(Headline USA) After three years of yawning over scandals involving members of the Biden family and others that would tarnish their collective narrative, three leftist media outlets—the Associated Press, the New York Times and National Public Radio—have been reinvigorated by the prospect of digging through the private messages of a rival company’s personnel on a fishing expedition for derogatory information.
The outlets asked a Delaware judge earlier this week to reveal mostly private text messages and conversations between Fox News employees shortly after the 2020 presidential election that were uncovered during the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit.
Fox News is opposing their efforts to unseal documents related to its recently settled defamation lawsuit, saying it would do nothing but “gratify private spite or promote public scandal.”
Fox agreed last month to pay $787 million to end the case.
Fox lawyer Katharine L. Mowery, in a letter sent late Wednesday to Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, said much of the material its competitors sought wasn’t relevant to the issues of the lawsuit. She said the media has no right to access such records.
“They have not been shy about sharing the communications with the most potential to grab headlines,” Mowery wrote of the media challenging the sealed documents.
Many private messages obtained through legal discovery already were leaked to the leftist press as the embattled voting technology company sought, successfully, to bully Fox into a settlement.
Some showed Fox hosts and executives questioning allegations that Dominion’s voting equipment had led to widespread irregularities in the highly contested election.
One batch of messages revealed former Fox host Tucker Carlson’s scorn for former President Donald Trump, including one text where he declared, “I hate him passionately.”
Although the messages do not, in and of themselves, establish falsity of the claims, the diffidence of those at the network might, on one hand, establish a sort of willful negligence on the network’s part. Or, some might argue, it might reveal their due diligence in examining all facets of a contentious debate.
Fox New’s settlement of the case ensures those questions will never be raised before a jury—and many assume the network’s intention also was to ensure that other private correspondence would not leak that would damage their reputation even if it had little impact on the case itself.
One of the reasons Fox agreed to settle the case was to “buy peace and bring an end to the media spectacle,” Mowery wrote.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
