The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Hard Lessons From the Dominion Defamation Lawsuit
Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million this week. Political analyst Jim Geraghty finds three big lessons in it:
One: There can be catastrophic financial consequences for adopting and repeating the lies of the former president.
If you choose to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, you must also believe that there is a compelling pile of verifiable evidence that, for some inexplicable reason, was never presented by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in its myriad post-election lawsuits in November and December 2020. Furthermore, you must believe that when facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion, Fox News never presented any of this evidence as a defense in this defamation lawsuit. Truth, or substantial truth, is an absolute defense in a defamation case.
If you choose to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, you must believe Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion in a settlement, rather than present any of that evidence. You must believe that Fox News had a quick and easy way to win this lawsuit and simply refused to use it — even though the news distributor had more than 700 million good reasons to point to this evidence, if it existed.
But Fox News did not present that evidence; in fact, Fox Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch said under oath that he believes the 2020 presidential election was free, fair, and not stolen. Fox News did not present any evidence contending that the 2020 presidential election was not stolen, because the 2020 presidential election was not stolen, and there is no compelling evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Period, full stop, do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Note that Geraghty did not say there were no problems with the 2020 election, but media outlets are going to be far less likely to give Trump or others air time for such claims in the future.
Two: A network’s responsible journalism is not a useful legal defense against a network’s irresponsible and defamatory journalism.
Here, Geraghty explains at length a conversation he had with Fox News attorney Paul Clement, who Geraghty thought made a strong case. The judge, however, did not agree, and Geraghty notes some of the commentary and assertions by Fox hosts that were most problematic.
The Fox News argument was that just about everything in its prime-time hours, and on a program such as Lou Dobbs Tonight, was self-evidently opinion, and thus covered by the privilege of opinion. But Judge Davis just didn’t see it that way.
Three: It is unlikely that networks like Fox News can afford to keep loose-cannon hosts anymore.
Dobbs’s name is all over this lawsuit, and out of all of Fox News’ hosts, he offered the most comments cited as defamatory false claims of fact in Judge Davis’s ruling. Fox News dumped Dobbs and his program in February 2021, shortly after Smartmatic filed its lawsuit. It would be overstating it to contend that … Dobbs single-handedly cost his former employer $787 million. But Dobbs made the job of Dominion lawyers a hell of a lot easier.
You notice it wasn’t Bret Baier, Dana Perino, or Howard Kurtz who got Fox News in trouble. In fact, the network’s news division and reporters are barely mentioned at all in the Dominion lawsuit. The news division, by and large, exercised appropriate skepticism about the lack of evidence for the outrageous claims of Giuliani and Powell. No, it was the prime-time opinion hosts — some would call them the “entertainment” hosts — who turned their studios into platforms for Trump-campaign surrogates to offer every nutty conspiracy theory they could think of, with minimal pushback or skepticism.
Geraghty concludes:
A loose-cannon host who is unpredictable and capable of saying anything — and Fox News is not the only network with on-air talent who fits this description — can end up costing his network hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s not just more than the advertising revenue of any one program; that’s a large chunk of the advertising sales for the entire network over the course of a year. The cost-benefit analysis of cable-news personalities is about to change — and the market for “you never know what he’s going to say next” is about to crash.