While Fox has settled with Dominion Voting Systems over defamation allegations related to the network’s 2020 election lies, another lawsuit looms, this one from voting company Smartmatic, which is similarly taking Fox to court in a $2.7 billion defamation case. Documents uncovered in the Dominion lawsuit suggest that the Smartmatic case could be equally detrimental to Fox’s bottom line.
In 2021, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for $1.6 billion, but following months of discovery and depositions, both parties reached a pretrial settlement on April 18 for $787.5 million in what The New York Times called “one of the largest defamation settlements in U.S. history.” Stock for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, has since dipped, and the network fired Tucker Carlson, generally considered the face of the network, in a sudden ouster potentially tied to fallout from the Dominion suit.
Throughout its 2020 election coverage, Fox aired several segments that falsely alleged that Smartmatic owned Dominion Voting and that software from both companies were used to alter “millions of votes” to sabotage Donald Trump’s electoral chances. Although the majority of the discovery in the Dominion trial pertained specifically to Fox’s coverage of Dominion, some of the files explicitly discussed Smartmatic.
For instance, Dominion frequently sent emails to top Fox News leadership and network personalities with press clippings that fact-checked the debunked claim that Dominion and...
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