheating, I suppose there’s no way other than monitoring,” Mr. Keshel said. “In fact, they have monitoring at polling stations when you go up, so I don’t see the difference.”

The legality of monitoring the boxes is hazy, Mr. Weil said. Laws governing supervision of polling places — such as whether watchers may document voters entering or exiting — differ across states and have mostly not been adapted to ballot boxes.

In 2020, election officials embraced ballot boxes as a legal solution to socially distanced voting during the coronavirus pandemic. All but 10 states allowed them.

But many conservatives have argued that the boxes enable election fraud. The talk has been egged on by “2000 Mules,” a documentary by the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which uses leaps of logic and dubious evidence to claim that an army of partisan “mules” traveled between ballot boxes and stuffed them with fraudulent votes. The documentary proved popular on the Republican campaign trail and among right-wing commentators, who were eager for novel ways to keep doubts about the 2020 election alive.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/technology/voter-drop-box-conspiracy-theory.html

The deal price tops the $400 million or so valuation that Axios discussed with Axel Springer last year, according to three people familiar with the matter. After those talks, Axios raised another funding round, led by Cox, that valued the company at $430 million.

Cox Enterprises is not buying out HQ, which Axios is spinning out into a separate company. Mr. Schwartz will be chief executive of that company, and Cox will take a minority stake, with Mr. VandeHei serving as chairman, a person with knowledge of the deal said.

The deal to acquire Axios harks back to the media roots of Cox Enterprises, a family-owned privately held company based in Atlanta that generates most of its revenue from its cable and broadband businesses. The company traces its beginnings to 1898, when James Middleton Cox bought what is now The Dayton Daily News for $26,000. In 1939, Mr. Cox purchased the newspaper that would eventually become The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the company still owns both publications.

“It’s a big part of who we are and what we do,” Mr. Taylor said. “We’ve been in the news business for 124 years, and this speaks to the legacy our grandparents left us.”

Cox Enterprises, which already owned a minority stake in Axios, is putting $25 million of cash on its balance sheet to fund the company’s growth. Mr. VandeHei said Axios planned to build a series of subscription products, similar to those offered by Politico Pro, on topics including technology, politics and legislative policy.

Axios also plans to continue starting more regional editions, which already exist in 24 cities including Philadelphia, Des Moines and Nashville. Mr. VandeHei said the company aimed to be in at least 100 cities in the coming years.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/business/media/axios-cox-enterprises.html

The success of “Renaissance,” her seventh solo studio LP — every one of them, beginning with “Dangerously in Love” (2003), has gone to No. 1 — affirms Beyoncé’s status as a chart-topping megastar. Her opening-week total bests those of a string of recent albums by younger, streaming-heavy stars like Drake (204,000), Kendrick Lamar (295,000) and Post Malone (121,000). But it was nowhere near the total for “Harry’s House,” which started with 521,000, thanks in part to record-breaking vinyl sales. (Now in its 11th week out, “Harry’s House” is in fifth place on the album chart.)

The 332,000 “equivalent album units” for “Renaissance” includes 179 million streams and 190,000 copies sold as complete packages, including 121,000 on CD and 26,000 on vinyl, according to Luminate, the tracking service that supplies the data behind Billboard’s charts. “Lemonade” arrived with the equivalent of 485,000 sales, and “Everything Is Love” (2018), Beyoncé’s joint album with Jay-Z, arrived at No. 2 with 123,000.

Also this week, “Un Verano Sin Ti,” by the Puerto Rican streaming king Bad Bunny, drops to No. 2 after holding the top spot for the last five weeks straight. Counting two earlier peaks since it came out in May, “Verano” has logged seven times in the top spot.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/arts/music/beyonce-renaissance-billboard-chart.html

She grew up in a “difficult home,” as she put it. Her parents met as art students in Odessa, Ukraine. When Kravchenko was 3 and her sister 5, they lost both their grandfather and father to murder in a few short months. Their grandfather, a high-ranking commander in the Soviet military, was temperamental and belligerent and possibly mentally ill, Kravchenko said. He was killed when an assailant strangled him and torched his house. Ola’s mother, Tania, was suspected in the arson and spent almost a year in Soviet detention. (According to Tania, his body was exhumed, and new evidence cleared her of the murder.) Shortly after, Ola’s father’s body was found, hanging from a tree in a forest. He had been a penniless artist in St. Petersburg, “extraordinarily talented” and “hypersensitive,” according to Tania. No one knows how he died, though friends of his later told her that they had seen two men chasing him in the woods. Ola’s family moved in with Tania’s mother. Four years later, they immigrated to Israel, settling in Katzrin.

Kravchenko found it hard to fit in. She worked on shedding her accent and avoided the children of other Russian or Ukrainian immigrants, who make up about a third of Katzrin’s population. She often wandered out of class, disappearing into nature. The school repeatedly called her mother to come find her. She distinctly recalls the first time she heard voices. She was 17 and driving home with her mother. “She started saying all these unpleasant things about me: that she didn’t want to drive me home, that she was tired of taking care of me, that I was always nagging.” But when Kravchenko looked over at her mother, “her mouth wasn’t moving.” Soon the voices became numerous and frequent, disguised as the voices of people Kravchenko knew well. “They were always critical of me, always nasty,” she said. “There was no telling them apart from real voices.”

