Fox News Opposition Brief Takes Aim At Dominion For ‘Cherry-Picking Quotes’ to Grab Headlines
AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
Fox News’s brief in opposition to Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit, in which the network sought to knock down the election tech company’s allegations, was unsealed Monday.
The Fox News brief became public at the same time that new court documents from Dominion, detailing testimony from Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch taken last month, also became public.
The voting technology company is suing Fox News, alleging the network knowingly aired election lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election — falsely implicating Dominion.
“Executives at all levels of Fox — both (Fox News Network) and (Fox Corporation) — knowingly opened Fox’s airwaves to false conspiracy theories about Dominion,” Dominion wrote in the unsealed filing Monday. A five-week trial is currently scheduled to begin on April 17.
Reuters, which has followed the trial closely, explained that “Dominion has argued that internal communications and depositions by Fox personnel prove the network knowingly spread falsehoods about Trump’s loss in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in order to bolster its ratings. Fox has argued that its coverage of claims by Trump’s lawyers were inherently newsworthy and protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”
The newly unsealed brief, Fox News took aim at Dominion, declaring, “Dominion’s summary judgment motion rests on an accounting of the facts that has no basis in the record, no bearing on this case, or both. Dominion spends much of its introduction and facts section mischaracterizing the record and cherry-picking quotes that it strips of key context. And it spills considerable ink on facts that are utterly irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
Fox News has argued in previous statements that the voting technology company’s lawsuit “has always been more about what will generate headlines than what can withstand legal and factual scrutiny as illustrated by them now being forced to slash their fanciful damages demand by more than half a billion dollars after their own expert debunked its implausible claims.”
The brief also argued that Fox News and the network’s hosts covered the election conspiracies coming from then-President Donald Trump, both because a president’s claims are newsworthy and electronic voting machines had raised concerns before:
Dominion ignores evidence demonstrating that the hosts had good reasons to keep an open mind about the President’s claims that Dominion machines were hacked or facilitated fraud. After all, the media (including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico), politicians from both political parties (including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and Stacey Abrams), computer scientists, and election security experts all expressed concerns about voting machines generally and Dominion specifically in the lead up to the election.
The brief also took aim at the size of the damages Dominion is seeking and argued the company has never been worth anywhere near $1.6 billion.
A Dominion spokesperson replied to the Fox News brief, saying, “The damages claim remains. As Fox well knows, our damages exceed $1.6B.”
