https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/mar/26/fox-news-sued-dominion-2020-election-voting-fraud-lies
The North American voting machine company Dominion has hit Fox News
with a $1.6bn defamation lawsuit, accusing the network of spreading
election fraud lies in a misguided effort to stop an exodus of enraged
viewers after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The
complaint accuses some of Fox’s biggest personalities Maria Bartiromo,
Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro “and their chosen
guests” of spreading “defamatory falsehoods” about Dominion.
Fox
supercharged false conspiracy theories about Dominion, the lawsuit
says, by plucking the lies from relatively obscure corners of the
far-right internet and broadcasting them to tens of millions of viewers
on television and online.
“Fox took a small
flame and turned it into a forest fire,” the complaint says. “As the
dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the
election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise
would never have achieved.”
Fox vowed to fight
the case in a statement on Friday morning: “Fox News Media is proud of
our 2020 election coverage, which stands in the highest tradition of
American journalism, and will vigorously defend against this baseless
lawsuit in court.”