Dominion v. Fox at last

The trial in the defamation lawsuit that pits Dominion Voting Systems (plaintiff) against Fox News (defendant) has begun. Or at least, late on Sunday the presiding Judge issued an order saying that it would begin today -- as I write, I'm imagining his order has been followed by the time you read this.

Quick review: very soon after the election in November 2020, Trump partisans began claiming that Dominion-manufactured machines had been switching votes to Biden.

Certain Fox News hosts, Jeanine Pirro prominent among them, after reading about it in some of the wilder corners of the internet, began spouting this view on the air. Trumpette attorney Sidney Powell helped spread this idea.

By mid-November, a panicked Fox News producer circulated a memo that Judge Jeanine should be yanked off the air, precisely in order to shield the company from liability. That email will in due course be part of the plaintiffs' case. For Fox News did not yank her and she continued to promote the theory. The relevant executives knew better and let this proceed anyway.

In recent days the pre-trial maneuvering about this matter took a strange turn when lawyers for Dominion played for Judge Eric David (Delaware Superior Court) a tape they had obtained from Abby Grossberg, a former Fox producer and likely an important witness. The tape had Rudy Giuliani, a central figure in Trumpworld at the time, speaking to Fox employees.

On the tape, one hears Giuliani speaking in disparaging terms about the supposed evidence for the view that Dominion machines were switching votes to Biden from Trump. One popular claim at the moment was that Rep. Nancy Pelosi had a financial interest in Dominion. Giuliani, asked about it, said that he had no evidence of that. This struck Judge David as important evidence as to Fox's "actual malice" in saying things that it knew had no basis in fact. He saw it as evidence of a sort that Fox should have disclosed earlier, but wrongly withheld. Judge David was reportedly furious.

So: why did Grossberg produce it? Well, her account is that she was playing ball on the Fox team, going along with putting various factual claims on air without checking. She made the decision to do this so that she could keep her job and keep paying her bills, as she puts it. Short term, she did keep getting the paychecks for a time.

But such plans do run out of gas. Grossberg got fired in due course anyway. (Apparently, thoughtcrime. She played ball but with mental reservations that became obvious up the corporate food chain.) Now that she has been fired, she has no job to lose and she has brought various materials, not limited to the tape, to the attention of Dominion's attorneys.

This could all really be a disaster for Fox. Even beyond the billion dollars or so that Dominion demands as damages.

A Story About Coleridge

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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