CNN Media Reporter Oliver Darcy spoke with several legal experts about the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, with some saying the network is in serious trouble in the case.
First Amendment lawyer David Krozenik claimed the text messages showing Fox News hosts and executives in agreement that former President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him were not factual “certainly puts Fox in the actual malice crosshairs and puts them in real jeopardy.”
“This ‘out of the horse’s mouth’ evidence of knowing falsity is not something we often see,” University of Utah professor and media scholar RonNell Andersen Jones added. “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.”
Fox News has defended itself against the Dominion lawsuit, saying the voting machine company is creating “noise and confusion” around the case.
“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,” the network said. “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.”
However, Andersen Jones said the evidence Dominion has compiled is a “dream” for the company, proving that the network knew it was lying and proceeded anyway.
