Dominion Voting Systems was given the go-ahead in June to file its lawsuit against Fox News and Fox Corp, its parent company, by Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric David. It ruled that it was reasonable to conclude that Murdoch and his son Lachlan either clearly knew that Dominion had not rigged the election or “recklessly ignored the truth” when Fox spread lies initially floated by Donald Trump. Conservative news outlets OAN and Newsmax have also been sued by Dominion for defamation for $1.6 billion each. “Dominion has a very strong case against Fox News,” Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a professor of constitutional law at Stetson University in Florida and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Guardian. All the “conspiracy theories about the Dominion machines were just pure bunk,” he added. “Fox as a news organization should know that and not give that aspect away [Trump’s] ‘big lie’ a loudspeaker’. What’s especially bad for Fox, he noted, is that Dominion asked the network to stop spreading the lies and correct the record, yet “Fox persisted in spreading misrepresentations about the voting machine company.” A particularly interesting development could be the exposure of text messages and emails between the Trump White House, Fox News personalities and even Rupert Murdoch. “I think once you start pulling the discovery material, what you’ll find is that there was a lot of communication between Trump’s people both internally and externally to promote very specific lies and narratives,” said Angelo Carusone, chief executive of Media . Issues for America, he told the Guardian. A Fox spokesperson told the newspaper: “We are confident we will prevail in this case, as the First Amendment is the foundation of our democracy and freedom of the press must be protected.” The story continues This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
