A judge in a court in the eastern state of Delaware ruled in a decision made public and seen by AFP that the TV station was not justified in contesting a civil defamation lawsuit filed by an electronic voting machine company.
Dominion Voting Systems is seeking $1.6 billion in damages and will therefore go to trial before a civil jury, starting April 17, in a Delaware court.
This complaint was filed in March 2021 and its contents have been leaked in dribs and drabs.
Documents from this civil lawsuit -- text messages, emails exchanged between executives of Fox News and News Corp. -- revealed that in November 2020, behind the scenes and offices of the network's executives, up to its owner Rupert Murdoch, there was little belief in Trumpist lies of a presidential election "stolen" by Joe Biden, including through electronic voting.
But these doubts were expressed only in private, while these theories flourished on the air, on the sets of the stars of the channel.
The voting machine company Dominion believes it has been defamed by Fox News because the channel had claimed that its devices had been used to falsify the results of the November 2020 presidential election in several places in the United States.
In his order, Delaware Magistrate Eric Davis said it was "crystal clear that no claim about Dominion in the 2020 election is true."
Fox News responded again Friday that it was only reporting on air the allegations of former Republican President Trump (2017-2021) and again invoked "the protections of the First Amendment (of the US Constitution) on the absolute right of the media to cover the news (...) and freedom of expression and of the press."
© 2023 AFP