The Dominion v. Fox News Trial Will Not Be Televised: "It's a Gift to Fox News"

[Nevilledog]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/fox-dominion-trial-televised

No paywall
https://archive.is/T7jS5

The trial for Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News, which legal experts are calling the most consequential defamation lawsuit in decades, is set to start Monday. The verdict will decide whether Fox News will be held accountable for spreading 2020 election lies—conspiracies that were fundamental to Donald Trump’s Big Lie. It could be the only time the likes of Fox Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch will be forced to answer for the outlet’s democracy-damaging coverage in a public setting. Some of the network’s top stars, like Tucker Carlson, are also expected to take the stand. It’s worth watching live. Except, unless you’ve made the trip to Wilmington, Delaware, and managed to get a seat in the courtroom, you can’t.

The trial will not be televised. The only way Americans will be able to know what’s going on inside the courtroom—outside of getting one of the roughly 200 seats available in the courtroom—will be by calling into an audio line provided by the court. “It’s better than nothing, but it’s not much better,” says Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin. Grueskin recalls his experience listening to the audio line for Sarah Palin’s defamation case against The New York Times last year. “You can’t tell who’s talking half the time, especially when the lawyers start arguing a point, or you come into the testimony part way through,” he said.

Not only will the trial not be televised, the court has banned any recording or rebroadcasting of the audio feed—hampering outlets’ abilities to playback the proceedings on the radio or TV. A group of media outlets, including the Times, CBS, ABC, NBC, and ProPublica, wrote to Judge Eric Davis seeking to record the audio stream of the trial, and to use excerpts of those recordings in their news programming. But Davis denied that request Thursday during a pretrial hearing, as the Associated Press reported. He said he’d “gone as far as I can go with response to access,” and, signaling the Delaware Superior court’s traditionally restrictive rules over public access, that the outlets were “getting the most access of any media in a Superior Court case in Delaware.” Fox’s lawyers filed an opposition brief to the media outlets’ letter, which, in a statement to Vanity Fair, Fox called “an 11th hour request that risks compromising the integrity of the trial proceedings.” Dominion Voting Systems declined to comment.

“It’s a gift to Fox News that this is not going to be broadcast live, because it spares them from the nightmarish scenario of the visual of some of their leading anchors being cross-examined and confronted with their own texts, which are contrary to what they’ve said on air,” former federal prosecutor and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig tells me. In the lead up to the trial, internal communications—obtained through the discovery process—have spilled out into the public, offering a damning look at Fox executives and stars dismissing unfounded claims and unreliable Trumpworld sources behind closed doors. “Sidney Powell is lying,” Carlson wrote in one private message, of the conspiracy-peddling Trump lawyer whom Fox repeatedly booked during the post-election period. Fox News’s attorneys appear aware of the power and stakes of live testimonies; they have actively tried to keep Rupert Murdoch off the stand, citing hours of deposition he already gave.

*snip*


This is just wrong.

[intrepidity]

1. WTF why???

If ever a court proceeding NEEDED to be public, this is the one!

Outrageous!

[brooklynite]

5. Because States have existing laws about broadcasting trials...

...and they don't change because one particular trial is "really important".

[intrepidity]

7. Ok thanks, I didn't know this nt

[Midnight Writer]

2. FOX can spread their lies all they want, but watching the exposure of their lies is forbidden.

I can live with audio only, but forbidding media outlets from rebroadcasting?

How can you put something out there publicly, and forbid the media from using it?

[patricia92243]

3. The majority of Fox News viewers do not even know it is happening.

[Initech]

6. Because Fox News would rather pick a fight with Bud Light over a damn commercial.

[blogslug]

4. Here is that call-in number

[phone]

From this link: https://courts.delaware.gov/superior/pdf/PublicNoticeRegardingAccessToDocumentsAndDocket.pdf

Court begins Monday, April 17th at 9:00AM EST

per this link: https://courts.delaware.gov/forms/download.aspx?id=185428

[Beachnutt]

8. I did a screenshot of this the other day