Here is the crux to the defamation suit against Fox News by voting machines company Dominion, as relayed Wednesday by Washington Post liberal Greg Sargent: “On the air, some of those [Fox News] personalities kept doling out what they privately admitted were lies.”
The idea is that Fox News people were knowingly telling their audiences lies that made Dominion, which administers software that tabulated election votes, look bad.
That claim by Dominion, gleefully parroted by Sargent and others in the media, is so far not born out by the publicly available facts. That is to say, it’s a lie.
Interest in the defamation lawsuit among Fox critics (i.e., The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the rest) revived this week with another round of Dominion disclosures to the public containing depositions and private text communications among Fox executives, news reporters, and primetime hosts.
What they show is: Fox primetime hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham were aggravated with colleagues on the news side for eagerly calling the election for Biden and Trump associates for eagerly doubting the results; Fox executives fretting about the fallout of the 2020 election, which was detrimental to ratings; and Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch musing to executives about Donald Trump’s post-election grievances and what they would mean for the company.
It’s all of great interest to Fox competitors, who are rationally kicking up as much dirt as possible on the controversy in order to take the network down a peg. That’s
