What does the Dominion case mean?

Created
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 09:00
Updated
Wed, 08/03/2023 - 09:00
What are they hiding? A Feb. 16 filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation lawsuit in Delaware against Fox News has kicked up a media firestorm: Outlet after outlet described how internal email and text messages quoted in the document, a filing for summary judgment, showed that network honchos knew that former president Donald Trump’s election-theft claims were lies — and allowed them to air anyhow. Yet the filing is filled with frustrating dead ends, the result of the network’s aggressive effort to prevent disclosure of many of the internal communicationsthat came out of discovery in the case, Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News. The black passages in the document raise the questions: What is Fox News hiding? And will those passages ever be unredacted? As the Dominion filing makes clear, Fox News executives panicked in the weeks after the November 2020 presidential election. The network had called Arizona on election night for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a move regarded as treason by the network’s MAGA crowd, which declared viewers would flee to the competition, especiallyconservative cable news outlet Newsmax. So, Fox News tried playing both sides — a little conspiracy-mongering here, a little factual injection there. Anything to hang on to its ratings preeminence. One way the network competed with Newsmax was to host election-denying attorney Sidney Powell and her extravagant claims. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who appeared multiple times in the Dominion filing, apparently commented on the situation, though the public, for now, doesn’t have the goods: Impenetrable black expanses in the…