A panel of multiple legal experts is now saying that the “explosive” new filing against the highly controversial Right-wing network by Dominion Voting Systems poses a “serious threat” to the scandal-ridden Conservative media outlet, as the voting system company comes after Fox for repeatedly airing blatant lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and Donald Trump’s brutal loss, despite knowing the truth.
CNBC recently reported on Dominion’s public blasting of Fox “for failing to provide evidence of alleged voter fraud during the 2020 election,” amid the voting-tech company’s bombshell $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network.
CNN has spoken with multiple legal experts on the matter, all of whom stressed the seriousness and gravity of the lawsuit against Fox.
University of Utah professor and media law scholar RonNell Andersen Jones told CNN that Dominion’s new legal filing is “pretty voluminous” and noted that she has “never seen” such a “staggering brief” like this one “in a high-profile defamation case against an outlet as enormous as Fox.”
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“Dominion’s filing here is unique not just as to the volume of the evidence but also as to the directness of the evidence and the timeline of the evidence,” Jones added.
CNN’s report reads:
A cache of behind-the-scenes messages included in the legal filing showed Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch called Trump’s claims ‘really crazy stuff,’ and the cable network’s stars — including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham — brutally mock the lies being pushed by the former president’s camp asserting that the election was rigged.
It also showed attempts to crack down on fact-checking election lies. On one occasion, Carlson demanded that Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she fact-checked a Trump tweet pushing election fraud claims.”
However, Fox Network continues to assert, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law. Their motion for summary judgment takes an extreme and unsupported view of defamation law and rests on an accounting of the facts that has no basis in the record.”
First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams weighed in and called the bombshell new legal filing “a major blow,” adding that “recent revelations certainly put Fox in a more precarious situation.”
Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, Rebecca Tushnet, echoed a similar sentiment, noting that Dominion’s proof is “very strong” and clearly “lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting.”
Tushnet goes on to similarly note that she has “never seen such damning evidence collected in the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit.”
“Donald Trump seems to be very good at generating unprecedented situations,” the Harvard law professor adds.
Fox continues to attack Dominion’s suit as “noise and confusion,” claiming, “the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan.”
But Jones sees it much differently: “This ‘out of the horse’s mouth’ evidence of knowing falsity is not something we often see. When coupled with the compelling storyline that Dominion is telling about motivation — the evidence that at least some key players in the organization were actively looking to advance some election denialism in order to win back viewers who had departed — it makes for a strong actual malice storyline.”
David Korzenik, another First Amendment law professor, said the Dominion lawsuit puts Fox News Network “in real jeopardy,” stressing that “while the law allows for bias and ratings-seeking behavior by media outlets, it does not allow for the publication of material one knows to be false.”
Read CNN’s full report here.
Featured image via screen capture
