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By Mike Scarcella
(Reuters) - Fox News Media and its parent Fox Corp won a ruling on Monday dismissing a lawsuit by a former Biden administration official who accused the media giant of defaming her as a proponent of censorship.
Chief U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly in Delaware ruled that Nina Jankowicz, who resigned from her U.S. Department of Homeland Security post in May 2022, could not back up her defamation claims.
Jankowicz sued Fox last year, claiming she was forced to resign from the Disinformation Governance Board as a result of the company's broadcasts. She said Fox had “intentionally trafficked in malicious falsehoods to pad its profits.” Fox denied the claims.
Fox News Media said in a statement on Monday that it was pleased with the decision, calling the case "a politically motivated lawsuit aimed at silencing free speech."
Lawyers for Jankowicz said they disagreed with the order and would appeal.
The Disinformation Governance Board quickly drew criticism from conservative critics of President Joe Biden and others after it was formed in 2022. The administration suspended the board's work in May 2022, and it was dissolved later that year.
Connolly’s ruling said most of the Fox News statements at issue in the lawsuit were aimed at the board, not at Jankowicz directly. The judge also said viewers would likely have understood the statements at issue to be protected opinion.
“It is undisputed that from the time its existence was announced by DHS, the Disinformation Governance Board was a hypercharged subject of political debate,” Connolly wrote.
Connolly also said the board’s objective “is fairly characterized as a form of censorship.”
Last year, Fox Corp agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems that said Fox News broadcast false claims that the company’s voting machines were involved in a conspiracy to rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Fox as part of the settlement said it acknowledged “the court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella in Washington; Editing by David Bario and Matthew Lewis)
