Fox Newsthe Conservatives’ reference television channel americanwill be judged on April 17 for defamation during the results of the 2020 presidential election, won by Joe Biden against Donald Trump. The civil complaint was filed by Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company vote electronic.
In its lawsuit filed in March 2021, the American company claims $ 1.6 billion in damages for defamation. In a ruling, released Friday, a Delaware state judge ruled that Fox News, owned by the magnate Rupert Murdoch through the group News Corp., was not justified in contesting this complaint.
Publicly relayed “fake news”
The documents of the complaint, unveiled in dribs and drabs since February, contain text messages and e-mails exchanged between the leaders of Fox News and those of the News Corp group. These exchanges reveal that in November 2020, behind the scenes of the channel and even to Murdoch himself, there was little belief in the Trumpist lies of an election “stolen” by Joe Biden, in particular by means of electronic voting.
But these doubts were expressed only in private, while these theories flourished on the air, on the sets of the stars of the chain. The Dominion voting machine company considers itself thus defamed because Fox News had claimed that its devices had been used to distort the results of the November 2020 presidential election in several places in the United States.
In his ruling, Magistrate Eric Davis found it “clear as water that no assertion about Dominion in the 2020 election is true”. This Friday, Fox News reacted, saying again that it had only reported Donald Trump’s allegations on the air and again invoked the First Amendment on freedom of speech and the press.
