If Rupert Murdoch and Fox News don’t reach a deal quickly, Dominion Voting Systems will have its day in court in its defamation suit against the embattled conservative cable news agency.
Ahead of an April 17 hearing in the $1.6 billion case, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis today denied all efforts by Fox to drop the case, in part because hosts and guests were of opinion or neutral reports on allegations of voter fraud and beyond by Donald Trump and his allies.
Fox News Network “is not a passive entity,” the judge said, in a direct rebuttal of the network’s main defense. “FNN monitors what is broadcast on its various networks. FNN does this through its employees as representatives of FNN. Regardless of who is responsible for the release within FNN, FNN actually released the statements to its viewers.”
Conversely, Judge Davis allowed part of Dominion’s own summary judgment motion and challenged other parts. (Read his statement here)
From the beginning, Dominion Fox intentionally and knowingly spread false claims about the company amid Trump’s now-charged bellicose claims that the 2020 election was stolen for Joe Biden. FNC said it was reporting on a newsworthy topic, ultimately in the public interest, and doing its job. While hordes of embarrassing (to say the least) private texts, emails and other correspondence from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Fox executives and Murdoch himself paint a stark portrait of an organization that does one thing and something tells his loyal viewers quite differently to say when the cameras were off.
A point Judge Davis hammered home in his 130-page ruling released Friday:
Through its extensive testimony, Dominion met its task of showing that there were no genuine material facts relating to falsity, “Fox therefore had the burden of again proving a substantive factual matter.” Fox couldn’t handle that burden. The evidence developed in this civil suit shows that this is the case CRYSTAL Clearly, nothing Dominion has said about the 2020 election is true (Italics, capitalization, and boldface by Judge Davis) Therefore, the Court will grant summary judgment in Dominion’s favor on the element of falsity.
Looking further, Judge Davis’ ruling narrows the scope of what the jury told Fox Corp. found guilty. for defamation or Fox Corp. whether Fox News engaged in actual malice or whether Dominion was harmed.
A spokesperson for Dominion told Deadline today: “We welcome the court’s thorough ruling, which strongly rejects all of Fox’s arguments and defenses and that his statements about Dominion are false under the law. We look forward to the process.”
“The court rejected Fox’s ‘cogent claim’ in defense of the First Amendment and ruled that Dominion’s lawsuit is First Amendment compatible,” the spokesperson added.
“This case was, and always has been, about the First Amendment, which protects the media’s absolute right to cover the news,” a Fox News Media spokesperson said Friday after the ruling was released. “Fox will continue to fight vigorously for freedom of expression and a free press as we move into the next phase of this process.”
In his lengthy decision, Davis dismissed several of Fox’s defenses: that he was merely reporting arguably newsworthy allegations, including those of Sidney Powell, who was once a member of Trump’s legal team. But the judge said the court was bound by existing precedents that recognized no “privilege for neutral reporting” and shielded reporters from liability for neutral reporting, even on defamatory allegations.
“Even where neutral reporting privilege applied, the evidence does not support that FNN reported in good faith and disinterestedly,” the judge wrote, noting that Fox News’ failure to disclose extensive conflicting testimony from the public and Dominion itself was at fault indicating that reporting was not disinterested.”
Davis also dismissed Fox’s arguments that it is shielded from journalists’ liability for reporting on official proceedings, such as hearings and court hearings. He noted that many of the claims made by Trump allies on Fox News “were filed before a lawsuit was filed in court.”
Dominion identified 20 counts of voter fraud against the company on Fox News airwaves. Fox argued that the statements were opinions and therefore protected against defamation claims, and that the average viewer “will understand that the statements convey opinions and not facts in the immediate and wider social context in which the statement is made”.
However, Davis, in his opinion, went through the statements one by one to conclude that the statements were facts or mixed opinions and sided with Dominion.
Davis wrote that the statements are “necessarily defamatory because the statements alleged that Dominion committed voter fraud; manipulated vote counts through its software and algorithms; was founded in Venezuela to manipulate elections for dictator Hugo Chavez; and paid bribes to government officials who used the machines in the elections. Dominion claims that the statements jeopardize the fundamental integrity of its company. This alone makes the statements inevitably defamatory. The comments also appear to accuse Dominion of the serious crime of voter fraud. Allegations of criminal activity, even in the form of an opinion, are not constitutionally protected.”
Jury selection for the trial in Joe Biden’s adopted home state begins April 13.
Much of the attention on the case has centered on the release of correspondence from Fox News and Fox Corp. employees, showing that the network was rushed to respond to a post-election backlash in which Trump recommended that his followers downsize competitors will go to watch Newsmax and One America News Network. Fox News became the first network to predict that Biden would win Arizona, the first sign on election night that Trump would lose — a fact that angered POTUS at the time.
According to him, Davis referred to some of the text messages, including one to Hannity from Carlson, as upset that Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News had fact-checked Trump’s claims about Dominion. “Please let them fire. . . . This hurts business measurably. The stock price went down,” Carlson wrote.
Source: Deadline
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
