Fox News filed a motion on Tuesday to dismiss a $1.6 billion lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems.
The cable news giant called the lawsuit an effort to “stifle the media’s free-speech right to inform the public” in a statement. The motion filing follows Fox News’s February motion to dismiss a similar lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting technology firm.
“There are two sides to every story,” attorneys Chip Babcock and Scott Keller said jointly. “The press must remain free to cover both sides, or there will be a free press no more. The freedoms of speech and press would be illusory if the prevailing party could obtain billions of dollars from the press because it provided a forum for the losing side.”
FOX MOVES TO DISMISS $2.7B SMARTMATIC LAWSUIT
Dominion Voting Systems accused the network of selling “a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.”
Fox News says the company failed to identify “any actionable defamation,” invoking its freedoms of speech and press in its statement.
“The First Amendment and New York law independently protect media reporting and commentary on newsworthy allegations, and allegations from the sitting President of the United States and his legal team are inherently newsworthy,” Fox News added. “Well-established doctrine protects the media’s ability to report and comment specifically on government proceedings such as election recounts, official investigations, and civil litigation—all of which were pending during the election.”
In response to the filing, Dominion said it would not back down.
“Dominion strongly supports free speech, but defamation for commercial gain is clearly not protected, and we intend to hold FOX accountable for its reckless disregard for the truth,” the company said in a Wednesday statement to the Washington Examiner. “This case will strengthen the First Amendment, not weaken it.”
Dominion and Smartmatic were both the targets of allegations claiming they helped flip votes cast for former President Donald Trump to now-President Joe Biden. Rudy Giuliani told Fox Business host Lou Dobbs in November that Dominion was owned by Smartmatic, which he said was founded to “fix elections.” Sidney Powell, a lawyer who worked on behalf of Trump, claimed in a November appearance on Dobbs’s show that Dominion was founded in Venezuela to “produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez.”
Dominion has denied the claims and filed lawsuits against Giuliani and Powell for $1.3 billion each. Powell filed a motion to dismiss the suit on the grounds that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements [at issue] were truly statements of fact.”
In February, Fox News filed a motion to dismiss a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic on similar grounds to those outlined in the current motion. Hosts Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, and Maria Bartiromo were all named in the suit.
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Dobbs’s show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, was canceled in February after the Smartmatic lawsuit was filed.
“As we said in October, Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate post-election, including on Fox Business,” Fox News told the Washington Examiner at the time. “This is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”
