At the Washington Post, a deeply ironic story about how a judge is citing Tucker Carlson's period of voter fraud skepticism as evidence that the network knew there was malice involved in the other hosts who went in boots and all.
It’s
a pretty remarkable state of affairs when a judge is approvingly citing
Tucker Carlson’s journalistic rigor, but that’s precisely the situation
we find ourselves in now.
And rather ironically, that could be bad news for Fox News.
New York Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen has now ruled that voting-machine company Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and Rudolph W. Giuliani can proceed. The case involved numerous false and baseless claims made on Fox about voter fraud involving the company’s voting machines....
In
the course of laying out the legal requirements for Smartmatic to prove
its case, the judge noted that the company must prove Fox met the
standard of acting with “actual malice” — i.e. not merely promoting
false claims, but doing so with malice. And on that count, the judge
says the best evidence that it did is Carlson.
That’s because Carlson, unlike the others, applied significant actual skepticism to the claims — and broadcast it.
It’s
an episode many might have forgotten in the long and sordid run-up to
the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. But there was a time in
which none other than Carlson stepped forward to question the “stolen election” narrative
that had taken hold in the Trump movement and in certain corners of his
network. Carlson said on Nov. 19 that Powell’s claims were serious, but
he also (rightfully) noted that she had yet to substantiate them. He
said he had asked, over the course of a week, for the evidence and
offered her his platform, but that she had declined.
The episode alienated some Trump allies. But it also, in Cohen’s estimation, speaks to the possibility that Fox might meet the “actual malice” standard.
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