One of the most closely watched U.S. defamation cases in decades is set to begin on Thursday as a Delaware court picks a jury to decide whether Fox News should pay Dominion Voting Systems $1.6 billion for spreading election-rigging falsehoods.
Reuters reports a critical task for jurors over the five-week trial will be deciding who was responsible for the cable network's decision to broadcast the claims despite internal doubts about their veracity. Dominion asserts that Fox's top brass approved of the coverage, but the network says the evidence of high-level involvement is threadbare.
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| Rupert Murdoch |
"The more complicit the whole organization is in perpetuating these known falsehoods, the more likely a jury would be to return a big dollar figure," said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor at the UNC School of Law.
Dominion alleges that Fox destroyed its business by knowingly airing false claims that its ballot counting machines were used to flip the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election against former President Donald Trump, a Republican who lost to Democrat Joe Biden. The trial has been widely viewed as a test of whether Fox's coverage crossed the line between ethical journalism and the heedless pursuit of ratings, as Dominion alleges and Fox denies.
The jury pool will be drawn from New Castle County, Delaware, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two-to-one, according to the state's Department of Elections. Fox is home to many conservative commentators who pulled for Trump.
Opening arguments are set to begin April 17.
Meanwhile, Robby Soave from The Hill TV talks in depth about the upcoming jury trial of the lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems has filed against Fox News.
Disclaimer: Donald Trump falsely claims that he won the 2020 election. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump 306-232 in the Electoral College and had a 4-point margin in the popular vote.
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