Around the same time, Kravchenko’s mother suggested she try meditation, and she started attending classes led by a charismatic Chilean-born guru named David Har-Zion. Kravchenko fell under his spell. After several months, she moved in with a group of his followers. She slept on a yoga mat with dozens of people in a large hall. Members were forbidden to form relationships with the outside world and were required to surrender their personal possessions to the group. For three years, she lived in “virtual enslavement,” she said. Har-Zion later fled the country, and Kravchenko found herself all at once unmoored and alone. “I had no life skills whatsoever,” she said.

When she was 20, she met Habany on the streets of Tel Aviv. She was raising donations for Har-Zion’s group at a local market, and he helped his father run a clothing stall there. They began to take long walks on the beach together, smoking marijuana and talking about their pasts. He was 19, bookish and opinionated, and he impressed her with his knowledge of Hebrew literature. He confided in her that at 17 he was committed at a psychiatric institution outside Tel Aviv. (The court later indicated that this was for conduct disorder.) Rather than alarm her, this “only pulled me closer,” she told me. Within six months, she moved in with him. “I was totally his,” she said.

There had been warning signs, but Kravchenko chose to ignore them. “The sex was violent, but I was drawn to it.” By 2005, Kravchenko felt increasingly isolated. Returning home from work one evening, she started talking with a group of young people who frequented a public square. They offered her vodka. The next thing she recalls, she woke up naked in her apartment, her body aching, with Habany screaming at her: “What is this? What did you do?” Kravchenko doesn’t know the person who raped her or remember much about that evening — “I have flashes of the guy,” she told me — but when Habany saw her, he kicked her in the head and stomach, dragged her into the bathtub and urinated on her. Habany later told investigators that he “peed on her,” because he “felt like it.” An investigator drilled into this: “Your partner, your lover … was raped according to you by another man, and you peed on her?” Habany told him, “It’s my personal business — not yours.”

After that night, Kravchenko said, Habany became obsessed with her whereabouts. He didn’t allow her to socialize or go out without him to any place except work. “I didn’t realize that I was being abused,” she told me. “I still wanted to marry him, have children with him.” In 2006, they ran out of money to pay rent and had to move in with Kravchenko’s mother, in Katzrin. Tania was concerned about how Habany treated Kravchenko and tried to warn her daughter. But by then, Kravchenko had lost her sense of self. In a sketchbook from that time, she drew a woman warrior with a sword entering her private parts. “I even bought myself a dog collar,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/magazine/shadow-of-truth-tair-rada.html

Tungsupakul brought the idea of the bracelets to the production as another example of paying attention to the local customs. “I asked my friend who studies northern culture at Chiang Mai University, and he said this is a must-have item,” she said. “It’s a signature of passing good luck to a person, giving him a blessing that if you’re going on a dangerous mission, you will be safe.”

Tungsupakul is also one of a handful of female characters in a male-dominated cast — a factor that Ruetaivanichkul, one of the producers, said was crucial to creating balance within the production, which is one of a spate of screen projects, including the 2021 documentary “The Rescue,” about the mammoth effort to save the stranded soccer team and its coach. (The producer P.J. van Sandwijk worked on both “Thirteen Lives” and “The Rescue.”)

“She introduces femininity and the soft side of energy,” Ruetaivanichkul said. “She shows the empathy within the group. That is what Ron emphasized from the very beginning, because otherwise it’s not going to be different from the story in the documentaries that focus on the rescuers. We are trying to do the world-building of Thai culture.”

Tungsupakul and her sister were raised by parents who ran a small business trading construction materials. She graduated from law school, but instead decided to move to Bangkok to pursue a career in acting. Early success on a 2013 series in which she played a rural girl forced to move to Bangkok after her father is murdered made her a star in Thailand. When asked if she was famous, Tungsupakul demurred with a quiet “Yeah,” before adding, “But if I say ‘yes’ then maybe ‘Oh, I’m too much.’”

“Thirteen Lives” is her first international production, one she found challenging when it came to modulating her emotions. She remembers Howard telling her at one point, “‘Ploy, in this scene, please don’t cry. No more tears,’” she said with a laugh. The tears came so easily because the world the production team had recreated in Australia felt so close to home. Tungsupakul was in Bangkok when the rescue was underway, but she remembers being glued to the television, watching the story unfold, positive that no child was going to survive.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/movies/thirteen-lives-pattrakorn-tungsupakul-cave-rescue.html

“As soon as I heard the concept, I actually was kind of jealous,” Mr. Lasseter said. “It’s a subject that every single person in the world has a relationship with, and that is very rare in a basic concept of a movie.”

