You might have missed it, but the most revealing moment of the Dominion/Fox News case that’s been dominating the news cycle didn’t come during discovery. It didn’t come when court filings revealed CEO Suzanne Scott’s angry emails about subscriber losses or Tucker Carlson’s text messages about Donald Trump. It didn’t even come the moment Fox agreed to pony up an eye-watering $787 million to settle Dominion’s claim before going to trial.
No, the most revealing moment of the Dominion saga occurred Tuesday afternoon, when Dominion lawyer Davinda Brook thanked the assembled press for the role they had played in the company’s heist.
“Thank you, to all of you, for being with us on this journey,” Brook said to the crowd of reporters. “We appreciate what you’ve done to help us and to help expose what we were able to discover over the course of this process. So thank you and we’ll see you at the next one.”
Brook’s thanks were well-aimed. Every step of the Dominion lawsuit was a collaborative effort between lawyers and an army of press allies. Their objective: the destruction of a rival press outlet they hated, and the remaking of American defamation laws in order to do it.
The rest of the media went on a gloating spree over Fox’s misfortune.
This is a momentous evolution in the relationship between the Regime and the American press. It’s also a far cry from, say, the comeuppance Rolling Stone received for its bogus UVA Jackie story eight years ago. The “victim” of Fox’s alleged “defamatory” reporting wasn’t an innocent person, but a subsidiary corporation owned by a large venture capital firm. The amount of damages Fox News was facing, and the amount it consequently had to settle for, was cartoonishly out of proportion to any actual harm inflicted by Fox’s reporting. The scale of these damages, and those being sought in a similar lawsuit by fellow voting machine company Smartmatic, are not about remedying a harm. They are about putting Fox out of business.
And the rest of the press is cheering.
Believe it or not, this is a recent development. In 2009, when the Obama administration tried to squeeze Fox out of the pool of accepted news organizations, it
ran into stiff resistance from other press outlets:
Tension between the White House and Fox News continued to mount this week after broadcast bureau chiefs in Washington refused to go along with the Obama’s administration’s attempt to squeeze Fox News out of an interview.
Despite the administration’s pledge to play nice earlier this week, the White House tried to exclude Fox News – alone among the five White House “pool” networks – from interviewing executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg on Thursday.
After CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC balked at the plan Tuesday, ABC News’ Jake Tapper asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the appropriateness of the administration’s saying that Fox News, which he called “one of our sister organizations,” is “not a news organization.”
Those versions of CNN and network news are gone, and they didn’t even have to change personnel, because the old version of Jake Tapper is gone. A new press has arrived—one perfectly happy to collude with both government and the legal apparatus to grind down a designated enemy.
For the press, the Fox-Dominion saga was a bonanza, with zero concern about the ramifications of obliterating an entire outlet over its election reporting. In 2009, a young Brian Stelter reported skeptically on the Fox-Obama feud; last week, Vanity Fair hired him as a special correspondent just to cover the abortive trial. The New York Times covered the case like it was a second war in Ukraine.
One of the Times’ articles
lays bare how Dominion’s legal strategy was based not on America’s actual defamation law
per se, but on getting the press to collaborate in dragging down Fox.
The game plan revolved around getting damaging evidence out in public, Hootan Yaghoobzadeh of Staple Street Capital, which owns Dominion, said on CNBC today. That contributed heavily to what was a stacked deck against Fox News, with the broadcaster facing what one legal expert told The New York Times was “unquestionably the strongest defamation case we’ve ever seen against a major media company.”
[Archived Link]
The Dominion lawsuit was a collaborative effort between lawyers and an army of press allies that could soon come back to haunt them.
www.revolver.news
