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    Much of Smartmatic Case Against Fox News Can Proceed, Judge Rules

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    The $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by the election technology company Smartmatic can move forward, a New York judge ruled on Tuesday. But the judge tossed out Smartmatic’s defamation claims against the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and a network guest, Sidney Powell.Smartmatic sued Rupert Murdoch’s cable news networks last year, along with several Fox hosts and guests. The lawsuit accused them of damaging the company by promoting a false narrative about the 2020 election: that Smartmatic and other voting systems companies tried to rig the race against President Donald J. Trump. Smartmatic later expanded its legal battle against disinformation to the right-wing media outlets Newsmax and One America News Network.On Tuesday, Justice David B. Cohen of State Supreme Court in Manhattan said in a 61-page ruling that, “at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth.”He added, “At this nascent stage of the litigation, this court finds that plaintiffs have pleaded facts sufficient to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice.”He also declined to dismiss Smartmatic claims against Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business star, and Lou Dobbs, whose Fox Business show was a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s defeat. Fox canceled Mr. Dobbs’s program last year, one day after Smartmatic sued.Citing a legal technicality, Justice Cohen dismissed most of Smartmatic’s defamation claims against Rudolph W. Giuliani, who, appearing on Fox News as a legal representative for Mr. Trump, said the technology company had “tried-and-true methods for fixing elections,” among other false assertions. Even so, Justice Cohen said there was “substantial” evidence that Mr. Giuliani “acted with actual malice insofar as he evinced a reckless disregard for the truth” and ruled that Smartmatic could try again. The judge allowed another part of Smartmatic’s defamation case against Mr. Giuliani to go forward.Fox News vowed a swift appeal.“While we are gratified that Judge Cohen dismissed Smartmatic’s claims against Jeanine Pirro at this early stage, we still plan to appeal the ruling immediately,” the network said in a statement. The network added that it would “continue to litigate these baseless claims by filing a counterclaim for fees and costs” under New York’s anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) statute, which is meant to quickly set aside lawsuits that may be intended to chill free speech.Fox News said it would do so “to prevent the full-blown assault on the First Amendment which stands in stark contrast to the highest tradition of American journalism.”In dismissing the claim against Ms. Pirro, Justice Cohen said that while she had asserted on her show that Democrats “stole votes,” she had not specifically blamed Smartmatic’s software.A spokesman for Smartmatic did not reply to a request for comment.Fox News is also battling a related $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused the channel of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business. A Delaware judge rejected an attempt by Fox News to dismiss Dominion’s lawsuit in December. More

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      An old falsehood resurfaces: that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s son.

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      Misinformation has been a key weapon wielded by Canada’s protest movement, and critics of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have returned to one simmering falsehood: that Mr. Trudeau is the love child of the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro.The conspiracy theory that Mr. Trudeau is Mr. Castro’s son has gained momentum on social media in recent days. It previously spread after Mr. Castro’s death in 2016, when Mr. Trudeau hailed him as “a remarkable leader.” He described Mr. Castro, who ruled as a Communist autocrat for almost 50 years, as “Cuba’s longest-serving president.”“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend, and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away,” Mr. Trudeau said at the time. His father, Pierre Trudeau, served as prime minister for over 15 years. Pierre Trudeau was the first leader of a NATO member state to visit communist Cuba, and Mr. Castro served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.The claim that the Canadian prime minister is Mr. Castro’s “illegitimate son” was also amplified by Tucker Carlson in an opinion piece posted on Fox News’s website on Friday.Some proponents of the falsehood have pointed to a striking resemblance between Mr. Castro and Mr. Trudeau. But the facts don’t add up, and the Canadian government has also previously denied the contention.Mr. Trudeau’s mother, Margaret, famously traveled to Cuba and met Mr. Castro at the beginning of 1976. But the visit was more than four years after Mr. Trudeau was born, on Dec. 25, 1971. Given her high profile, it would have been highly unlikely for Mrs. Trudeau to have slipped into Cuba undetected.Misinformation is just one tactic used by some protesters. While the demonstrations outside Canadian Parliament began as loosely organized truck convoys and supporters, the Ottawa police say the protesters are showing signs of increasingly sophisticated methods to target law enforcement operations. On Wednesday night, the Ottawa police emergency line was “almost jammed” by 911 calls, a significant number of them traced to United States addresses, said Peter Sloly, Ottawa’s police chief.Protesters have also mocked Mr. Trudeau in recent days by showing real images of him in blackface. In 2019, on the eve of federal elections, photos and a video emerged of him dressing up in blackface and brownface in the early 1990s and in 2001.Mr. Trudeau has long cast himself as a global spokesman for liberal causes, supporting women’s and Indigenous rights, welcoming immigrants and fighting climate change and racism. But that carefully calibrated image suffered a blow at the time.“All those pictures you’re seeing of Trudeau in blackface are real (but he’s not Castro’s love child),” The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, told its readers on Friday. More

