There was no evidence of any of this,but Fox News became a welcoming home for the espousal of it all. Dominion sued Fox and a lot of other people for destroying the company’s reputation.
Libel cases of this type in the US turn,in crude terms,on the basic issue of good-faith reporting. The courts recognise that news organisations can make unintentional mistakes,and they would be severely hampered,and cowed,if they were punished for each one. It’s really hard to win a libel or defamation case against a media outlet in the US.
However,if they print things theyknow aren’t true,or go out of their way not to find out if they are true or not – the legal term is “with reckless disregard” – that can make them liable for punishment.
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This week,Dominion filed a motion that includes many documents from a process known as discovery,in which the company’s lawyers got to sift through a lot of texts and emails from inside Fox. As we say in America,Hoo boy!
According to the motion,the texts show that Fox personalities and producers were saying one thing in public and another behind the scenes. We repeatedly see,for instance,that Fox’s supposed news folks not only didn’t bother to attempt to check whether Dominion was the brainchild of a dead dictator in a third-world country before letting various Trumpeters say so on air,but that they actually knew it was all nonsense and said so among themselves. The claims were “crazy”,“insane”,said staffers,including the network’s stars. Their guests were “lying”,they acknowledged. And yet they kept putting them on air.
For its part,Fox contends that it was just reporting the news. But even that has been undermined by a deposition from Rupert Murdoch himself,in which the 91-year-old executive concedes that his anchors were endorsing the defamatory claims – a horrific admission,legally speaking. (And now Trump has turned his fire on Murdoch,saying the executive has thrown his stars “under the table”.)