conspiracies by the ex-president and his allies including in the media. in its $1.6 billion defamation case pierces the hermetically sealed bubble that is fox news. the network that drives the conversation and conduct in the republican party and on the right like none other. it shows that hosts on fox news either peddled the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from trump or gave the platform for people to spread the big lie that the election was stolen from trump for one reason and one reason only, fear, terror really of losing viewers and tumbling stock prices and viewers migrating to more radical outlets. messages and emails obtained by dominion along with testimony from fox news employees and hosts reveals that it was well known and bantered about inside fox news that the vote fraud conspiracies were as rupert murdoch put it terrible stuff, damaging everybody. and that it was, quote, very hard to credibly claim foul. claim foul, they did and panic over viewers turnin
actual malice and the judge in this case in his order said, proof of actual malice calls a defendant s state of mind into question and does not readily lend itself to summary disposition. that s at the very beginning of the case before none of this discovery comes out. and so now that you ve had all of this discovery and you ve seen that they all knew it wasn t true, what s really important about the law is what dominion argues, it says, yet fox despite knowing the truth or at a minimum recklessly disregarding that truth fox spread and endorsed outlandish voter fraud claims about dominion even as it internally recognized the lies as shocking and reckless. it s so hard to defeat a first amend defense when claiming defamation yet this is a rare case where it is so obvious on its face that fox knew what it was putting on the air was false or it recklessly chose to put something on the air that was false. this never happens but why is fox defending this? normally you would see a settlement