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      McCarthy Says Republicans Are Losing Confidence in Liz Cheney

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      Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, said on Tuesday that House Republican lawmakers had expressed concerns to him over whether Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the party’s No. 3, could continue in her position, feeding rising speculation that Ms. Cheney could be stripped of her leadership post.“I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message,” Mr. McCarthy said on Fox. “We all need to be working as one, if we’re able to win the majority.”Mr. McCarthy’s remarks were a striking escalation of a growing feud pitting Ms. Cheney — who has been vocal in criticizing Donald J. Trump and repudiating his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — against House Republicans, many of whom have parroted such assertions and embraced the former president. Mr. McCarthy chose Mr. Trump’s favorite news program, “Fox and Friends,” as the venue for his latest airing of the party’s concerns about Ms. Cheney, whose fate has become a bellwether for the future of the party. His decision to do so reflected growing resentment among rank-and-file Republicans about Ms. Cheney’s determination to continue calling out Mr. Trump and members of their party.When a group of pro-Trump Republicans in the House moved in February to remove Ms. Cheney from her leadership role, citing her decision to vote to impeach Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy defended her in a speech just ahead of the secret-ballot vote, which she won overwhelmingly. But in the weeks that followed, Mr. McCarthy appears to have soured on her as Ms. Cheney has continued to contradict him, chiefly on whether Mr. Trump should continue to play a leading role in the party.The turning point came last week at a conference retreat in Orlando, where Ms. Cheney told reporters that any lawmaker who led the bid to invalidate President Biden’s electoral victory in Congress should be disqualified from running for president. She also broke with leading Republicans on the scope of a proposed independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot, saying it should be narrowly focused on the assault on the Capitol, not on Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests, as Mr. McCarthy and others in the party have insisted.Some lawmakers are so certain that the conference will call a vote to strip Ms. Cheney of her position that they have begun floating names of Republicans who could replace her in the third-ranking post. That endeavor is also fraught. Mindful of the optics of replacing the only woman in leadership with another man, Republicans are eyeing choosing a woman.Several of them are bullish on the prospect of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, an outspoken rising star within the party who has toiled to increase the number of women in the party, but it is not clear she would be interested in the job. Also cited as a possibility was Representative Jackie Walorski of Indiana, who as the top Republican on the Ethics Committee earlier this year successfully balanced the job of condemning Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s past conspiratorial statements while arguing she should not be kicked off her committees. More

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      Fox News Pushes to Have Defamation Suit Against It Dismissed

