A person walks past the News Corp. and Fox News headquarters on April 19, 2023, in New York. New York City’s pension funds and the state of Oregon sued Fox Corporation on Tuesday, Sept. 12. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
New York City pension funds and the Oregon attorney general have joined forces to sue Fox News Corporation and allege in a new complaint that the right-wing media giant has damaged shareholder value by repeatedly disseminating false and allegedly defamatory information about the 2020 election, including claims of election rigging.
Filed in the Delaware Chancery Court, the joint lawsuit arrives as Fox only freshly settled a defamation case this April brought against it by Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine company at the center of former President Donald Trump’s false election fraud claims.
Fox News agreed to settle the case with Dominion for $787.5 million after the judge in the case issued a summary judgment that Fox’s claims about the machines being rigged were not only false but spread for the sake of the company’s profit motives. The ruling severely limited Fox News’ possible defenses at trial.
Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum excoriated the company’s board.
“The board of Fox Corporation took a massive risk in pursuing profits by perpetuating and peddling known falsehoods,” Rosenblum said in a statement Tuesday. “The directors’ choices exposed themselves and the company to liability and exposed their shareholders to significant risks.”
The New York pension fund co-plaintiff makes up five separate pension entities in that state. It represents, according to the New York Times, some $253 billion in worth spread over 800,000 current and retired workers.
A probe launched last year by the Oregon Department of Justice as well as the Oregon treasurer’s office did conclude that Fox Corporation managers harmed its investors by significantly opening them up to defamation charges through their slippery on-air statements about Dominion and the 2020 election.
“By pushing narratives that appealed to their audience regardless of the facts, Fox’s Board should have been especially sensitive to risks of defamation. Yet Fox’s business model is to promote false claims including that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich provided hacked emails to WikiLeaks, and continuing through false claims that election technology companies U.S. Dominion, Inc. and Smartmatic, USA Corp. rigged the 2020 presidential election,” Rosenblum said.
Brad Lander, the comptroller for New York City, told the Times that the “longstanding practice of allowing conspiracy theories that its executives and board know are false to be repeated over and over and over again, despite the very clear and present risk of defamation lawsuits” has continued without any attempt at reforms.
As of July, the New York pension funds held by Fox are just over 850,000 shares with an estimated value of $28 million.
Fox did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, another voting technology company, Smartmatic, has had some success in its defamation case against another right-wing outlet, Newsmax. Last month a Delaware judge denied the outlet’s attempt to keep out more than two dozen additional defamation allegations the company says it found in a recent hand-off of records during discovery, CNN reported,
Smartmatic is currently suing Fox for $2.7 billion, claiming its dissemination of claims that their machines were used to rig the election against Donald Trump was defamatory.
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