Election technology company Smartmatic and far-right network One America News announced Tuesday that they’d settled a defamation lawsuit stemming from the network's lies concerning the 2020 election.
“The case was resolved pursuant to a confidential agreement,” OAN attorney Chip Babcock told CNN.
Both parties declined to supply details of the settlement.
The case against OAN was one in all several lawsuits filed against right-wing media following the election. During the 2020 presidential campaign, pro-Donald Trump media falsely spread lies claiming that President Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.
Smartmatic filed a lawsuit against OAN in 2021, claiming the right-wing conspiracy network “victimized” the corporate and spread lies about its role within the 2020 election to “increase viewership and revenue.”
The development comes a yr after Fox News got here to an enormous agreement with Dominion Voting Systems, one other election technology company that was similarly vilified in 2020. Fox News paid greater than $787 million to settle that lawsuit, becoming the most important publicly known defamation settlement in U.S. history.
Smartmatic still has a lawsuit pending against Fox News, smaller conservative broadcaster Newsmax and a number of other pro-Trump personalities who also spread lies concerning the election.
OAN has established itself as a perhaps probably the most extreme of pro-Trump cable news outlets. And his reporters have sometimes crossed the road into right-wing politics.
The little-watched channel has commonly aired baseless conspiracy theories supporting Trump, particularly concerning the 2020 election.
The channel worked closely together with Russian agents in a propaganda-style documentary during Trump's first impeachment trial in 2019 over allegations that he pressured Ukraine to analyze his political rivals. One of his correspondents who’s even a lawyer worked with Trump's legal team is alleged to be undermining the 2020 election results.
DirecTV dropped the right-wing extremist network The withdrawal from this system in 2022 represents a big setback for the channel and can affect the channel's viewership and revenue.
This is a developing story and will likely be updated.
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