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      In the months since the election tech company Smartmatic sued Fox News and three of its anchors, the two companies have engaged in a prehearing back-and-forth that continued Monday when Fox filed briefs in support of a previous motion to have the lawsuit dismissed.In its defamation suit, which was filed in New York State Supreme Court on Feb. 4, Smartmatic accused Fox and the anchors Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro of promoting falsehoods about the company and widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.Shortly after the suit was filed, Fox canceled Mr. Dobbs’s program on Fox Business and filed a motion for a dismissal of the suit, arguing that the claims of electoral fraud broadcast on Fox News and Fox Business were newsworthy and handled fairly. Smartmatic replied on April 12, with a brief stating that the three Fox anchors had played along as their guests promoted election-related conspiracy theories.In its latest volley, Fox asserted that its coverage of Smartmatic was part of its overall reporting on a challenge of the election outcome based on claims made by former President Donald J. Trump.“Smartmatic asks this court to become the first in history to hold the press liable for reporting allegations made by a sitting president and his lawyers, and to break that barrier in the context of one of the most newsworthy events imaginable: a contested presidential election,” Fox said in its filing on Monday. “This court should decline that First-Amendment-defying request.”Representatives for Smartmatic declined to comment.Smartmatic has argued that the Fox hosts knew the on-air statements about the company were not accurate. If a court determines that Smartmatic is a public figure, Smartmatic’s lawyers will have to show that Fox acted with “actual malice” in its treatment of the company.The Fox briefs filed on Monday argued that Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7 billion in damages, had not demonstrated that its channels or its anchors acted with malice, showing only that the three Fox hosts had not investigated the claims made on their programs.The Fox brief said that Smartmatic’s “allegations largely boil down to accusations of mere ‘failure to investigate.’”It added, “Seeking to compensate for the weakness of its allegations, Smartmatic emphasizes their volume. But a stack of inadequate allegations is still inadequate.”The briefs filed by Fox on Monday are likely to be the last in its case against Smartmatic before a court considers the matter. A hearing date has not been scheduled.Another election technology company, Dominion Voting Systems, sued Fox for defamation in March. Fox called that suit “baseless” and pledged to fight it in court. More

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      Smartmatic says disinformation on Fox News about the election was ‘no accident.’

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      The election technology company Smartmatic pushed back on Monday against Fox News’s argument that it had covered the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election responsibly, stating that Fox anchors had played along as guests pushed election-related conspiracy theories.“The First Amendment does not provide the Fox defendants a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Smartmatic’s lawyer, J. Erik Connolly, wrote in a brief filed in New York State Supreme Court. “The Fox defendants do not get a do-over with their reporting now that they have been sued.”The brief came in response to motions filed by Fox Corporation and three current and former Fox hosts — Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs — to dismiss a Smartmatic lawsuit accusing them of defamation.Smartmatic and another company, Dominion Voting Systems, became the focus of baseless conspiracy theories after the Nov. 4 election that they had manipulated vote totals in contested states. Those conspiracy theories were pushed by Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, serving as personal lawyers to former President Donald J. Trump, on Fox News, Mr. Trump’s longtime network of choice. Smartmatic, which says that the conspiracy theories destroyed its reputation and its business, provided election technology in only one county during the election.Last month, Dominion also sued Fox News. Together, the two suits represent a billion-dollar challenge to the Fox empire, which, after Smartmatic filed its lawsuit, canceled the Fox Business program hosted by Mr. Dobbs.“The filing only confirms our view that the suit is meritless and Fox News covered the election in the highest tradition of the First Amendment,” the network said in a statement late Monday.Fox’s motion, as well as those of its anchors, argued that the mentions of Smartmatic were part of its reporting on a newsworthy event that it was duty-bound to cover: A president’s refusal to concede an election and his insistence that his opponent’s victory was not legitimate.But the response Smartmatic filed on Monday, which runs for 120 pages, said that argument amounted to wishful thinking and that Fox had not covered the claims about Smartmatic objectively or fairly.“The Fox defendants wedded themselves to Giuliani and Powell during their programs,” the brief said. “They cannot distance themselves now.”Fox will have several weeks to respond to the brief, and a judge will eventually consider whether to allow Smartmatic’s case to proceed. More

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      I Used to Think the Remedy for Bad Speech Was More Speech. Not Anymore.

