CNN’s Jake Tapper put Dominion Voting Systems CEO John Poulos on blast over why Fox News wasn’t asked to give an on-air apology for “all those misled Americans” in the network’s massive $787.5 million defamation settlement on Tuesday. (You can watch a moment at the 11:00 mark in the clip below.)
The settlement, which barely made on-air noise among Fox News personalities, included a statement from the network in which Fox News gave a nod to “the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and remarked that the settlement “reflects FOX’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”
Justin Nelson, the lead attorney for Dominion, told MSNBC’s Joy Reid that Dominion “would have liked to have seen the hosts take the stand and others” at Fox News.
Tapper, on Tuesday, read the statement on his show and clearly had difficulties reciting Fox’s commitment to the “highest journalistic standards.”
He questioned Poulos on Wednesday over Fox’s lack of an apology in its statement.
“Why not force them to tell all those people, all those misled Americans, which polls indicate millions of them still believe this nonsense, why not force them to say, ‘We shouldn’t have done that. That was false. You have been misled, Joe Biden actually won. Dominion and Smartmatic and all that was operating just fine’? Why not force them to do that?” Tapper asked.
“Was it just like, ‘We’ll give you $200 million more if you don’t force us to do it’? Because you could have forced them to do it.”
Poulos responded that the defamation part of the law “is really not built around apologies” but rather is built to compensate for damage.
“And I can tell you we had a company-wide call yesterday, and the unanimous consent in our company is if we could all go back in time and have our company reputation back, we would do so every single time,” Poulos added.
“Exactly, exactly, but that’s my point,” said Tapper, who noted the lie about Dominion’s machines causing Donald Trump to lose the 2020 vote “persists.”
(H/T Mediaite)