[ad_1]
Fox Business has canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the weekday show hosted by one of former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal media supporters that became a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential race.
“Fox News Media regularly considers programming changes, and plans have been in place to launch new formats as appropriate postelection, including on Fox Business,” the company said in a statement. “This is part of those planned changes. A new 5 p.m. program will be announced in the near future.”
Mr. Dobbs, 75, who rose to fame as a CNN anchor, began hosting his Fox program in 2011 and gained an influential fan: Mr. Trump, who shared his hard-line views against immigration and later came to view Mr. Dobbs’s program as required viewing, even patching in the television host during policy discussions with his White House staff.
“Lou Dobbs is and was great,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Friday after the news of Mr. Dobbs’s departure. “Nobody loves America more than Lou. He had a large and loyal following that will be watching closely for his next move, and that following includes me.”
Mr. Dobbs was named in a lawsuit filed this week by the election technology company Smartmatic against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, Fox News, and two other Fox anchors, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro.
The suit, which seeks damages of at least $2.7 billion, cited a false claim, made on a November episode of Mr. Dobbs’s show on Fox Business, that Hugo Chávez, the deceased president of Venezuela, had a hand in the creation of Smartmatic technology, designing it so that the votes it processed could be changed undetected. (Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013, did not have anything to do with Smartmatic.)
The Chávez claim was made by Sidney Powell, who worked as a lawyer for Mr. Trump. She was also sued by Smartmatic on Thursday, along with another Trump lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mr. Dobbs was also cited in the lawsuit for using the phrase “cyber Pearl Harbor” to describe a supposed vote-fraud conspiracy, borrowing language used by Ms. Powell.
The cancellation of Mr. Dobbs’s Fox Business program was reported earlier by The Los Angeles Times.
Don Herzog, who teaches First Amendment and defamation law at the University of Michigan, said it was possible the cancellation could help Fox in its defense of the lawsuit.
If Mr. Dobbs had continued to discuss Smartmatic or promote election fraud on his program, the network could have found itself liable for each new claim, Mr. Herzog said.
The network also could argue that the lawsuit made them aware of untruths that Mr. Dobbs had helped spread. And in a trial atmosphere, the cancellation of Mr. Dobbs’s program might help persuade jurors that the network was acting in good faith.
Mr. Herzog said a responsible judge would counter that sentiment: “A judge should instruct a jury that what Fox does later to try to show they’re acting in good faith doesn’t settle the question of whether they were acting in good faith at some earlier time.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
John Koblin and Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.
[ad_2]
Source link
