The Fox News Case for the First Amendment and the Law of Defamation: The Case for Dominion’s Explanation of Fox News Losses

Conservative TV darlings Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and a slew of other Fox News stars and executives, including the network’s 92-year-old owner Rupert Murdoch, may soon have their days in court in what stands to be the biggest media trial since the 1980s.

“Dominion’s lawsuit is a political crusade in search of a financial windfall, but the real cost would be cherished First Amendment rights,” a Fox spokesperson said in a statement.

Big figures at Fox privately acknowledged the reality that Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Fox kept its huge audience engaged by faking conspiracies and lies.

Attorneys for Fox have also claimed that the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, shields the network from being punished for what its guests say on air – even “speech [it doesn’t] think is right.”

The epic case now turns on an attempt by Dominion to prove the legal standard for defamation that Fox must have known (or strongly suspected) it was lying about the issues at hand at the time and that it acted with “actual malice.”

That high standard is known as “actual malice.” It’s meant to protect media outlets from being punished for reporting critically on powerful figures, including corporations and the government.

Fox Corporation Will Not Win If Dominion Can’t Testify About a Business, Does It Really Matter? The High-Dimensional Case of Fox News

It won’t make it to first base if the people on Fox agree that Trump’s claims had merit. Judge Eric Davis ruled that jurors did not need to decide if Fox’s claims about a company were true during the pre- trial hearings.

Legal filings made public a trove of private text messages, emails and deposition transcripts, revealing how Fox hosts, producers, and executives really felt about Trump.

Rudy Giuliani was Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, as well as Sidney Powell, a Trump ally and attorney. (Dominion has separately sued both Giuliani and Powell but there have been no rulings in either of those cases.)

The whole thing is crazy, and Sidney Powell will not release the evidence. Which I hate,” Carlson texted fellow hosts Hannity and Laura Ingraham a couple weeks after the election.

In April, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said that Fox could be in for a big blow because they could be forced to testify.

Gauging by what Fox has presented in court, the network’s attorneys maintain the election-technology company’s worth is nowhere near the $1.6 billion Dominion is asking for.

Fox has accused Dominion of picking quotes and texts that would hurt them in the trial. But the evidence that has emerged suggests that Fox’s desire to cater to the beliefs of its viewers, even with untrue information, is closely allied to Trump’s own approach and reflects the way in which the Republican Party has been loath to antagonize the ex-president’s supporters.

• Abby Grossberg, a former Fox News producer who alleged that the network’s lawyers coerced her into providing misleading testimony in a lawsuit filed March

Both parties have made the witnesses relevant. Fox was trying to prevent the Murdochs from testifying.

That could make a big financial hit to Fox. Fox Corporation has $4 billion of cash on hand, according to the latest earnings statement. It’s also unclear how much insurance the company has, or what any insurance policy would cover.

Fox argued in a statement the case is about protecting “the rights of the free press” and a verdict in favor of Dominion would have “grave consequences” for the fourth estate.

Many of the documents that were included in the 10,000 pages of court documents that have been made public as part of the lawsuit will be shown in the trial.

Tucker Carlson and the Delaware Superior Court: The Start of the trial for the election denialism of the Fox News Network: A case study in a lawsuit that Trump himself denies violating any laws

For example, host Tucker Carlson said in one text message he “passionately” hates Trump. In one November 2020 exchange, Tucker Carlson said Trump’s decision to snub Joe Biden’s inauguration was “so destructive,” adding that Trump’s post-election behavior was “disgusting” and that he was “trying to look away.”

Murdoch’s private messages revealed how his own thoughts contradicted what Fox espoused. Murdoch wrote to Fox News Chief Executive Suzanne Scott, “Maybe Sean’s and Laura’s election denialism went too far,” referring to Trump’s loss to Biden.

Opening statements were expected on Monday, but the Delaware Superior Court said in a surprise announcement that “the start of the trial” will now be Tuesday.

