It’s the defamation, stupid
A month after Fox Corp. agreed to pay a record-breaking $787.5 million defamation settlement over Fox News’ lies about Dominion Voting Systems, the company appears to be settling on a fall guy: Viet Dinh, its longtime top lawyer. A Friday New York Times report points the finger at Dinh and his “overly rosy” assumptions about the case for Fox’s subsequent legal “missteps and miscalculations,” citing “interviews with roughly a dozen people directly involved in or briefed on the company’s decision-making.”
Dominion sued Fox over the right-wing network's promotion of conspiracy theories about its voting machines in the weeks following the 2020 election. Fox’s coverage amplified then-President Donald Trump’s false claims that he had actually won the election and that massive election fraud, including by Dominion, had “rigged” the results against him.
Fox executives apparently think the main problem exposed by the Dominion lawsuit is not that the network served as a willing megaphone for right-wing falsehoods as part of Trump’s election subversion plot, but rather that it was ultimately forced to pay a serious cost for doing so. This remarkably blinkered view of the case speaks to Fox’s unwillingness to undergo serious changes, and suggests the network has more Dominion-sized defamations in its future.
The Times recounts a series of missed opportunities for Fox that it attributes to Dinh’s overconfidence, including ignoring “a natural time to settle”...
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