Dominion win key decision over Fox in defamation lawsuit

[Rotadom]

Fox’s worst week? Dominion ruling adds to drumbeat of bad news for the network

https://ktvz.com/news/2021/12/16/dominion-voting-wins-key-decision-in-lawsuit-against-fox-news-2/

On Sunday the Fox News Channel’s news facade was chipped away when Chris Wallace decamped to CNN. On Monday the hypocrisy of Fox’s biggest stars was highlighted by a bipartisan House committee. On Tuesday the network belatedly and weakly defended itself. And the week wasn’t even half over yet.

On Wednesday Fox’s social media team was forced to delete an antisemitic cartoon after advocacy groups shamed the network. And today, Thursday, Fox was set back in court in a big way. As Katelyn Polantz reports here, “a judge in Delaware has found that Fox News’ coverage of election fraud after the 2020 election may have been inaccurate, and is allowing a major defamation case against the right-wing TV network to move forward.”

“The ruling will now allow Dominion to attempt to unearth extensive communications within Fox News as they gather evidence for the case, and the company may be able to interview the network’s top names under oath,” Polantz explains.

For that reason, some media writers are speculating that the network will now try to settle, lest it be subjected to the embarrassment of the discovery process. “Fox loses the key motion; cases often settle at this point,” Ben Smith tweeted, “and a settlement here would likely be a big number. It’s a very strong case.”

“Wrong” has been a throughline in the outside coverage about Fox this week. As the network’s ranks of reporters shrank and conspiratorial ranters grew, Wallace decided not to re-up his contract. Fox’s court jester ridiculed him on the way out.

“There’s a good chance Wallace had enough of being on the wrong end of conservative wrath,” the former Fox analyst Bernard Goldberg wrote for The Hill on Thursday.

Goldberg, who was a regular on Bill O’Reilly’s show back in the day, quoted an email from a “wise, conservative friend” of his. The launch of Fox was “great for journalism and great for the country,” this person said, but then Fox “sold their souls to … Trump and they’re too damn stupid to realize the damage they’ve done to the conservative cause they claim to espouse.”

That damage includes the Big Lie, hyped by some of Fox’s biggest stars, and now the subject of Dominion’s lawsuit…

 

[WillJ8787]

Fox is going to be paying out plenty very soon

 

[butters]

judge gives go-ahead for 'actual malice' case against fox and giuliani

Ironically, the statements of Tucker Carlson, perhaps the most popular Fox News host, militate most strongly in favor of a possible finding that there is a substantial basis that Fox News acted with actual malice. As noted above, on November 19, 2020, Dobbs posted a video of he and Powell on Twitter with a caption stating, inter alia, that Powell “has no doubt that Dominion voting machines run [Smartmatic]’s software which allows [it] to manipulate the votes.” … The same day, Carlson wrote an article stating that, for over a week, Powell had been claiming that the election had been stolen and that, if Powell were correct, it would be the greatest crime in American history, and he thus asked her to substantiate her comments. However, Powell never provided the evidence requested by Carlson, and President Trump’s campaign advised Carlson that it knew of no such evidence. Therefore, there are sufficient allegations that Fox News knew, or should have known, that Powell’s claim was false, and purposefully ignored the efforts of its most prominent anchor to obtain substantiation of claims of wrongdoing by [Smartmatic].

This is not the only evidence the judge mentions as pointing to the possibility that Fox acted with actual malice. At another point, he noted that Fox didn’t share emails from Smartmatic seeking to correct claims that its machines were used in Los Angeles County with other hosts. The judge even speculates that “it is possible that it deliberately decided to prevent them from learning facts which could or would have confirmed the probable falsity of the statements broadcast on their shows.”


But it’s Carlson’s words that the judge says “militate most strongly in favor of a possible” actual-malice finding.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...rds-against-fox-news/ar-AAUQ5Co?ocid=msedgntp

 

[HisArpy]

All of the media is going to be paying very close attention to this case because it just might change the rules laid out in NY Times v. Sullivan.

The result might not be what either side wants to happen.