Checks and Balance: Fox hunted
Checks and Balance from The Economist
The Economist
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fox News has settled a mammoth defamation lawsuit over its coverage of the 2020 presidential election. Dominion Voting Systems had accused the network of knowingly spreading the lie that its machines somehow rigged the election by awarding votes to Joe Biden. Defamation cases are notoriously hard to win in America, and it was remarkable that this one got so far. Will it change Fox News?
The Economist’s Kennett Werner sets out the background to the lawsuit. We return to the founding of Fox News. And law professor RonNell Andersen Jones explains what the case tells us about how the media works in America.
John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard and Idrees Kahloon.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | As Helen opened her Amazon parcel, |
| 0:03.0 | her stomach filled with butterflies, rapid air technology and a grill mode feature, |
| 0:08.0 | this air-fryer tickled Helen's taste buds for a price lower than she'd ever imagined. |
| 0:13.0 | Five stars from Helen. |
| 0:15.0 | Find star-rated products at star prices. |
| 0:18.0 | Start your search on Amazon today. |
| 0:20.0 | The suspicious ballot box was found in the house of a local activist in San Francisco. |
| 0:31.0 | It had a false bottom which could allow fake votes to mix with real ones. |
| 0:36.0 | Panic spread and voters across 1850s America worried about the legitimacy of elections. |
| 0:43.0 | A New York inventor came up with a way to make voting more transparent. |
| 0:48.0 | Make the ballot boxes literally transparent. |
| 0:52.0 | Samuel C. Jolli's design had a lockable wooden frame, |
| 0:56.0 | encasing a clear glass sphere which had a slot for voters to post their ballots. |
| 1:01.0 | Jolli thought that if everyone could see what was going in and out, |
| 1:05.0 | it would be easier to trust in the process. |
| 1:08.0 | It worked. The glass ballot boxes were used widely throughout the rest of the 19th century |
| 1:14.0 | and transparent ballot boxes are still found all over the world today. |
| 1:18.0 | America now deploys more advanced machines at the polls |
| 1:22.0 | and lies about some of these voting machines were at the root of the lawsuit |
| 1:26.0 | Fox News has just settled for $787.5 million. |
| 1:32.0 | I'm John Prado and this is checks and balance from the economist. |
| 1:38.0 | Each week we take one big theme shaping American politics and explore it in depth. |
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