But he ultimately threw out almost everything and started over. The primary cast now includes Jane Fonda, who voices a pink dragon who can sniff out bad luck, and Whoopi Goldberg, who plays a droll leprechaun taskmaster. Flula Borg (“Pitch Perfect 2”) voices the overweight, bipedal unicorn, who is a major scene stealer.

“Sometimes you have to take a building down to its foundation and, frankly, in this case, down to its lot,” Mr. Lasseter said.

Mr. Lasseter did not invent the concept of doing real-world research to inform animated stories and artwork, but he is known for pushing far beyond what is typically done. For “Luck,” he had researchers dig into what constitutes good luck and bad luck in myriad cultures; the filmmaking team also researched the foster care system, which informed part of the story. (The lead character grows up in foster care and is repeatedly passed over for adoption.)

As at Pixar and at Disney, Mr. Lasseter set up a “story trust” council at Skydance in which a group of elite directors and writers candidly and repeatedly critique one another’s work. The Skydance Animation version will soon include Brad Bird, a longtime Pixar force (“The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille”) who recently joined Mr. Lasseter’s operation to develop an original animated film called “Ray Gunn.”

Ms. Holmes said Mr. Lasseter was a nurturing creative force, not a tyrannical one.

“John will give you notes on sequences,” she said. “He will suggest dialogue. He will comment on color or timing or effects. He’ll pitch story ideas. He’ll draw something — ‘Oh, maybe it could look like this.’

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/01/business/media/john-lasseter-luck-apple.html

Mr. Trump found a home on Fox News when the network’s founder, Roger Ailes, gave him a weekly slot on “Fox Friends” in 2011. Mr. Trump used the platform to connect with the budding Tea Party movement as he thrashed establishment Republicans like Mr. Ryan and spread a lie about the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Initially, neither Mr. Ailes nor Mr. Murdoch thought of Mr. Trump as a serious presidential candidate. Mr. Ailes told colleagues at the time that he thought Mr. Trump was using his 2016 campaign to get a better deal with NBC, which broadcast “The Apprentice,” according to “Insurgency,” this reporter’s account of Mr. Trump’s rise in the G.O.P. And, when Ivanka Trump told Mr. Murdoch over lunch in 2015 that her father intended to run, Mr. Murdoch reportedly did not even look up from his soup, according to “The Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green.

But as Mr. Trump became bigger than any one news outlet — and bigger than even his own political party — he was able to turn the tables and rally his supporters against Fox or any other outlet he felt was too critical of him. He regularly used Twitter to attack Fox personalities like Megyn Kelly, Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove.

The network could always be critical of him in its news coverage. But now the skepticism comes through louder — in asides from news anchors, in interviews with voters or in opinion articles for other Murdoch-owned properties.

Referring to the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, the Fox anchor Bret Baier said it had made Mr. Trump “look horrific” by detailing how it had taken 187 minutes for him to be persuaded to say anything publicly about the riot. One recent segment on FoxNews.com featured interviews with Trump supporters who were overwhelmingly unenthusiastic about a possible third campaign, saying that they thought “his time has passed” and that he was “a little too polarizing.” Then they offered their thoughts on who should replace him on the ticket. Unanimously, they named Mr. DeSantis.

“I spent 11 years at Fox, and I know nothing pretaped hits a Fox screen that hasn’t been signed off on and sanctioned at the very top levels of management,” said Eric Bolling, a former Fox host who is now with Newsmax. “Especially when it has to do with a presidential election.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/business/media/fox-news-donald-trump-rupert-murdoch.html

Frank Millspaugh, a general manager of the station in the 1960s and ’70s, said listeners had empathized with Mr. Josephson’s eternal grumbling about waking up early. But some board members of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns the station, were displeased with the countercultural tone of Mr. Josephson, Mr. Fass and Mr. Post.

“They wanted a more serious, more respectful sound to the station,” Mr. Millspaugh said in a phone interview. But when they understood how effective those hosts were in raising money for the station, “they softened their criticism.”

In the mid-1970s, Mr. Josephson served for two years as the general manager of WBAI, which routinely operated on a shoestring. During one urgent financial crisis, the station turned to listeners to raise $56,000 to meet its monthly expenses. Within four days, $25,800 had poured in, most of it cash.

“We will survive,” Mr. Josephson told The Daily News in 1976. “We have to raise more money and spend less. It’s just like New York City,” which was dealing with a much larger financial crisis of its own at the time.

Norman Lawrence Josephson was born on May 12, 1939, in Los Angeles. His father, Adrian, at one point owned a woodworking company; his mother, Marian (Tyre) Josephson, was a homemaker.

Larry had loved radio since childhood but did not initially pursue work in it. Instead, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and studied linguistics, then went to work for I.B.M. as a computer engineer in the New York area. (He did not finish his bachelor’s degree until 1973.) He began volunteering at WBAI in the 1960s and was hired to host the morning show in 1966 because, he said, the station couldn’t find anyone else who would wake up that early.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/obituaries/larry-josephson-dead.html