‘Staggering’: Pile of Experts Tell CNN That Fox News Is In ‘Real Jeopardy’ After Bombshell Filing — Including Famed Floyd Abrams

CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy gathered a raft of formidable experts to Riverdance on Fox’s grave over the bombshell Dominion filing — including famed First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams.

Damning comments made by Fox News hosts and executives in private in the aftermath of the election were revealed last Thursday in a new filing by Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News for defamation and seeking $1.6 billion in damages.

While the fallout has been covered by other media outlets and has included copious doomsaying by a spectrum of pundits (to include Mediaite Editor-in-Chief Aidan McLaughlin), Darcy assembled some serious heavy-hitters for Friday morning’s edition of his Reliable Sources newsletter.

Here’s a sampling of quotes from the murderer’s row of legal experts who are predicting deep doo-doo for CNN’s rival network:

• “It’s a major blow,” attorney Floyd Abrams of Pentagon Papers fame told me, adding that the “recent revelations certainly put Fox in a more precarious situation” in defending against the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.
• Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton Professor of First Amendment Law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion’s evidence as a “very strong” filing that “clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting.”
• The filing, (David Korzenik, an attorney who teaches First Amendment law and represents a number of media organizations) said, “certainly puts Fox in the actual malice crosshairs and puts them in real jeopardy.”

Floyd Abrams is the father of Mediaite founder and legal expert Dan Abrams.

Fox News has responded to the filing with a statement from a spokesperson.

“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech, which are fundamental rights afforded by the Constitution and protected by New York Times v. Sullivan,” a Fox News spokesperson said in a statement. “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!