Viet Dinh is stepping down as Fox’s Chief Legal and Policy Officer, the post he’s held considering that 2018, probably to take a position where he’ll cost a customer less than the bulk of a billion dollars.
In the after-effects of the 2020 governmental election, Fox News hosts supplied an open platform for wingnuts declaring Dominion, a ballot device maker, polluted the outcomes. Dominion lodged a $1.3 billion suit that ended with Fox handing over $787 million to prevent trial. Another ballot device business, Smartmatic, still has a suit pending.
Dinh fans would argue that a GC shouldn’t be burdened obligation for that overall due to the fact that he supposedly recommended holding the line on the Dominion match. The theory, according to these accounts, rested on the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court brushing off disparagement law to safeguard Fox in the long-run. Not sure how that would have fit together with the reactionary wing of the Court’s holy war versus NY Times v. Sullivan, however Fox should have expected a dash of homefield officiating.
But even this rose-colored counterfactual wouldn’t discharge Dinh of obligation for landing Fox in this circumstance.
Where was legal when Fox hosts were turning over the network to lying conspiracy nuts connecting a Canadian election device business to dead South American totalitarians? It’s definitely not the legal department’s task to pre-clear every visitor for every single program, however this went on for weeks. The network didn’t navigate to prohibiting Rudy Giuliani up until September 2021. After the very first number of bothersome interviews in late 2020, somebody must’ve roamed down to the studio to advise Tucker Carlson of the legal implications these interviews might have for the network.
And yet Carlson, who the network didn’t kick to the curb up until a couple of months earlier, and the network’s other prime-time hosts felt adequately pushed to grumble to each other that Fox’s news department was tinkering their audience by reporting the truth of the election and damaging the prime-time reveals’ continued trafficking in conspiracies. That shows a culture of neglect for legal responsibilities that law departments are anticipated to mark out long prior to it puts a business in jeopardy. Instead, the hosts were coddled by the business as short-term golden goose without regard to the long-lasting damage they may trigger.
Once the claims over election lies begun and Dinh apparently pressed the shoot-the-moon method to take the case to the Supreme Court — a strategy that would cost millions upon millions even if the network won — how was legal unconcerned to the dangers of discovery? Did they simply presume nobody put any of this things in composing? Because the choice to press this case to the cusp of trial led to all of Fox’s unclean laundry getting aired. Up to and consisting of the truth that the business stopped working to reveal that Rupert Murdoch held a position with Fox News while attempting to argue that Fox Corp. had no possible liability in the event due to the fact that Murdoch had no function with Fox News.
Why wasn’t legal on top of that?!?!? Do they not have an org chart over there?
Every circumstances where a business would expect an internal legal group to knock the brakes, the Fox group struck the throttle and release the wheel. The production groups behind these programs ought to’ve understood the guidelines, somebody must’ve stopped those groups when it ended up being clear that they didn’t, and as soon as whatever went to hell the very first and just concern ought to’ve been settling the case rapidly and silently.
So, no, Dinh wasn’t the one who cost Fox all this cash. But he is the one charged with avoiding all this. And that didn’t actually exercise.
Viet Dinh, Fox’s leading legal representative who supervised its $787 million Dominion settlement, is stepping down [CNN]
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