Episode description

Defamation litigation tends to be unavailing. Many offending statements don’t meet the definition of defamation — they may be opinions, or insults, or false statements against a public figure made without actual malice, or even true factual statements you just didn’t like hearing. This week’s episode is mostly a deep dive into defamation lawsuits brought against Fox News (and related parties) by two voting technology companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. This litigation looks different from most defamation litigation. Smartmatic and Dominion are large companies whose business has likely been impaired by the lies told about them. Those lies were broadcast extremely widely — no need to worry about the Streisand effect. One of the entities that shared many of the lies, Fox News, is a very deep pocket. And Fox has good reason to worry it could end up facing some very large judgments. Ken and Josh discuss the favorable rulings and power moves in both of these cases, plus an update on Rust shooting. (Appellate public defender Caitlin Smith, who wrote into us several weeks ago about why the enhancement was invalid, has been proved right.) And we talked about how Sam Bankman-Fried got into a position where the judge presiding over his case seems to like him less than the prosecutors do.

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