Fox News this week agreed to pay over $780 million to settle its defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over false claims made on the network about the company in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Some Fox News critics have contended, however, that this will not be enough to dissuade the network from recklessly peddling election misinformation in the future -- although legal expert Mitchell Epner disagrees.
Epner, a former federal prosecutor who now practices media law at the law firm of Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC, tells Law & Crime News that the precedents set in the Dominion case should give Fox News enough incentive to be more careful in the future lest it be forced to yet again fork over a massive sum of money.
In fact, he said that Dominion's extremely successful discovery had turned up so much incriminating information about Fox News personalities' and executives' knowledge that they were peddling false claims that the network would need to go to unrealistically extreme lengths in the future to cover up such impropriety.
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“If Fox wants to get better at getting away with defamation, they will start organizing themselves like a criminal conspiracy where nothing is committed to writing unless it’s in code,” Epner said. “But that is a very, very difficult way to run a news organization.”
