Fox News’ legal defense has shifted its approach on how they are going to handle the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting System which alleges that the media company continued to perpetuate the unfounded claims of the 2020 presidential election being stolen.
The $1.6 billion defamation case claims that Fox News continued to promote these claims about the voting systems, supplied by Dominion, being fraudulent, with many top hosts and on-air personalities supporting these claims publicly, even though privately they had expressed doubts about the accuracy of these statements and claims.
In their new approach to handling the case, Fox has decided to shift the blame to the person from whom the claims originate, that is Donald Trump. Dominion has so far been arguing that the network’s executive deliberately chose to promote these claims in order to undermine the company’s reputation, while also maintaining the support of their conservative audience. However, Fox News is now downplaying its role in this case and is instead shifting the blame to the former president.
The night before the trial was scheduled to start, Fox News lawyers filed documents to the judge urging him to see that the company’s allegedly defamatory statements were inspired by Trump’s statements about the election being rigged against him. This could prove to be incredibly beneficial in the defense of Fox News if accepted by the judge, as to win the defamation suit, Dominion will need to prove that Fox had acted with harmful intent.
By shifting the attention to Trump, Fox News’ attorneys can instead argue that the statements of the former President are “newsworthy” and that the hosts of the network were not acting with “actual malice” when repeating these statements.