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      I used to believe that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Now that seems archaic. Just as the founders never envisioned how the right of a well-regulated militia to own slow-loading muskets could apply to mass murderers with bullet-spewing military-style semiautomatic rifles, they could not have foreseen speech so twisted to malevolent intent as it is now.Cyber-libertarianism, the ethos of the internet with roots in 18th-century debate about the free market of ideas, has failed us miserably. Well after the pandemic is over, the infodemic will rage on — so long as it pays to lie, distort and misinform.Just recently, we saw the malignancies of our premier freedoms on display in the mass shooting in Boulder, Colo. At the center of the horror was a deeply disturbed man with a gun created for war, with the capacity to kill large numbers of humans, quickly. Within hours of the slaughter at the supermarket, a Facebook account with about 60,000 followers wrote that the shooting was fake — a so-called false flag, meant to cast blame on the wrong person.So it goes. Toxic misinformation, like AR-15-style weapons in the hands of men bent on murder, is just something we’re supposed to live with in a free society. But there are three things we could do now to clean up the river of falsities poisoning our democracy.First, teach your parents well. Facebook users over the age of 65 are far more likely to post articles from fake news sites than people under the age of 30, according to multiple studies.Certainly, the “I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true” sentiment, as the Bill Maher segment has it, is not limited to seniors. But too many older people lack the skills to detect a viral falsity.That’s where the kids come in. March 18 was “MisinfoDay” in many Washington State high schools. On that day, students were taught how to spot a lie — training they could share with their parents and grandparents.Media literacy classes have been around for a while. No one should graduate from high school without being equipped with the tools to recognize bogus information. It’s like elementary civics. By extension, we should encourage the informed young to pass this on to their misinformed elders.Second, sue. What finally made the misinformation merchants on television and the web close the spigot on the Big Lie about the election were lawsuits seeking billions. Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two election technology companies, sued Fox News and others, claiming defamation.“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.”In response to the Smartmatic suit, Fox said, “This lawsuit strikes at the heart of the news media’s First Amendment mission to inform on matters of public concern.” No, it doesn’t. There is no “mission” to misinform.The fraudsters didn’t even pretend they weren’t peddling lies. Sidney Powell, the lawyer who was one of the loudest promoters of the falsehood that Donald Trump won the election, was named in a Dominion lawsuit. “No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact,” her lawyers wrote, absurdly, of her deception.Tell that to the majority of Republican voters who said they believed the election was stolen. They didn’t see the wink when Powell went on Fox and Newsmax to claim a massive voter fraud scheme.Dominion should sue Trump, the man at the top of the falsity food chain. The ex-president has shown he will repeat a lie over and over until it hurts him financially. That’s how the system works. And the bar for a successful libel suit, it should be noted, is very high.Finally, we need to dis-incentivize social media giants from spreading misinformation. This means striking at the algorithms that drive traffic — the lines of code that push people down rabbit holes of unreality.The Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6 might not have happened without the platforms that spread false information, while fattening the fortunes of social media giants.“The last few years have proven that the more outrageous and extremist content social media platforms promote, the more engagement and advertising dollars they rake in,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr., chairman of the House committee that recently questioned big tech chief executives.Taking away their legal shield — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — is the strongest threat out there. Sure, removing social media’s immunity from the untruthful things said on their platforms could mean the end of the internet as we know it. True. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.So far, the threat has been mostly idle — all talk. At the least, lawmakers could more effectively use this leverage to force social media giants to redo their recommendation algorithms, making bogus information less likely to spread. When YouTube took such a step, promotion of conspiracy theories decreased significantly, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who published their findings in March 2020.Republicans may resist most of the above. Lies help them stay in power, and a misinformed public is good for their legislative agenda. They’re currently pushing a wave of voter suppression laws to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.I still believe the truth may set us free. But it has little chance of surviving amid the babble of orchestrated mendacity.Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and author, most recently, of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Dominion Sues Fox News, Claiming Defamation in Election Coverage

