CNN Media Analyst ‘Worried’ Fox News Loss in Dominion Case Will Hurt Journalism
Axios reporter and CNN media analyst Sara Fischer joined CNN This Morning on Wednesday to discuss the latest bombshell revelations in the Fox News defamation lawsuit.
Dominion Voting Systems is suing Fox for $1.6 billion, alleging that the right-of-center network knowingly spread false claims regarding voter fraud about the company in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
On Tuesday, the judge overseeing the suit admonished Fox News’s lawyers for a last-minute disclosure that Rupert Murdoch is also an officer at Fox News, not just the chairman of Fox Corp – Fox News’s parent company.
Fisher explained the impact of the disclosure and the judge’s reaction. “So Dominion’s lawyers were arguing, look, it matters what role Rupert Murdoch plays in Fox News, not just Fox Corp., which is the parent company to Fox News,” Fischer began, adding:
And what the judge was basically saying was, yes, if he’s an officer of Fox News, that could potentially give you license to explore more. And so one of the things that’s being delegated now or debated right now is whether or not Rupert Murdoch is going to be subpoenaed by Dominion in front of this jury to testify if he does. It would potentially be explosive.
“The malice bar is high, to prove malice, I mean, you have to show, what they’ve already sort of overcome part of the hurdle of doing this. But now they have to show intent and malice,” added Poppy Harlow.
“It’s very high,” replied Fischer before offering a word of warning if Fox were to win the lawsuit:
And I will say there’s a part of me as a journalist that’s a little bit worried about this case, because if Fox is to lose, essentially the precedent that is being set is that people who are powerful, that want to sue news organizations, you can, you know the bar gets lowered a little bit for to an extent if Fox loses this case.
And so the thing that I’m watching is even let’s say if Dominion wins, do they win for $1.6 billion? If they don’t, to me, it suggests that that bar is not as low as it could be if they lost it all.
“What the judge did, saying that that should ease everyone’s concerns a little bit is that there is no truth. Fox can’t go into this saying that there was truth to what happened to Dominion, that we’ve he’s already taken off the table. None of it was true,” replied Don Lemon.
“Let’s go back to that five weeks that I was talking about before a trial like that. You’re going to have a lot of things that get litigated. One of the decisions that he made, to your point Don, last month was that this argument that Fox was making, which was that there’s news value in bringing these claims up on his air, cannot be litigated. It is not applicable. It is false,” Fischer added, recapping some prior rulings from Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis.
Watch the full clip above via CNN.
