Following Fox’s decision to pay to settle a legal dispute, Dominion announces a “major acknowledgment of the truth.”
financial timesBy Joe Miller, p. 7
Late afternoon, on a yard in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday, Attorney Justin Nelson She told the world’s media that there will finally be “claiming and accountability” for the widespread lies about vote-rigging after the former US president’s defeat. Donald trumpwhich happened about 30 months ago. Last minute deal worth $787.5 million before Foxaccused of making false claims about his client, the maker of voting machines DominionIt was an “outspoken defense of truth and democracy,” said the Texas attorney. It seemed like a moment of reckoning for the role conservative media outlets played in spreading the conspiracy theories that later helped fuel a deadly uprising on Capitol Hill that remains a faith staple for die-hard Republicans. Moments earlier, the outcome of Dominion’s legal battle was uncertain, with the latest delay to a six-week trial set to begin Monday in Delaware, the favored legal residence of big US corporations. A 12-person jury, handpicked from hundreds of nominees, did not return from lunch to a courtroom packed with reporters eagerly awaiting Dominion’s opening statement. After a long wait, the judge finally appeared. He said the parties had “settled their case”. Trial closed. What convinced Fox to throw in the towel at the last minute and accept one of the largest defamation settlements in US history wasn’t immediately clear, though legal experts seemed to agree that the company faced increasingly higher odds as the case dragged on. Some have speculated that Fox knew it when the jury met that day that it sounded like the demographics of the area the members came from—heavily Democratic, with a train station named in honor of Atmosphere Biden.
Other analysts come back a few days, when the judge Eric DavisFox, who was overseeing the case, warned Fox’s lawyer that they had a “credibility problem” after a dispute over information provided to the court. Professor of Law at George Washington University Catherine rusIt came to a head last month, when Davis departed from his usual dry prose to declare in a written opinion that it was “absolutely clear” that statements made by Fox about the alleged fraud of Dominion voting machines were false. He added that the protection of freedom of expression under the US Constitution does not extend to lying. “The judge basically destroyed all of Fox’s defenses…they were left with almost nothing,” said Ross. “Fox was really cornered.” Others pointed out the volume of emails and internal texts in Fox The Dominion discovered it during the initial investigation, including the announcer Tucker CarlsonTrump, who was once a supporter of Trump, has admitted that he hates the former president “deeply”. In other excerpts, Fox News staffers admitted they don’t think the election was stolen, but they fear viewers will flock to the right-wing contenders if they say so early on the air. Commentators said the fact that the 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch was forced, at Dominion’s request, to testify personally about his role in the months-long affair may have given more impetus to the latest deal talks. However, despite the high level of libel cases in the United States, Fox’s fate was sealed by the time Dominion sued him in 2021, said Lee Levine, a retired First Amendment attorney who has represented large media groups in a career that has lasted 40 years old. The 443-page lawsuit was “the most powerful defamation lawsuit against a media company I’ve ever seen,” Levine said, in part because Dominion’s real-time warnings to Fox hosts and executives about false allegations in the weeks after the election. At the time of the vote in November 2020, Dominion was a small and relatively unknown Denver company without a full-time public relations professional. But it sprang into action when Trump allies began speculating about the company on air and hired an expensive outside communications team led by Tony Fratto, the former White House deputy press secretary under George W. Bush. A person familiar with the strategy said the team, which realized Fox “refused to go look at” the evidence, sent more than 3,600 emails and messages to Fox employees, enclosing reams of evidence they said showed allegations made by the Trump campaign were patently false. .
(Continued in financial times)
