Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News for airing bogus allegations of fraud in the 2020 election is set to begin trial on Monday, April 17, 2023, in Delaware.
The trial will test press freedom and the reputation of conservatives’ favorite news source.
If the trial were a sporting event, Fox News would be taking the field on a losing streak, with key players injured and having just alienated the referee.
Court papers released over the past two months show Fox executives, producers and personalities privately disbelieved Trump’s claims of a fraudulent election.
That means trial time won’t have to be spent disproving them at a time when millions of Republicans continue to doubt the 2020 results.
New York law protects news outlets from defamation for expressions of opinion.
Fox angered Davis this past week when the judge said the network’s lawyers delayed producing evidence and were not forthcoming in revealing Murdoch’s role at Fox News.
It’s not clear whether that will affect the trial.
The suit essentially comes down to whether Dominion can prove Fox acted with actual malice by putting something on the air knowing that it knew was false or acting with a “reckless disregard” for whether it was true.
“Credibility is always important in any trial in any case.
Supreme Court, which could use it as a pretext to weaken the actual malice standard that was set in a 1964 decision in New York Times Co.
Florida-based Smartmatic has looked to some rulings and evidence in the Dominion case to try to enhance its own $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit in New York.
Fox’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, said earlier this year that he had been banned from covering the lawsuit, but the network has since changed direction.
“The real potential danger is if Fox viewers get the sense that they’ve been lied to.
There’s little indication that the case has changed Fox’s editorial direction or cut into its viewership.
“There’s a certain amount of tribal reaction to this,” Graham said.