It’s not just Democrats who believe that Fox News hosts and their guests lied repeatedly about Dominion Voting System efforts to “steal” the 2020 election. It’s also the opinion of Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis.
Davis in a ruling on Friday regarding Dominion’s defamation suit against the network held that on 20 occasions, Fox made false accusations that Dominion tampered with voting results.
“Through its extensive proof, Dominion has met its burden of showing there is no genuine issue of material fact as to falsity,” the judge wrote. Since Fox never disputed falsity, Davis concluded: “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” Fox’s motion for summary judgment was rejected, meaning the suit will go to trial.
It cannot be repeated enough: Plaintiffs almost never win on the issue of falsity before the trial even begins. Usually, there is some defense that the facts were plausibly true — or at least that the comments were opinion (therefore, not actionable). Not in this case.
Fox’s lawyers and executives have suggested that Fox wasn’t responsible for what its star hosts said. Davis flatly rejected this. “FNN [Fox News Network] is not a passive entity. FNN controls what is broadcast on its various networks. FNN does this through its employees as agents of FNN,” Davis held. He added, “FNN did in fact publish the statements to its viewers.”
“Even if the neutral report privilege did apply, the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.” He added, “failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not disinterested.”
Overall, Davis’s ruling means that even before the first witness is heard in Fox’s defamation trail, the jury will be told the network repeatedly published false statements about Dominion that injured its business reputation. That is not exactly saying that Fox acted with malice, which Dominion’s lawyers will have to prove to win the case. Still, a jury might well come to that conclusion considering that the entity didn’t bother to check out an outrageous, obvious lie. Dominion now starts with a powerful advantage: Who’s going to believe anything Fox says at this point?
“The ruling is as significant for Fox News as it is for the whole of right-wing media,” said Angelo Carusone, CEO of Media Matters and who has documented Fox’s antics for years. “For Fox, the ruling underscores their incredibly weak legal position and dramatically increases the likelihood that they Fox will lose at trial.” He added, “Regardless of how this shakes out legally, Fox is on its heels, which means the right-wing echo-chamber is currently without its conductor at a moment when it needs it the most.”
On the issue of malice, Davis’s damning recitation of the facts shows that Fox knew it was lying. . . . . Fox’s arguments appear weak. It claims there’s a difference between not knowing something is true and knowing it’s false. But running something without any evidence that it is true sounds like the very definition of malice — i.e., reckless disregard for the truth.
The pretense that Fox is a real news organization is being blown to smithereens — as is a great deal of the right’s narrative about everything from stolen elections to race to immigration. Discredit Fox, and you discredit a huge portion of the right-wing echo chamber and the MAGA pols who thrive in it.
Credible media, elected officials and voters can now stop treating Fox as a legitimate news outlet. If Fox doesn’t believe its own propaganda, why should anyone else?
The second column is similarly damning to Fox News:
What Fox did to Dominion was not journalism. It was more like a mugging.
After the 2020 election, Fox repeatedly aired wild, unsubstantiated and patently false allegations about Dominion’s voting machines having “stolen” votes — and, by extension, the presidency — from incumbent Donald Trump.
In a ruling on Friday sending the case to trial, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis wrote that the evidence produced so far makes it “CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
The lies pushed by Fox’s hosts and guests included claims that Dominion was created in Venezuela to rig elections for dictator Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, and that the company’s machines used some kind of algorithm to change Trump ballots into votes for Joe Biden. These and other false statements, Davis ruled, were presented by Fox as fact rather than opinion and — to state the obvious — were harmful to Dominion’s reputation.
What is most stunning about the voluminous evidence presented thus far by Dominion is how differently Fox operates from any news organization I’ve encountered in all my years as a journalist.
Text messages, emails and other internal Fox communications show that in the weeks after Election Day, as Trump and his advocates pushed the “stolen election” lie, the network’s most senior executives — including Murdoch himself — and its most popular hosts were less concerned about reporting the truth than about having Fox’s huge, lucrative, Trump-supporting audience stolen away by even more MAGA-friendly outlets, such as Newsmax and One America News (OAN), with even fewer journalistic scruples.
At legitimate news organizations, senior figures do not seek to have staff members fired for telling the truth. At Fox, however, this appears to be business as usual. During the 2020 vote count, Fox was the first network to call Arizona for Biden — which all but extinguished any chance for Trump to win an electoral majority and sent him into a rage. Real news organizations take pride in being first — and right — on an election call. Fox, by contrast, ended up firing the politics editor who oversaw the Arizona call, ostensibly as part of a bureaucratic reorganization.
[T]he network’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, complained in early December 2020 about an anchor who had fact-checked some of Trump’s false “stolen election” claims. “This has to stop now,” Scott wrote. “This is bad business and there clearly is a lack of understanding [of] what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious and we are just feeding them material. Bad for business.”
I don’t believe this case threatens the protections accorded to journalists. My only worry is that some people might get the idea that actual news organizations think and act like Fox. We do not.
Anyone who watches Fox News is either a total fool or is allowing themselves to be played for fools.
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