“The Court has decided to continue the start of the trial, including jury selection, until Tuesday, April 18, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. I will make such an announcement tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. in Courtroom 7E,” using the legal term “continue,” which means delay or postpone.

Legal experts were surprised that Fox did not settle the case because of the damning material that has come to light. A settlement would prevent what is going to be embarrassing for Fox over the next few weeks.

Ron Nell Anderson Jones is a professor of law and an expert on First Amendment issues at the University of Utah.

Some of the company’s highest-ranking executives and highest-profile hosts are scheduled to otherwise testify during the trial about the election lies promoted by the network in the wake of the 2020 election.

The ex president’s conspiracy theories about the voting machines were promulgated by the conservative network to avoid alienating its viewers and for the good of its bottom line.

The drama that is expected to take place in a Delaware courtroom could show how truth has degraded into a political currency and highlight a right-wing business model that depends on spinning an alternative reality. It is not clear whether Trump will end up paying a significant personal or political price for his roles in the 2020 election.

Though he vigorously denies breaking any laws, the former president appears to face the possibility of indictment in probes into his attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s election victory by a district attorney in Georgia and by special counsel Jack Smith into his conduct in the lead-up to the US Capitol insurrection. And the many layers of Trump’s democracy-damaging behavior were catalogued in interviews and public testimony taken by a House select committee when Democrats controlled the chamber last year.

The foundation of the campaign to get back the White House is the falsehood of a corrupt election. Millions of Trump’s supporters have bought into the idea that he was illegally ejected from office on the premise that he really won in 2020.

It is questionable whether conservative media viewers will get enough information about the trial to make them change their minds about 2020.

Despite winning the House in the last year of the elections, senior Republicans are still scared by the idea that the election was corrupted as they try to rebound from his loss in 2020.

Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp said on CNN Sunday that the ex-president was preventing the party from looking to the future.

Donald Trump and the Establishment of State: How Rugged He Went? An Insight into the Higgs Sector of the Republican Party

One argument in court that could be used is that Fox believed that telling inconvenient truths was bad for business, a factor that led the right-wing media in 2020 and continues to this day. Two years after the election of Donald Trump, the Republican Party is unwilling to upset its base voters. The only part of the GOP that has power in Washington is the House, so they have tried to protect Trump from accountability over the 2020 election, and to distort what actually happened on January 6, 2021.

But the court proceeding against Fox – like the constitutional process that assured a transfer of power between Trump and Biden, albeit one marred by violence – shows that the country’s instruments of accountability remain intact, despite Trump’s efforts.

But the run-up to the trial has been a catalog of embarrassments and reversals for both the network and the broader premise that there is anything to Trump’s false claims.

From the opening hours of his presidency, Trump made clear he would create an alternative vision of reality that his supporters could embrace and that would help him subvert the rules and conventions of the presidency. The angry exhortations by Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, in January 2017 that his boss had attracted the biggest inauguration crowd in history seemed at the time bizarre and absurd. But in retrospect, they were the first sign of a daily effort to destroy truth for Trump’s political benefit, which eventually morphed into lies about a stolen election that convinced many of the ex-president’s supporters. On January 6, 2021, during the certification of Biden’s victory, his supporters launched a mob attack on Congress.

This is probably not surprising. Because when he was in office, Trump made no secret of his strategy, telling the world in a moment of candor how he operated.

You have to stay with us. He told his supporters at the veterans convention in Kansas City to not believe the stories they see from these people. What you are seeing and reading doesn’t correspond to what is happening.

“We won in 2016. We won by much more in 2020 but it was rigged,” Trump said in the first big rally of his campaign in Waco, Texas, at the end of March.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/17/politics/trump-election-lies-fox-news-defamation/index.html

How much should you look at in the mirror when you’re driving? A case study on Donald Trump’s legacy and the fate of the presidency

If you look in the mirror too long while you’re driving, you might collide with someone, that’s not good.

It will take a lot more than a courtroom display to get the truth about 2020 restored, as the fact that Trump is still wildly popular with conservatives suggests.