Fox News Breaks Silence on Dominion Suit: Host Claims ‘Vigorous 1st Amendment Defense’
Others, including a prominent attorney, don't see it that way, however
Fox News broke its on-air silence on the massive, $1.6 billion lawsuit against the network over its promotion of falsehoods that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
Dominion Voting Systems filed the defamation lawsuit against the right-wing channel, alleging that during the 2020 presidential election the right-wing talk channel “recklessly disregarded the truth" and pushed various pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theories about the election technology company because "the lies were good for Fox's business.”
The Dominion lawsuit is one of two separate cases brought by voting technology companies against Fox News that collectively seek $4.3 billion in damages, posing a serious threat to the highly profitable arm of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.
Although the case has long drawn coverage from other news sources, Fox News has remained silent about the matter on its own air.
Until now.
Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz broke that silence over the weekend, by claiming his employer “has taken a hit” in the court of public opinion, but has a “vigorous First Amendment defense.”
Others, however, see a much different case for Fox, especially as its come out that prominent Fox hosts had been disbelieving Trump's fraud claims privately but repeating them as fact on-camera.
Fox News is in an “incredible” amount of trouble over the lawsuit, according to conservative attorney — and longtime Trump critic — George Conway.
“It’s incredible. I litigated libel cases, one in particular in my practice 25 years ago, and litigated lots of other cases. When you have a libel case and you’re the plaintiff’s lawyer, you don’t expect to get anything remotely like this,” Conway said in a recent on-camera appearance on CNN. “These cases are like a kaleidoscope. What you have is that sometimes you turn it one way and the reporters look a little careless and they look like they’re ignoring something, and the other way you can see how they might have believed this story to be true. And what’s really remarkable is that this comes in the context of the most difficult standard, the most difficult standard that you could possibly apply in a libel case, which is The New York Times against Sullivan standard, which governs the libel claims on matters of public concern against public figures. And that requires — it’s a bit of a misnomer because people talk about it being the standard of actual malice, the Supreme Court uses that word, but malice isn’t required.
“And then you also hear the term ‘reckless disregard,’ but recklessness isn’t enough. It’s not enough the reporter kind of just blew past some facts. And there’s a case from 1968 called St. Amant v. Thompson that says that what you have to show to show reckless disregard is that at a minimum, the publisher of the information or the broadcaster of the information actually entertained serious doubts as to the truth of what was being reported. And here it’s you just have that in droves, at multiple levels,” added Conway, whose wife once worked for Trump. “You have the fact-checkers, you have the anchors, you have Rupert Murdoch, all agreeing that this was false.
“And you never see in a libel case, you just virtually never see in a libel case the libel plaintiff moving for summary judgment, which is a judgment without a trial, saying that there is really no issue to go to the jury, it’s all one-sided, because the standard against libel plaintiffs is so high. And here they made that motion and it’s not a bad motion,” he said. “I think ultimately it will be heard before a jury, but if the judge actually granted — certainly on falsity, because they’re not disputing falsity — if the judge even granted on actual malice and the state of mind — The New York Times standard — that wouldn’t be crazy, and that’s remarkable.”
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