Chapter Two in Fox News Legal Saga Over Election 2020 Coverage Could Be Tougher Than Chapter One

Instead of marking the end of Fox News’s legal troubles, its blockbuster settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday is just the close of chapter one. Chapter two could be even more entertaining to all the Fox critics who savored every email and text message from the news channel’s on-air personalities and senior managers released during the discovery phase of the Dominion case. By agreeing to pay Dominion more than $787 million for parroting President Trump and falsely accusing the company and others of being part of a conspiracy to rig the 2020 election, Fox sent a signal to another litigant lined up behind Dominion that it is willing to pay handsomely to avoid any more embarrassing disclosures about its coverage.Fox can afford to pay: The $787 million settlement, the largest in American history in a defamation case, is barely more than two quarters of profit for the entertainment behemoth, which in addition to Fox News and Fox Business owns the Fox broadcast network, Fox Sports, and a number of profitable local television stations. In the three months that ended December 31, 2022, Fox reported profits of $321 million on total revenue of $4.61 billion.The second election technology company to sue Fox News, Smartmatic, did so in 2021 for many of the same reasons that prompted Dominion’s litigation. Smartmatic wants $2.7 billion in damages from Fox News because its anchors and guests repeatedly claimed on air that its technology was created in Venezuela by strongman Hugo Chavez and imported to America as part of a “cyber Pearl Harbor” to disrupt the elections.Just days before the Dominion trial began, Fox News quietly settled another defamation case involving its post-election coverage with a Venezuelan businessman who the network accused of masterminding what one of the network’s anchors, Lou Dobbs, called the “election project.” Terms of settlement with Mahjed Khalil were not disclosed. A day after Smartmatic filed its lawsuit, which named Mr. Dobbs as a co-defendant, the network canceled his nightly show on Fox Business.Smartmatic, which makes electronic voting machines and election technology used in several countries around the world, had only one customer in the United States during the 2020 election — the county of Los Angeles. The outlandish accusations by Fox anchors, the company says, ended any hope that it would gain ground in the American market and led to death threats against its employees and management.In a statement released after the settlement was announced late Tuesday, Smartmatic sounded even more determined about its case than previously. “Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest,” a company spokesman said. “Smartmatic remains committed to clearing its name, recouping the significant damage done to the company, and holding Fox accountable for undermining democracy.”As it did in the Dominion case, Fox has tried to get the Smartmatic case thrown out, insisting that the allegations against it are “baseless” and amount to a “full blown assault on the First Amendment.” As it also did in the Dominion case, though, Fox has lost those appeals. In the most recent ruling, by an appeals court at New York, the court rejected Fox News’s effort to have the case dismissed and opened the door to adding its parent company, the Fox Corporation, as a defendant. No trial date has been set in the case, but Fox News said in a statement that they are ready and eager regardless of when it happens.“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial, likely in 2025,” the company said. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on its face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

Chapter Two in Fox News Legal Saga Over Election 2020 Coverage Could Be Tougher Than Chapter One

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