A voting machine company’s $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox News will hinge on a legal standard established in a 1964 Supreme Court case, The New Yorker reports.
Dominion Voting Systems has in the estimation of Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis already established that the conservative cable network aired falsehoods about the company.
Davis in a summary judgement released March 31 asserted that “the evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that [it] is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” with the word “crystal” in bold caps appearing in the judge’s own writing.
Dominion now needs to prove “actual malice,” the standard established in the landmark New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case.
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Actual malice is described as a “notoriously difficult” standard to meet, according to the report, which notes that Dominion’s lawyers will have to prove that Fox news “entertained serious doubts as to the truth of [the] publication” or if they had a “high degree of awareness of [its] probable falsity.”
The New Yorker’s Clare Malone writes “That’s a notoriously difficult standard to prove, since it requires some insight into the mind-set of the people or organization that put out defamatory information. And news outlets devote a great deal of time and resources to protect themselves from defamation suits.”
A Dominion brief offers a roadmap for how it is likely to prove that Fox News acted with actual malice.
Malone writes that “Dominion lists twenty instances of alleged defamation, which the lawyers say occurred across Fox’s Web site, social media, and six of its shows—'Lou Dobbs Tonight,’ ‘Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo,’ ‘Justice With Judge Jeanine,’ ‘Fox & Friends,’ ‘Hannity,’ and ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’—and at the direction of people at Fox News who Dominion says knew that the statements were false and let them air anyway.
“Those people include not just well-known hosts but their producers, network executives, and the very top brass: Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the father-and-son duo that controls Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp.”
