MSNBC's Katie Phang: Tucker Carlson texts revealed in Dominion filings are “smoking gun evidence”
Phang: There is evidence “that they knew or they recklessly disregarded the falsity of what was being put out and basically peddled to Fox News viewers”
Published
Citation From the March 7, 2023, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
JOY REID (HOST): The question I have is, he's essentially warning Sidney Powell, "You better bring some receipts because I'm putting you on my show and you're getting people's hopes up." Then he turns around, despite her never bringing said receipts, and he keeps saying the thing. Where does that leave Fox in terms of defamation?
KATIE PHANG (GUEST): It leads you directly down the path towards the state of mind of the speaker, of the defamation. The idea that the person, when they're relaying the information, that they knew that it was false, because you have to prove actual malice when you're Dominion Voting and you're suing Fox News. It's just as important, in terms of smoking gun evidence, when you have these types of text messages, these chats, all of these emails evidencing that they knew or they recklessly disregarded the falsity of what was being put out and basically peddled to Fox News viewers.
So, when you're suing somebody for actual malice, somebody could say, "Hey, in good faith, I was reporting. It was newsworthy," you know? "It was important to talk about a challenge to a 2020 presidential election." But what does Fox News in here is the fact that they maybe, at some small measure of time, thought, "Maybe this is not totally credible." But in the absence of the evidence that they kept on asking for, they still kept on pushing out the falsehoods. And that is the problem for Fox News when it comes to this particular litigation.