Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is in legal jeopardy thanks to its decision to promote President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election.
On Thursday, Trump’s former attorney general William P. Barr took to one of Murdoch’s outlets to support another.
Barr, writing in the Wall Street Journal, defended Fox News in the face of a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. It’s perhaps unsurprising from a guy with a demonstrated penchant for tailoring his legal analysis to fit his allies’ purposes. Like Fox, he argues that an adverse outcome could damage media outlets beyond Fox News. (For a counterpoint on that, see here.)
But for our purposes, we’ll focus on Barr’s legal case: that Fox’s coverage of the false claim that Dominion rigged the 2020 election doesn’t amount to defamation. And while that’s very much an open question, there are some holes in the arguments as Barr lays them out.
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Echoing Fox, Barr argues that the network was merely covering claims from newsworthy individuals, rather than endorsing them.
“As the record shows, the hosts presented the claims as unproven allegations and didn’t say they were true,” Barr asserts. “As long as claims are presented only as allegations and not asserted to be true, legal responsibility for any defamatory content rests with those making the allegations, not the news outlet.”
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