Dominion, a maker of voting machines used in many countries, has filed a defamation lawsuit in the United States against the company that owns Fox News. Rupert Murdoch faces a six-week trial on April 17 where Dominion’s lawyers seek compensation of $1.6 billion. Murdoch is 92 years old and this summer he will marry, for the fifth time, now a 66-year-old widow. Only his son Lachlan is still in business. The rest have abandoned it. And his shareholders have refused to merge News Corp with Fox because of television’s poor reputation. The Succession series family falls short next to the Murdoch clan.
In the 2020 presidential elections, Trump and his supporters accused Dominion of having rigged this voting system. An unproven accusation that was soon joined by some of the most populist Fox News journalists such as Carlson, Bartiromo, Dobbs and Hannity.
The lawsuit includes evidence of how this accusation was orchestrated in favor of Trump: from calls and telephone instructions from Murdoch to slogans from the directors of the television network, passing emails where the journalists involved in that smear campaign questioned the veracity of the facts, although for months, knowing that they were spreading unfounded rumors that they themselves did not believe, they never stopped publishing them.
In one of those internal messages, Carlson acknowledges that they are “playing with real fire.” And Murdoch, who feared reprisals from Trump, warned people about him that “we are playing it.” The dilemma was that Fox’s ratings had been plummeting since election night when they were the first network to announce Trump’s defeat. That angered his followers. For Fox News, that rejection was a great danger, which is why spreading the hoaxes about Dominion on a massive scale was a desperate attempt to win back viewers who were turning to other televisions.
In the United States, the “First Amendment” to the Constitution guarantees almost absolute freedom of the press, although in defamation cases it must be proven that journalists act “without malice”, that is, without intent to insult.
Normally these two conditions are difficult to demonstrate and US jurisprudence is very restrictive when it comes to accepting this type of claim. It is understood that “press freedom” is a superior good, that informers must be protected, and that the powerful should not condition journalists.
However, Dominion seems to have everything in its favor to win the trial: no state has been able to prove that there was an electoral “rigging†or that the machines were rigged; Trump and his lawyers did not win any lawsuit either, and even his Justice Minister refused to take action against Dominion because he did not see any criminal indications and, finally, because the directors and journalists of Fox were exposed when in their internal communications they recognized that all that it was a setup to please Trump and his millions of fanatical viewers disappointed by the defeat of the Republican leader. And that now they are trying to reconquer by tearing their hair out over Trump’s accusation after the silence pact with Stormy Daniels.
In late March, Fox’s lawyers went to the Delaware Supreme Court and sought to block the case. For two days they tried to convince the judge that the lawsuit was unfair, biased and without foundation. However, the evidence provided by Dominion was joined by the last-minute testimony of Abby Grossberg, a producer of those programs, who denounced pressure from the Fox legal team so that she would not reveal “privileged information” that she knew from her position. Abby was threatened with dismissal for breaching these confidentiality rules, but she appeared before Judge Eric Davis and “sang” everything she knew, she had seen and heard in the buildup to those shows. The lawyers’ advice had been for her to answer “I don’t know†to as many questions as possible. Fox just fired her from her.
Fox’s own media columnist, Howard Kurtz, has acknowledged that he was banned from talking about the case on his show. Silence imposed on all its journalists in the chain.
Whatever the outcome of the case, Murdoch is reliving the ordeal he suffered a few years ago when “eavesdropping” ended with the closure of the News of the World, the largest-circulation Sunday newspaper in Great Britain, and the payment of large fines to victims of that scandal.
The case also resonates in Spain because, in recent years, the “state sewers” have had the consent and complicity of newspapers and journalists who have disseminated false news based on pre-fabricated documents; lawsuits that have been dismissed alleging that the journalists limited themselves to “communicating†this information.
One more reason to claim that this profession belongs to authentic “journalists” and not to “communicators” with impunity. The former, to earn this professional title, are required to verify their sources and “act without malice.” Do not say that it “rains” without first going out and checking that it is pouring.
