“What’s unique about this case is that we also see the plaintiffs arguing that their case is about democracy preservation. “Dominion’s narrative arc here is very much about the harm that this conscious, corporate lie did to the country and its people,” Jones said. It is now commonly referred to as the “big lie” in the US – the belief that elections cannot be trusted.ĭominion’s lawyers argue in court filings that Fox made a deliberate choice to play up such election lies because it was concerned about losing viewers to far-right competitors. Lies about the 2020 election, like the ones spread by Fox, have seeped into orthodoxy of the Republican party and resulted in a wave of harassment against election officials, efforts to overturn election results, and the violence at the Capitol on January 6. “You couldn’t make up a hypothetical of ‘what is actual malice’ that’s stronger than that,” said Lee Levine, a lawyer who has defended media organizations in defamation cases. Or ‘this is ludicrous’ or’ this source is lying’,” she said. “It is ridiculously rare to have one of these actual malice cases in which the plaintiff can show the jury a series of statements that say, directly, ‘this is a lie’. RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah, said the case was shaping up to be “the most important defamation case in generations”. Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”īy mid-November, Fox’s internal fact-checking operation, called the Brain Room, had investigated the claims about Dominion and determined they were false. It’s insane,” Tucker Carlson wrote in a text message on 18 November 2020, referring to one of Trump’s attorneys who continued to go on Fox’s air to spread false claims about Dominion. And damaging,” Rupert Murdoch wrote in a 19 November 2020 email as he watched Rudy Giuliani make false claims about Dominion at a press conference. The evidence they have produced offers as close to smoking-gun evidence as one can get. US law sets an extraordinarily high bar that plaintiffs must clear to win a defamation case, requiring them to prove that someone acted with “actual malice” – knowing or reckless disregard for the truth – when they published a false claim.īut this case is unusual, experts say, because Dominion’s case is so strong. It is extremely rare for a defamation case to go to trial – most are either dismissed or settled. Rupert Murdoch in New York in October 2019. “It’s become sort of a proxy for voting and January 6.” “It’s not just comeuppance on something insignificant,” said Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog group. ![]() The trial is seen as one of the strongest opportunities for holding Fox and Murdoch, accused for years of distorting the truth to rile up conservative viewers, accountable for its lies. ![]() The jury could also choose to impose additional punitive damages. Dominion is suing Fox News and its parent company Fox Corporation for defamation, seeking at least $1.6bn it says it is due to cover the reputational damage it suffered as a result of Fox’s lies. Those messages and the claims are now at the center of a blockbuster six-week jury trial now set to begin on Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware, where Fox is incorporated after a delay was announced from the original schedule of Monday. A stunning trove of internal communications obtained by Dominion shows there was widespread disbelief at the company everyone from Fox’s CEO, Rupert Murdoch, to top hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson knew the claims were untrue, even as the network continued to air them to millions of Americans. None of those claims were true and Fox hosts, producers and top executives knew it.
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