By Helen Coster and Jack Queen
(Reuters) - One of the most closely watched U.S. defamation cases in decades is set to begin on Thursday as a Delaware court picks a jury to decide whether Fox News should pay Dominion Voting Systems $1.6 billion for spreading election-rigging falsehoods.
A critical task for jurors over the five-week trial will be deciding who was responsible for the cable network's decision to broadcast the claims despite internal doubts about their veracity. Dominion asserts that Fox's top brass approved of the coverage, but the network says the evidence of high-level involvement is threadbare.
Last week, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said he would not block Dominion from calling Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, to testify in-person about his involvement in the coverage, which Davis has ruled was false and defamatory.
"The more complicit the whole organization is in perpetuating these known falsehoods, the more likely a jury would be to return a big dollar figure," said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at the UNC School of Law.
Dominion alleges that Fox destroyed its business by knowingly airing false claims that its ballot counting machines were used to flip the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election against former President Donald Trump, a Republican who lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The trial has been widely viewed as a test of whether Fox's coverage crossed the line between ethical...
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