A month ago, I spoke to Paul Clement, the lawyer representing Fox News in the Dominion and Smartmatic lawsuits, and he sounded skeptical that one side or another would reach out for a settlement. “In a case where the stakes are this large, for the First Amendment but also just in terms of the financial stakes, there’s always a chance you can settle somewhere along the line, but I think from the Fox perspective, the principle here is incredibly important.”
Clement continued, “this isn’t going to be the last story where there are allegations that are newsworthy, and they’re newsworthy because the president’s making them, or a governor’s making them, or a presidential candidate is making them, and it is pretty obvious, given where we are right now, that when there are those newsworthy allegations or denials, Fox is going to report them differently from the way that they’re reported in a lot of the mainstream press.”
This morning, the trial was delayed for a day, and the Washington Post reports that the proceedings are on hold “to allow both parties to hold conversations about the possibility of a settlement, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.”
The summary judgment portion of the case went terribly for Fox News, as Delaware Superior Court judge Eric Davis rejected the network’s argument that statements at issue were opinion and thus protected by the First Amendment and not a basis for a defamation lawsuit. In an 81-page ruling, Davis laid out 19 examples where figures such as Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, Lou Dobbs, and others made statements on-air that asserted “facts and [were] therefore not protected under the opinion privilege.”
“The evidence does not support that [Fox News network] ‘conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting,” Judge Davis wrote. “Like in Cianci v. New Times Pub. Co., where the Second Circuit held that defendant’s failure to reveal facts and plaintiffs side of the story was not disinterested reporting, FNN’s failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not disinterested.”
A Dominion spokesman released a statement Saturday, “In the coming weeks, we will prove Fox spread lies causing enormous damage to Dominion. We look forward to trial.”