In-House Counsel

Fox News Parts Ways With Lawyer After Coughing Up $787 Million And Counting

Honestly, what took so long?

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Viet Dinh landscape

Viet Dinh (courtesy of Fox Corporation)

Viet Dinh is stepping down as Fox’s Chief Legal and Policy Officer, the post he’s held since 2018, presumably to take a position where he’ll cost a client less than the better part of a billion dollars.

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Fox News hosts provided an open platform for wingnuts claiming Dominion, a voting machine manufacturer, tainted the results. Dominion lodged a $1.3 billion lawsuit that ended with Fox forking over $787 million to avoid trial. Another voting machine company, Smartmatic, still has a lawsuit pending.

Dinh supporters would argue that a GC shouldn’t be saddled with responsibility for that total because he reportedly advised holding the line on the Dominion suit. The theory, according to these accounts, rested on the conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court shrugging off defamation law to protect Fox in the long-run. Not sure how that would have meshed with the far-right wing of the Court’s holy war against NY Times v. Sullivan, but Fox must have hoped for a dash of homefield officiating.

But even this rose-colored counterfactual wouldn’t absolve Dinh of responsibility for landing Fox in this predicament.

Where was legal when Fox hosts were handing over the network to lying conspiracy nuts tying a Canadian election machine company to dead South American dictators? It’s certainly not the legal department’s job to pre-clear every guest for every show, but this went on for weeks. The network didn’t get around to banning Rudy Giuliani until September 2021. After the first couple of problematic interviews in late 2020, someone should’ve sauntered down to the studio to remind Tucker Carlson of the legal ramifications these interviews could have for the network.

And yet Carlson, who the network didn’t kick to the curb until a few months ago, and the network’s other prime-time hosts felt sufficiently emboldened to complain to each other that Fox’s news division was messing with their audience by reporting the reality of the election and undercutting the prime-time shows’ continued trafficking in conspiracies. That reflects a culture of disregard for legal obligations that law departments are expected to stamp out long before it puts a company in jeopardy. Instead, the hosts were coddled by the company as short-term cash cows without regard to the long-term damage they might cause.

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Once the lawsuits over election lies started and Dinh supposedly pushed the shoot-the-moon strategy to take the case to the Supreme Court — a plan that would cost millions upon millions even if the network won — how was legal oblivious to the risks of discovery? Did they just assume no one put any of this stuff in writing? Because the decision to push this case to the cusp of trial resulted in all of Fox’s dirty laundry getting aired. Up to and including the fact that the company failed to disclose that Rupert Murdoch held a position with Fox News while trying to argue that Fox Corp. had no potential liability in the case because Murdoch had no role with Fox News.

Why wasn’t legal on top of that?!?!? Do they not have an org chart over there?

Every instance where a company would hope for an in-house legal team to slam the brakes, the Fox team hit the throttle and let go of the wheel. The production teams behind these shows should’ve known the rules, someone should’ve stopped those teams when it became clear that they didn’t, and once everything went to hell the first and only priority should’ve been settling the case quickly and quietly.

So, no, Dinh wasn’t the one who cost Fox all this money. But he is the one charged with preventing all this. And that didn’t really work out.

Viet Dinh, Fox’s top lawyer who oversaw its $787 million Dominion settlement, is stepping down [CNN]

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