Smartmatic And Newsmax Settle Libelslander Lawsuit
Smartmatic And Newsmax Settle Libelslander Lawsuit
No comment from the ghost of Hugo Chávez.
Bummer for everyone looking forward to reading more juicy discovery materials in the libelslander lawsuit of Smartmatic USA vs. Newsmax Media! The civil suit has been settled for an undisclosed amount, right in the middle of jury selection in Delaware, heading off the trial that was set to start on Monday. Pay up, bitches!
And the suing isn’t over yet! Smartmatic still has lots of suits pending over various 2020 STOLLEN ELECTION lies, against Fox Corp., Rudy Giuliani, and more. Forbes helpfully has a rundown of all the payups newsy-tainment channels may yet have to do for besmirching Smartmatic and Dominion’s good names with their cuckoo claims that their machines were making voter fraud. Whatever it took to grab the hungry eyeballs of gullible rageaholic conspiracy theorists!
How wackadoo were Newsmax’s claims? The wackadoo-iest! There were correspondents like Emerald Robinson claiming, “Smartmatic software is what was used by Hugo Chávez and his successors to fix elections in Venezuela,” and host Chris Salcedo claiming that Smartmatic software comes with a “directive” on “how you change the results” of an election.
Newsmax had on guests like failed Texas Republican congressional candidate Russell J. Ramsland Jr., who claimed that the 2018 US congressional election in Dallas, Texas, and the 2019 gubernatorial election in Kentucky were:
“rigged by voting machines with links to Smartmatic and using Venezuelan election-stealing software controlled by a George Soros operative, and that votes had been sent to CIA-funded databases in Spain where they were changed and sent back to the United States.”
What, no Italian space lasers?
The origin of these fictions was Trump’s loon lawyers, Rudy Giuliani (now twice disbarred, congrats), L. Lin Wood (disbarred), and Sidney Powell (still not disbarred!), plus other assorted nuts like the MyPillow guy, who all dragged the voting-machine companies into their conspiracy theories, such as that Dominion actually owned Smartmatic, that Smartmatic’s “DNA” was in Dominion voting machines, and also that a secret witness “Venezuelan whistleblower” told Sidney Powell:
“I was a direct witness to the creation and operation of an electronic voting system in a conspiracy between a company known as Smartmatic and the leaders of conspiracy with the Venezuelan government. This conspiracy specifically involved President Hugo Chavez Frias, the person in charge of the National Electoral Council named Jorge Rodriguez, and principals, representatives, and personnel from Smartmatic. […] The purpose of this conspiracy was to create and operate a voting system that could change the votes in elections from votes against persons running the Venezuelan government to votes in their favor in order to maintain control of the government.”
In the real world, Newsmax knew full well that the claims were horseshit, surprise. Dominion and Smartmatic are competitors, they do not use the same software, their machines are not alive and therefore do not have DNA, and Hugo Chávez was not alive either, he died in 2013. Smartmatic voting machines were also only used in Los Angeles County, and the machines have never been involved in any kind of security breach anywhere.
Chris Ruddy, Newsmax CEO, emailed someone November 12, 2020, admitting, “Newsmax does not have evidence of widespread voter fraud.” And Newsmax anchor Bob Sellers groaned to a producer, “How long are we going to have to play along with election fraud?” Until they smelled lawsuits on the horizon, as it turned out!
Still, Newsmax aired hour after hour of this arglebargle, in an attempt to poach viewers from Fox. And it worked. Newsmax's viewership skyrocketed. Their average viewership was 58,000 viewers a night before the channel started its bogeyman campaign about the 2020 election, then it grew 900 percent after they started drumbeating the lies.
Eventually, though, threatening letters from lawyers freaked them out enough that they sent out anchor John Tabacco to hilariously “clarify” that “it has not reported as true certain claims about these companies.” Watch and have a chuckle!
Still, to this day, 63 percent of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and about a third of Americans overall still believe it.
However much Newsmax had to pay, it wasn’t enough.
Related:
[Washington Post gift link]
John Tobacco (if that IS his real name) wasn’t able to clarify Newsmax out of paying millions for spreading lies about voting machine companies? That’s shocking.
Smartmatic and other entities hurt by conservative media need to recover damages and do what’s best for them, but a vital piece of these defamation suits is public accountability. These settlements absolutely need to be made public and these plaintiffs should not agree to confidentiality. That’s easier said than done, as recovering damages is obviously vital to their survival. But the bigger picture here is establishing a cost to conservative platforms who victimize people and organizations by carelessly or even maliciously lying to rile up their viewers. Conservative media is about profiting off the anger and resentment of certain people. When conservatives attack innocent election workers or officials or companies, they must pay a steep price for that harm. Make these settlements and admissions of fault public.
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