Dominion Voting Systems has asked for a summary judgement in their defamation lawsuit against the liars/ charlatans/ coup curious at Fox "News," who knowingly lied about Dominion voting machines being part of a "stolen election" conspiracy. That's bad news for the propaganda network and its major misinformationists:
... Dominion’s case is so strong, in fact, that the new filing is a motion for summary judgment on liability in its $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News. (A summary judgment on liability would not settle the question of damages.)
Summary judgment involves one party in civil litigation asking a judge to rule based on evidence and material facts that a trial is not needed. It’s almost always the defendant asking for summary judgment. Here, the plaintiff, Dominion, is asking for summary judgment on the basis of the evidence it has assembled—despite the usual difficulty of winning a defamation suit at all. That is what you call confidence in your filing. And the filing backs it up with page after page of quotes from the likes of Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Rupert Murdoch, and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, showing that they knew the score. Maybe there were some true believers left at Fox, but they were not the majority. Fox News pushed lies about Dominion for its own cynical reasons.
“This filing argues a fire hose of direct evidence of knowing falsity,” RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, told The New York Times. “It gives a powerful preview of one of the best-supported claims of actual malice we have seen in any major-media case.”...
The Washington Post's Erik Wemple has summarized some of the nearly 200- page Dominion filing in a tweet thread (thread reader here), presenting the internal messages among Fox's trash "talent" showing they allowed the false and damaging narrative that Dominion machines were corrupted to air night after night following the November election, knowing the claims were bullshit. The main motivator, beyond fear of incurring the Malignant Loser's wrath, was to protect stock value and not to lose MAGA audience share to the likes of Newsmax and OAN, who eagerly promoted the Malignant Loser's lies. From Wemple:
The argument from Dominion -- bolstered by correspondence among the network's top people -- is that Fox News knew all too well that the stolen-election claims were a lie, yet they plowed ahead with programming indicating the opposite.
One thing that leaps out of the document is just how panicked were network officials about the viewers' disenchantment with the network's very early call of Arizona for Biden. [snip]
The minutiae disclosed in the Dominion filing are scandalous: They show just how incompatible is the hosts' candid chatter with the product they put on the airwaves -- and the reason for that gulf is ratings. Period.By filing its suit and plowing through discovery, Dominion has produced perhaps the most piercing look at the internal goings-on at Fox News in its quarter-century history. (our emphasis)
