Judge to decide whether Fox News will face Smartmatic at trial : NPR

Accusations have a well-known effect:

Fox News broadcast the outrageous lie that an election software company rigged votes for Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Behind the scenes, Fox News’ controlling owners, executives, and biggest stars did not believe the baseless claims of President Trump and his allies. However, officials of the voting tech company received death threats. Its reputation and financial prospects were severely damaged.

The claims are included in legal filings at the center of a hearing scheduled in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday afternoon over whether the billion-dollar defamation lawsuit against Fox News should be allowed to proceed to a full jury trial.

The lawsuit is being brought by London-based voting technology firm Smartmatic, which played a limited role in the 2020 race but was, nevertheless, accused in the Fox show of snatching votes from Trump and giving them to Biden. Smartmatic is suing for $2.7 billion.

The reason these allegations sound so familiar is that the company’s claims resemble a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox News stars and their on-air guests also blamed that company for Trump’s defeat after they peddled baseless conspiracy theories about the election.

In both the Dominion and Smartmatic cases, Fox’s top hosts and executives desperately tried to appease the network’s pro-Trump audience. Viewers turned away from Fox in droves after it became the first major US network to predict a Biden victory in the key state of Arizona on election night in 2020. Trump attacked Fox and encouraged its fans to turn to right-wing alternatives like Newsmax and OANN instead.

In 2023, a Delaware Judge finds Fox defamed Dominion Before testing. On the eve of the trial – and founder Rupert Murdoch’s scheduled public testimony – Fox paid $787.5 million To resolve the matter. This amount is considered a record in American media litigation.

The network did not admit wrongdoing, but issued this statement: “We accept the court’s rulings that found certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

Neither Smartmatic nor Fox would comment for this story. Smartmatic sued Fox News in February 2021 before Dominion, but the Dominion case moved quickly through Delaware’s streamlined trial system. Smartmatic revealed the names of several co-defendants, including stars such as the late Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, as well as Trump legal advisers Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who were frequent guests.

In previous comments, Fox has pointed out the glaring differences between the two defamation cases: different jurisdictions, different judges and different plaintiffs.

Fox News said in a statement released through a spokesperson, “The evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were being severely affected long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers made any claims to Fox News and that Smartmatic greatly exaggerated its loss claims to generate headlines and stifle free speech.” “We are eager and ready to continue defending our freedom of the press.”

Like the Dominion case, Fox has argued that its hosts were engaging in legitimate coverage of newsworthy claims by newsworthy figures – the President and his legal advisers – and that those claims have not yet worked through various legal proceedings. The Trump campaign and its allies lost nearly every legal and procedural challenge they filed to the election results.

In his court filings, Fox has directed most of his legal energy toward disputing Smartmatic’s claims about the voting technology company’s financial health, prospects and losses. And the network’s legal filings have called into question the firm’s stated origins and its operations abroad.

In October, Federal prosecutors charged Smartmatic In a scheme to pay bribes of more than $1 million to a Philippine government official for contracts related to the 2016 national elections. Company officials denied the allegations and said the charges were “targeted, political and unjust”.

New York State Supreme Court Justice David B. Cohen rejected Fox’s request to put the case on hold until a full hearing on those criminal charges could take place.

Smartmatic was operating in just one jurisdiction in the US during the 2020 elections: Los Angeles County, a heavily Democratic state almost guaranteed to swing toward Biden. The company says it was on the verge of making big profits in the US and abroad after the election – but its business aspirations were dashed by the way Fox stars amplified wild and baseless claims from Trump associates.

Fox never retracted his claims. After Smartmatic threatened to sue, Fox aired an unusual segment featuring Eddie Perez, an outside voting technology and integrity expert. An off-camera producer interrogated Perez. Perez made allegations one after another about Smartmatic. Fox aired it in a show hosted by Bartiromo, Dobbs and Pirro.

Pérez told NPR that he did not consider the segment an improvement, but said he was happy to provide accurate information to Fox viewers because it had aired so often that he considered it election disinformation.

Evidence presented in court filings shows that, inside Fox, some people believed the baseless claims made on air. According to testimony and exchanges presented in the public record, senior Fox executives and even its stars made it clear privately that they knew Trump had lost. The filing also reflects the way Fox stars saw their interests as aligning with the interests of the Republican Party under Trump, even when they didn’t always agree with what he was saying.

According to the legal filing, host Jesse Waters messaged Fox News comic host Greg Gutfeld, “Think how incredible our ratings would be if Fox fully got involved in Stop the Steal.” Waters later testified under oath that he never found such claims credible.

In court documents, Pirro lobbied then-Republican National Committee chairperson Ronna McDaniel in the weeks before the election to purchase copies of her book in bulk, as the RNC had done for Fox’s Sean Hannity.

According to court records, Pirro sent the message, “I’m the number 1 show watched on all news cables all weekend.” “I work very hard for the president and the party.” McDaniel objected. (The exchange was first reported Guardian,

Once Trump refused to accept the election results, Pirro – a former prosecutor – was among those who repeatedly escalated false claims of fraud. He later testified that he did not believe Trump was cheated of victory. Pirro is now the US Attorney for the District of Columbia.

“Fox executives and its personalities have repeatedly lied to their viewers,” a spokesperson for Smartmatic said in a statement to NPR earlier this fall. “They knew what they were saying was lies when they willingly destroyed Smartmatic’s reputation, even though when under oath they admitted they knew better the whole time.”

According to its court filing, Smartmatic’s legal teams also disclosed a Fox News workplace survey in the summer of 2020 — when Trump ran for re-election — in which several employees complained about the network’s bias.

A Fox staffer wrote, “We need to recalibrate the standards of conduct for our (on-air) talent as well as the veracity of our reporting.” “It often feels like our editorial approach and especially our on-air talent has changed to work for the current administration and will say anything that will be flattering to them. There seems to be a fear that we might offend the President or his most ardent supporters, and have abandoned all pretense of truthful reporting; often allowing guests to lie without challenge, or call out false information themselves, to the detriment of our reputation.”

Other colleagues complained about cheerleading by Fox personalities and objected to several on-air stars “secretly advising” the President.

In court documents, Fox’s lawyers described the comments as incomplete and said they represented a select number of negative comments. Fox said it was named a “great place to work” by the organization that conducts workplace surveys.

The day after Smartmatic sued Fox, Fox Business Network canceled Dobbs’ show. Dobbs was never seen on Fox airwaves again. He died in July 2024.

Fox has a record of playing hardball but ultimately settling cases close to trial, as he did – even though very late in the game – in the Dominion case. (Murdoch had done the same before Agreement with Prince Harry and a prominent British politician in a case involving their UK newspapers in January.) The company, so far, has publicly maintained a similar stance on the matter, believing that Smartmatic’s own shortcomings will help prevent the need for a similar outcome.