According to recent reports, Fox is attempting to settle a substantial defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems just before it was about to go to trial.
Judge Eric M. Davis of the Delaware Superior Court presides over the lawsuit. He said on Sunday night that the trial would start on Tuesday rather than Monday as originally planned.
As per reports, Fox made a last-minute effort to settle the issue without going to trial, citing sources familiar with the matter. The settlement negotiations were first covered by The Journal.
Some reports stated that the attorneys from both parties would meet on Monday to see if they could facilitate a last-minute agreement.
An official from Fox Corp., the organisation that owns Fox News, declined to speak with reporters. The request for comment was refused by a Dominion spokeswoman.
The turn of events effectively prevents what First Amendment specialists had predicted would be a judgement day for the right-wing media organisation in Delaware Superior Court.
In March 2021, Dominion initially brought its lawsuit and requested $1.6 billion in damages. It asserts that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, two conspiracy theorist attorneys, who spread untruths about the business to millions of viewers in the wake of the 2020 election, were featured by Fox News and Fox Corp., throughout this time.
Former president Donald Trump hired Powell and Giuliani in an unsuccessful attempt to get them to reverse his loss because he could not accept that he had lost the election.
False claims were made by Powell and Giuliani that Dominion had complicated ties to the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and secretly switched votes from Trump to Joe Biden to gain an advantage in the election.
Dominion argues that when they had Powell and Giuliani on their shows, Fox hosts Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs either agreed with those assertions or didn’t fully reject them.
According to Fox, what it was doing was merely reporting on the President’s newsworthy assertions. the majority of First Amendment scholars concur that Dominion has enough evidence to succeed in the case, even though that defamation actions are challenging to win in the US due to the country’s robust free speech safeguards.
The election technology firm would have demonstrated that Fox News moved with actual malice, a legal requirement that the media outlet knew it was lying or carelessly ignored the truth.
Federick Schauer, a professor at the University of Virginia and an authority on defamation law, claims that victories for plaintiffs in defamation lawsuits are frequently overturned on appeal. Even though juries frequently side with the plaintiffs, courts of appeals frequently overturn their judgements by using the actual malice threshold.
Both Fox and Dominion seemed ready to take their legal dispute to an appeals court. Fox has made mention of it in SEC filings, and both sides of the dispute hired skilled appellate attorneys for their teams.
According to reports, Viet Dinh, the head of the attorney for Fox Corp., declared that he thought Fox had a high chance of succeeding in their Supreme Court appeal.
Both Dominion and Fox filed applications for summary judgement in the months before the trial, attempting to persuade Davis that their separate cases were so compelling that he should decide them himself rather than submitting them to a jury.
Fox was severely embarrassed by the numerous deposition excerpts, texts, and emails from hosts, executives, and producers that were contained in Dominion’s papers.
The host, Tucker Carlson, worried that Trump may destroy Fox News in a text message expressing how passionately he detested the then-president. Powell’s allegations of vote-flipping were dismissed by Carlson, fellow host Sean Hannity, and co-host Laura Ingraham in a group chat.
While all this was going on, Fox News hosts were reluctant to acknowledge Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. In a text conversation, Carlson said that when the Fox News editorial board correctly predicted Arizona for Biden, it was destroying their credibility.
Together with Hannity, Carlson tried to get Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to terminate a reporter for fact-checking Trump.
Fox CorpChair Rupert Murdoch looked to be concerned about moving too far in Trump’s direction in his messaging and depositions, but he also wanted to make sure his supporters wouldn’t switch to another channel.
According to Dominion’s filings, the emergence of Newsmax also seemed to be motivating Fox News to spread fake news about the election. After Trump lost to Biden, the further-right media source openly praised his election lies, which helped boost its ratings.
Late in March, Davis announced his summary judgement ruling, which largely favoured Dominion.
Dominion is also pursuing defamation cases against Newsmax and One America News, another right-wing media organisation that has been abandoned by DirecTV and is now in grave danger. It is currently pursuing several cases against other conspiracy theorists, such as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, in addition to Smartmatic.
