As my mother always said, what you say can always come back to bite you in the ass. And no other entity in the world is more unaware of mom’s adage than Fox News—a media outlet without an ounce of thought regarding responsible reporting or credible fact-checking. It’s all about the show, folks.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and Fox favorites such as Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, and others are being deposed by attorneys representing Dominion Voting Systems in its behemoth $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, The New York Times reports.
Lou Dobbs is set to be questioned Tuesday, Hannity on Wednesday, and Carlson is scheduled for Friday, according to the Times. Jeanine Pirro, Steve Doocy, and several Fox News producers have already been deposed. But several anonymous sources told the outlet that it’s likely Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, Fox News president Jay Wallace, and even Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch could all be questioned soon.
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Sources familiar with the case told the Times since neither side has offered a settlement in the case, it looks as if the suit will head to trial early next year.
The Dominion suit filed in March 2021 alleges that Fox News “gave life to a manufactured storyline about election fraud that cast a then-little-known voting machine company called Dominion as the villain.”
The suit alleges that after the 2020 presidential election, viewers began moving away from Fox News and to other right-wing outlets that endorsed former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy of a stolen election, so in an effort to win back viewers, Fox News began “intentionally and falsely blaming Dominion” for Trump’s loss.
“These outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions,” the suit reads, alleged that Dominion rigged the election, manipulated vote counts, claimed that Dominion was founded in Venezuela to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chávez, and that the company paid “kickbacks to government officials who used the machines” in the 2020 election.
Fox News is, of course, using the First Amendment in an attempt to protect itself. A spokesperson told the Times the case is a “fruitless fishing expedition” and added that the network is “confident we will prevail as freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected.”
According to Deadline, in a $2.7 billion claim last year, Smartmatic sued Fox News, Dobbs, Pirro, and Maria Bartiromo, and their guests Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. And attorneys for Smartmatic recently subpoenaed former Attorney General William Barr and Ronna McDaniel, a Republican National Committee chairwoman, demanding documents related to the claim.