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      Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company, accused the news channel of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business.Fox News and its powerful owner, Rupert Murdoch, are facing a second major defamation suit over its coverage of the 2020 presidential election, a new front in the growing legal battle over media disinformation and its consequences.Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that was at the center of a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy about rigged voting machines, filed a lawsuit on Friday that accused Fox News of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business.Dominion, which has requested a jury trial, is seeking at least $1.6 billion in damages. The lawsuit comes less than two months after Smartmatic, another election tech company, filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Mr. Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and named several Fox anchors, including Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, as defendants.In a 139-page complaint filed in Delaware Superior Court, Dominion’s legal team, led by the prominent defamation firm Clare Locke, portrayed Fox as an active player in spreading falsehoods that Dominion had altered vote counts and manipulated its machines to benefit Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the election.Those claims were false, but they were relentlessly pushed by President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell, in public forums, including appearances on Fox programs. In January, Dominion sued Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell for defamation. The company also sued Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a Trump ally who was also a frequent guest on Fox programs, as well as shows on other conservative media outlets. Each of those suits seeks damages of more than $1 billion.“The truth matters,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in Friday’s complaint against Fox. “Lies have consequences. Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process. If this case does not rise to the level of defamation by a broadcaster, then nothing does.”In a statement on Friday, Fox said that its 2020 election coverage “stands in the highest tradition of American journalism” and pledged to “vigorously defend against this baseless lawsuit in court.”Fox Corporation previously filed a motion to dismiss the Smartmatic lawsuit, arguing that the false claims of electoral fraud made on its channels were part of covering a fast-breaking story of significant public interest. “An attempt by a sitting president to challenge the result of an election is objectively newsworthy,” Fox’s legal team wrote in the motion.The narrative that Mr. Trump and his allies told about Dominion was among the more baroque creations of the president’s monthslong effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and persuade Americans that Mr. Biden’s victory was not legitimate.Dominion, which was founded in 2002, is one of the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment in the United States, and its machines were used by election authorities in at least 28 states last year, including several states carried by Mr. Trump.Allies of Mr. Trump falsely portrayed the company as biased toward Mr. Biden and argued, without evidence, that it was tied to Hugo Chávez, the long-dead Venezuelan dictator. John Poulos, Dominion’s founder, and other employees received harassing and threatening messages from people convinced that the company had undermined the election results.Fox News and Fox Business programs were among the mass-media venues where Mr. Trump’s supporters denounced Dominion. The lawsuit also cites examples where the Fox hosts, including Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Dobbs, uncritically repeated or actively vouched for the false claims made by Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell.“Fox took a small flame and turned it into a forest fire,” Dominion wrote in the lawsuit. “As the dominant media company among those viewers dissatisfied with the election results, Fox gave these fictions a prominence they otherwise would never have achieved.”Dominion’s lawyers on Friday also cited an unusual argument made by Ms. Powell in a motion, filed on Monday, to dismiss the separate Dominion suit against her.In that motion, Ms. Powell’s lawyers asserted that because political language is often inexact, “reasonable people” would not accept Ms. Powell’s baseless claims as facts. Ms. Powell — who never allowed in public appearances that she was anything less than confident in her assertions — was essentially arguing that her conspiratorial claims were self-evidently hyperbolic and therefore not defamatory.Dominion says it recently lost major contracts with election officials in Georgia and Louisiana, adding that the company is now facing “the hatred, contempt, and distrust of tens of millions of American voters.”Right-wing media has already faced a reckoning of sorts from the threat of defamation litigation, a relatively novel tactic in a battle against disinformation that had previously been limited to ad boycotts and liberal public pressure campaigns.In February, two days after Smartmatic filed its suit, Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” its highest rated program. Newsmax, a pro-Trump cable channel also facing potential legal action, cut off Mr. Lindell when he repeated falsehoods about rigged voting machines. More