Africa-Press – Lesotho. For weeks and months Fox News star anchors peddled former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie, namely that he only lost the 2020 elections because of scurrilous allegations that they were rigged, in particular through Dominion Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Smartmatic software magically flipping votes against him, an unprecedented claim dismissed in more than 50 court cases as unsupported by any evidence.
Both Dominion and Smartmatic had filed civil suits for immense reputational damage due to clear and malicious “journalism” of Fox, to the tune of $ 1.7 billion and $ 2.7 billion, both unprecedented by their scale in the history of civil defamation by unscrupulous media, passing unscrupulous fabrications as news to a Trump-favourable and gullible public.
Those two companies provided counter fact sheets to Fox regularly which were ignored, and the most prominent star anchors of Rupert Murdoch’s influential cable network, Fox News, continued their wild propagandas, knowing fully well those narratives to be lies spewed by Trump and his “nut job” allied lawyers that would ultimately lead to the 6th of January riots in Washington DC by fired-up Trump supporters.
Both Dominion and Smartmatic had filed civil suits for immense reputational damage due to clear and malicious “journalism” of Fox, to the tune of $ 1.7 billion and $ 2.7 billion, both unprecedented by their scale in the history of civil defamation by unscrupulous media, passing unscrupulous fabrications as news to a Trump-favourable and gullible public.
The Dominion case came to court this week and Fox Corp blinked, caving in to a massive $ 787 million cash compensation to the aggrieved company to prevent the humiliation of the case being heard publicly. There may be others made accountable and the even heavier Smartmatic demand for financial compensation is yet to be heard.
It is unlikely that Fox Corp will be bankrupted by either or both settlements, historic in scale, and Fox will now be in damage control exercises, but it does send a strong signal that lies and fabricated stories that are damaging to third parties can have immense financial consequences in a setup where the Judiciary is still credibly important as the third independent pillar of democracy.
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