After receiving legal threats from two voting machine companies, Smartmatic and Dominion, Newsmax, Fox Business Network and Fox News Network programs have begun airing corrective and clarifying statements.
Smartmatic has asked the three networks to retract previous reports, and the company wrote in a legal notice last week that “these organizations could have easily discovered the false allegations about Smartmatic, investigated them and then released them to millions of viewers and readers.”
Newsmax host John Tabacco, who is the latest to issue the clarification, said on Monday’s broadcast, “Since Election Day, various guests, attorneys and elected officials have appeared on Newsmax with comments and claims about Smartmatic and the Dominion system …… Newsmax wanted to clarify its news coverage and noted that it did not report ‘certain claims’ about these companies as ‘true.’ “
Tabacco went on to say that Newsmax has “no evidence” of the multiple claims aired on its news network, including that Dominion and Smartmatic have a business relationship, that Dominion uses Smartmatic software or vice versa, or that “Dominion or Smartmatic used software or reprogrammed software to manipulate votes in the 2020 election.
J. Erik Connolly is one of the lawyers who issued the legal threat for Smartmatic. According to the New York Times, Connolly won a defamation lawsuit against ABC News in 2017 after ABC referred to a beef producer’s “lean, fine-grained beef” as “pink slime. The amount of damages is at least $177 million.
Generally larger media outlets rarely issue corrections unless they are threatened with lawsuits or legal action, because defamation lawsuits are time-consuming and expensive, especially for new outlets like Newsmax and OAN that are trying to attract investors so they can compete with Fox News.
But even issuing a correction or retraction doesn’t necessarily ward off legal damages. According to NPR, Fox News reached a settlement in November with the family of Seth Rich over allegations that he leaked thousands of Democratic Party emails to WikiLeaks. 27-year-old Rich, an employee of the DNC (Democratic National Committee), was murdered on July 10, 2016. Police suspect robbery and murder, but there are “conspiracy theories” that he was silenced for leaking Democratic emails to Assange.
Fox News has also suggested that the Democrat may have been involved in the 2016 killing of Ridge, but the case remains unsolved.
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