"We Hate Fox News" is not a legal argument
Misreporting the Dominion voting machines lawsuit.
There’s an old saying I remember from my undergrad days at Princeton University: “If you can’t blind them with your brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
That seems to be the strategy of the mainstream media in their coverage of the lawsuit between Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News. After several significant filings in the case last week, the word went out: make this all about Fox employees.
In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg, so biased she must type only with her left hand, wrote a hatchet job titled “What Fox News Says When You’re Not Listening.” As if any Times reader actually listens to Fox News.
Goldberg calls Fox’s Tucker Carlson “the sneering, conspiracy-obsessed host of what The New York Times called possibly ‘the most racist show in the history of cable news.’” Not only is this rude and possibly libelous itself, writing an article in your newspaper quoting other articles in your newspaper is the weakest of weak teas; It’s like Karl Marx quoting Das Kapital to convince us of his economic theories.
The op-ed piece, crowned by a Dali-esque montage of closeups of Fox mouths, wastes no time issuing its own judgment, saying it’s “a case stemming from Fox’s egregiously false claims of Dominion-abetted election fraud…” That’s just in case you planned to wander off the liberal plantation and think for yourself. As always, liberals tell their serfs how to think in advance.
It takes 13 paragraphs for Goldberg to admit her own bias, writing “It’s certainly true that all cable news shows program with ratings in mind. MSNBC—where, full disclosure, I’m a contributor…” And more full disclosure: MSNBC has been solidly behind Fox in ratings for more than a decade. Think Goldberg would have reason to present Fox in the worst light possible?
Goldberg and other news libs want us to know that even Fox News hosts weren’t convinced of the 2020 election-fraud theory. Two weeks after the election, “Carlson told [Laura] Ingraham: “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. Caught her. It’s insane.” Ingraham wrote back that Powell was a ‘complete nut.’” Goldberg adds “Carlson did express skepticism of Powell on-air, noting on Nov. 19 that she had never produced evidence for her claims.”
Goldberg is either dumb or she’s lying—I’ll let her choose, because Fox employees doubting the stories of election fraud is exactly what Fox’s lawyers are trying to show.
The Canadian Broadcasting Company jumped into the fray over Dominion Voting Systems because “The company was founded by Canadian John Poulos in Toronto and now has headquarters in Denver.” The supposed news report (not opinion piece) claims “Trump allies like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell appeared on Fox News and falsely claimed Dominion software may have manipulated vote counts in favour of Biden. Wild claims about the company's origin story, connecting it to late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, were also made.”
As to the “wild claim” the company was connected to a Venezuelan dictator, the brief filed Friday by Fox’s lawyers notes that Dominion’s subsidiary “Smartmatic was forced to sell Sequoia after Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to investigate Smartmatic “because of concerns that the government run by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez ... owns a stake in the company.” Seems like they wouldn’t have needed to sell it if it hadn’t been true or close to true.
The once-respected Associated Press ran a piece Friday headlined “Lawsuit is latest evidence of bogus ‘stolen election’ claims” written by Nicholas Riccardi. Riccardi claimed briefs filed by Dominion meant “more evidence is piling up that those who spread the misinformation knew it was false.” He adds the papers “add to the wealth of evidence that there was no widespread fraud during the 2020 presidential election and that even some of Trump’s most prominent supporters were aware of that fact at the time.”
Riccardi quotes a UCLA law professor (a liberal, of course) who says ““It demonstrates a profound cynicism about the political process and the gullibility of Trump’s supporters,” That is, the liberal rumors are apparently true, that Trump’s backers are mouth-breathing morons and Biden voters are eminently rational—and plenty numerous, since Biden in 2020 got 10 million more votes than Obama ever did..
The mainstream media, which haaaates Fox News, can’t say enough times that the 2020 election was, um, fair and balanced. But even if that were true, it’s not what the lawsuit is about.
Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox doesn’t turn on whether there was cheating in the 2020 election. It’s a defamation lawsuit that claims Fox purposely said enough bad things about Dominion that it hurt Dominion’s image and did damage to their business.
Fox’s lawyers attack Dominion’s claims from several directions. One is to quote non-Fox media expressing doubt about Dominion and its subsidiaries long before the 2020 election. On CNN back in 2006, Lou Dobbs had a computer expert saying of Smartmatic "“we’re using equipment to elect our president and our Congress, and our local officials, that cannot be audited, that are potentially under the control of foreign entities, and that are almost an ideal platform for rigging an election.”
In 2018 a Princeton professor warned that with Dominion’s new machines “after you mark your ballot, after you review your ballot, the voting machine can print more votes on it.” The next year the Washington Post reported that hackers tried to get into Dominion machines and had no trouble: “…that ‘ballots could easily be stolen’ from the machines ‘using common items such as a standard trash picker…and that Dominion’s ‘filesystem was unencrypted and unprotected.’” Also in 2019 Dominion tried to get its system accepted by the state of Texas, “But Texas refused to certify the system due to multiple hardware and software problems.”
All this and more was before 2020—where were the defamation lawsuits then?
Fox’s lawyers then point out that Donald Trump made many tweets and comments about possible cheating after the election, and it wasn’t just Fox amplifying them: “Given the gravity of the President’s allegations and their potential to impact the results of the Presidential election, every media outlet in the country (if not the world) covered the controversy.” Fox, they say, wasn’t much different from other news organizations in its coverage.
And they claim Fox anchors were quite willing to question the claims made by the president’s team, citing many occasions where hosts told Trump’s team “they would eventually have to prove their claims in court.” The brief notes 20 times Fox anchors expressed doubts about Trump’s claims on air. This is where the mainstream media hyperventilate about how Fox anchors didn’t even believe the cheating claims, but in fact it helps Fox’s case.
Dominion didn’t exactly cover itself with glory in the media scrum, appearing just once on Fox News on a news program and refusing all other invitations. If Dominion really wanted to protect its reputation it should have taken advantage of far more appearances on Fox. Its officials were certainly invited.
The Fox lawyers argue that there was no defamation, since court rulings note that “when the press reports newsworthy allegations made by others, that reporting is not defamatory, even if those allegations ultimately turn out to be false.”
In addition Fox’s attorneys point out Dominion can’t claim economic damages because its business hasn’t been affected by the Trump claims. “The record confirms that Dominion has not suffered any economic harm at all. Its customers never believed the President’s claims, and the testing of those claims in the crucible of public debate has left Dominion’s financials better than ever.”
Fox’s enemies (and they are legion) are using the legal filings, as a judge once noted, the way a drunk uses a lamppost—more for support than illumination. This is a defamation lawsuit, not a fight over whether Democrats cheated in 2020. The questions before the jury will be:
Did Fox News defame Dominion, that is, damage its reputation?
Did the news anchors and hosts act “with malice,” specifically wanting to damage Dominion?
And third, did Dominion suffer any damage that can be measured financially?
The media see a different case—one that isn’t being argued and can’t be proven. They think Fox News was mean for not agreeing with them and every other liberal in America and was even meaner because its ratings far exceed theirs. Even after there’s been a verdict the rest of the media will continue to claim it’s all about fixing the 2020 election.
In other words, they’ll still be trying to baffle you with BS.