On the legal front, it’s been a good 24 hours for Fox News.
Hours after President Biden announced he would withdraw from his 2024 re-election bid on Sunday, Hunter Biden dropped his lawsuit against Fox News for airing salacious images of his private misconduct taken from his personal laptop.
On Monday, a federal judge dismissed a defamation case filed by a former Biden administration official. He ruled that Nina Jankowicz’s legal claims cited statements that were often accurate, broadly speaking, or fell into the categories of opinion or statements that could not be disproven.
"This was a politically motivated lawsuit aimed at silencing free speech and we are pleased with the court's decision to protect the First Amendment,” a statement from a Fox News spokesperson read. Jankowicz's attorneys say they will appeal the decision.
A mock trial of the president's son
In Hunter Biden’s case, the explicit images were incorporated as part of a six-part series first posted in 2022 on its streaming service, Fox Nation. The series staged a mock trial of the younger Biden over his foreign business dealings.
Hunter Biden was found guilty last month on felony gun charges and faces criminal tax charges in September.
The Fox Nation series remained available until earlier this year, when Hunter Biden made public his threat to sue the network. The images showed him consuming crack cocaine and cavorting with prostitutes.
The network took down the series out of what a spokesperson called “an abundance of caution.” Fox nonetheless strongly defended its coverage, explicitly noting when the lawsuit was filed earlier this month that Hunter Biden was a public figure and a convicted felon.
“Consistent with the First Amendment, Fox News has accurately covered the newsworthy events of Mr. Biden’s own making,” the network said then in a statement. Fox pointed to its earlier comment after Biden dropped the suit. Biden’s attorney did not respond to NPR’s request for comment from her client.
Biden would have had a tough slog in making a claim for defamation, given his family’s prominence, the repeated reminders throughout Fox’s mock trial that the proceedings were not real, and Biden's real and noteworthy legal troubles.
Biden instead sued under New York state’s revenge porn statutes, under which it is illegal to distribute sexually explicit images or videos without the consent of those depicted or “harassing, annoying or alarming” the subjects of such material by posting it or threatening to do so.
In April, Biden’s attorneys said they had been pressuring Fox privately to retract stories and segments promoting unsubstantiated allegations that he had helped to funnel millions of dollars in bribes to his father, the president, from Ukrainian interests. According to the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, Fox stars ifeatured such claims hundreds of times.
A key source of those claims, Alexander Smirnov, has admitted that "officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved" in circulating the allegations. He now faces federal charges of lying to the FBI about those very allegations. Fox said it has covered that development in subsequent reports.
President Biden announced his decision to step aside from the 2024 race early Sunday afternoon. Hunter Biden praised his father in a statement released publicly for offering “unconditional love... as a president and as a parent.” Hours later, according to court records, the younger Biden filed papers to withdraw his suit.
Judge dismisses disinformation expert's suit
In Jankowicz's case, U.S. District Court Judge Colm F. Connolly dismissed each element of her defamation lawsuit against Fox. Jankowicz is a scholar who studies disinformation, democracy and freedom of expression.
In spring of 2022, the Biden administration appointed her to lead the new Disinformation Governance Board within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Just three weeks into the job, Jankowicz quit, saying she had been subjected to death threats and told by a private security consultant to leave her home. The board was disbanded.
In her suit, Jankowicz asserted that Fox had wrongly led viewers to believe that she intended to act in concert with major social media companies to censor American's online speech, that she had been fired rather than left voluntarily, and that she wanted to “give verified Twitter users the power to edit others’ tweets” -- an accusation based on a manipulated video segment. (She had endorsed a reform that is much like the “community notes” feature allowing users to add context, which Elon Musk has embraced since taking over Twitter and renaming it X.)
At the time of Jankowicz’s filing, legal scholars told NPR it was a reach: the bar for winning defamation cases is raised significantly for public officials, as free speech traditions seek to give Americans robust running room to criticize people holding significant government posts.
Judge Connolly held that several of the offending statements on Fox were true. For defamatory claims to be upheld, those statements would have had to be found damaging and false. (Additionally, Fox would have had to know, or had reason to know, they were false.)
He cited dictionary entries to say the statements on Fox encompassed fair descriptions under commonly understood definitions of terms in question. And he rejected Jankowicz’s citation of moments when commentators referred to the disinformation board without naming her, though her image was on screen.
Fox celebrated the decision by Connolly, who was nominated by then-President Donald Trump and had the support of Delaware’s two senators, both Democrats. In recent years, Fox has been mired in unwelcome scrutiny and legal challenges for what it has broadcast on a variety of political stories - largely aiding Trump's interests.
Fox News paid $787.5 million a year ago to settle a defamation suit stemming from its amplification of false claims that a voting machine company had helped rig the 2020 election in favor of President Biden. It is facing a multi-billion dollar lawsuit from a second voting tech company on the same grounds, though the network says it expects to prevail. In 2020, Fox paid millions to the parents of Seth Rich, a slain Democratic party staffer, to settle their suit over the network’s reporting on him, since retracted.
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