Several similar lawsuits are teed up against those who have spread election lies. The plaintiffs range from a different voting technology company to Georgia election workers who were falsely accused of tampering with the vote count in that state.
Fox News' nearly $800 million settlement of a voting machine company's defamation lawsuit marks the first milestone in a larger legal strategy designed to combat the false claims and conspiracy theories about elections that have rippled through the United States for nearly three years.
Several similar lawsuits are teed up against those who have spread election lies, including another against Fox. The plaintiffs range from a different voting technology company to Georgia election workers who were falsely accused of tampering with the vote count in that state. The defendants include close advisers to former President Donald Trump and a conservative group that funded a film last year alleging widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
"I personally do not regard a libel suit to be a good mechanism to deal with the disinformation problem," said Jane Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. "I keep coming back to this fear that we're trying to put a square peg in a round hole here." Shortly after a Delaware jury was empaneled to hear the case Tuesday, Fox and Dominion agreed to settle the lawsuit for $787.5 million, which is more than half the profits Fox reported last year.
Kathy Boockvar, Pennsylvania's former top voting official, in an interview hours after the settlement, recalled crying during her deposition in the Dominion-Fox case when she recounted the death threats she received after the 2020 election. She said those threats spiked after Fox aired segments amplifying false accusations of mass fraud.
"For us, it was never really about Fox, per se. It was about telling the truth and the media telling the truth," Poulos told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Wednesday. "And I think that what was important for us, is for people to be held to account for when they recklessly and knowingly tell lies that have such devastating consequences.""There's a long way still to make my client right," Nelson said in an interview with The Associated Press.
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