Fox’s False Election Claims to be Put on Trial: Jury Seated & Ready to Hear Case

A court trial is beginning to decide if a tech company should receive $1.6 billion due to Fox News incorrectly claiming the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. The judge gave the sides 1 extra day to try and reach an agreement before the jury selection.

A company called Dominion Voting Systems based in Denver is trying to prove that Fox TV was wrong when it claimed there was cheating during the elections. The court case has been dragging on for a while because Fox didn’t provide any proof, and Fox’s lawyers have problems too. It has also just been revealed that the people involved with Fox have another job – working for someone named Murdoch.

A judge named Eric Davis gave an order for a short break in the dispute between two companies. He also asked them to try and work together to find a solution, which was shared by someone close to Fox who wasn’t allowed to speak publicly about the case.

A court case is going to look into the rules that news outlets in the USA have followed for nearly 60 years. It’ll show us what was happening behind the scenes at Fox News after Joe Biden won against Donald Trump in the 2020 election and will explain how false information started spreading widely when Biden won.

Fox News stars like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity as well as the person who founded Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, might have to give testimony during a 6-week trial. It hasn’t been decided yet if anyone has to speak on Tuesday.

Dominion says that Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp., are badmouthing them and scaring their employees by lying about Dominion doing something wrong in the presidential election to make it appear that Donald Trump lost.

After the election happened, people on Fox News began telling stories about a company called “Dominion” who allegedly took away votes from Donald Trump and gave them to Joe Biden. Even though many of the hosts and workers at Fox News weren’t sure if these stories were true, they let people tell them anyways.

Dominion’s lawyers allege that Fox was promoting and broadcasting untrue information about the US election, which they say is one of the worst lies told in the country. They provide proof that Fox promoted these falsehoods even though they knew they weren’t true to get more viewers. In contrast, Fox claims they were simply reporting on President Trump trying to challenge the election results and merely shared the opinion of his people.

Fox News said in a statement last week that Dominion’s lawsuit is something similar to a mission where they are trying to get money, but it would end up costing us our right to freedom of speech. Fox also pointed out that sometimes their hosts mentioned needing evidence to support the accusations they made against Dominion and Dominion denies all of those claims.

Government officials, experts, and even President Trump’s lawyers looked at the election results in the battleground states but couldn’t find any proofs that fraud had occurred or that anything wrong had happened with people’s votes. On top of that, many courts which included judges chosen by Trump himself declared that all the claims about Dominion Voting Machines being false were very clearly untrue.

The jury has to answer an important question: Did Fox News know that what they were saying was false or did they simply not care if it was true? This special type of legal test, which comes from a Supreme Court case in 1964, is called “actual malice”.

Dominion has shown text and emails from Fox where they laughed at the idea of any votes being manipulated. A Fox Corp. executive even said it was “extremely crazy”!

Carlson, who is the biggest star at Fox News Channel, doesn’t like Donald Trump. The lawsuit shows that in text conversations Carlson said he “hates him passionately” and wants to be able to ignore talking about Trump in their broadcasts most nights.

The founder and chairman of Fox News (called Murdoch) thought what Donald Trump’s lawyers said during a news conference was “really crazy”. He also emailed the CEO of Fox News (called Suzanne Scott) to say that what was being said could be bad for them. Yet even after the voting had already happened, Fox continued speaking about the supposed ‘conspiracy’.

Murdoch, in a case against Fox, said that the 2020 presidential election was fair but some of its hosts talked about false claims related to it. According to Fox, Dominion focused just on some private messages and broadcast transcripts of their players, ignoring other comments which were better for them. Also, Fox thinks Dominion is overstating how much business they lost due to this situation.

Fox found itself in trouble with the judge as the trial was coming close. Last week, Davis scolded Fox for falsely showing some information and not revealing other things about the case on time. On Friday, a lawyer from Fox wrote a letter to apologize to the judge as they had misreported something about Murdoch’s position at Fox news.

Big Big News got some help from several private organizations for covering elections and democracy news topics. The Associated Press (AP) is responsible for everything that’s written about it.