The Media Research Center almost entirely ignored Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News for promoting never-proven claims about election fraud caused by the company’s voting systems. Instead, its writers — chiefly Tim Graham — whined that outlets like CNN covered the lawsuit, though he did surprisingly concede that “whatever good faith [right-wing media have] built up with people who are not as conservative could just get wiped out when the big liberal media can all unite and show that they have the same regard for the truth that Donald Trump has.” Of course, Graham followed that with whining that the scandal “enables Oliver Darcy and company to mount their high horses and suggest that Fox News has never, ever been a news channel” and denied any MRC role in building up Fox News as a right-wing propaganda machine. That was followed by Nicholas Fondacaro smearing a Fox News employee who stepped forward to claim she was pressured by Fox News lawyers to lie during testimony for the Dominion lawsuit as a “disgruntled” liar.
Fast forward several months, and Fondacaro and the MRC are singing a different tune about defamation lawsuit against a media outlet — this time, of course, the outlet in question is CNN, the MRC’s mortal enemy. Fondacaro wrote in a June 14 post:
On Wednesday, three judges with the First District Court of Appeal for the State of Florida ruled that Plaintiff Zachary Young had sufficiently provided enough evidence to the court that they could proceed with his defamation suit against CNN for punitive damages. The network allegedly, knowingly lied about his security consulting company and their work amid President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Jake Tapper, one of CNN’s presidential debate moderators was one of the journalists at the center of it all.
The defamation suit stemmed from a segment on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper about Young’s company Nemex Enterprises Inc. and the prices they were allegedly charging to get people out of Afghanistan. Tapper led into the segment by painting an image of “black market” hustlers who charged “exorbitant fees” taking advantage of desperate people:
[…]A NewsBusters investigation found that CNN has since deleted the segment in question from their CNN Transcripts archive page for the November 11, 2021 episode of The Lead. There’s no note about the missing segment.
CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt singled out Young’s company, not mentioning any others known to be working in-country to get people out.
Fondacaro didn’t mention that CNN issued an apology for the report four months later per Young’s request, and that the story was taken off the website; CNN also stated that “”At the time of its reporting, CNN knew little about Young’s financials, his model, or whether he’d successfully evacuated anyone because whenever anyone [including CNN] asked Young to explain his business, he obfuscated, behaved unprofessionally, lied, and hid.”
In a June 24 post, Fondacaro worked with Young’s lawyer to hype the case and help him see dollar signs:
The case may not be as well known (yet), but CNN could be facing a defamation liability rivaling or exceeding the $787 million Fox News paid out to Dominion Voting Systems. NewsBusters recently reported on Florida’s First District Court of Appeals affirming that plaintiff Zachary Young could seek punitive damages, in addition to economic and emotional damages, from the Cable News Network in a civil trial after they allegedly defamed him regarding his work in getting people out of Afghanistan. The total could near or exceed $1 billion.
For that outcome to be remotely in the cards, Young needed to prove malice and according to the ruling, he’s done exactly that. “Young sufficiently proffered evidence of actual malice, express malice, and a level of conduct outrageous enough to open the door for him to seek punitive damages,” Judge L. Clayton Roberts wrote in the court’s ruling.
[…]In an interview with NewsBusters, Vel Freedman, the lawyer representing Young, said that “everyone makes mistakes” but what CNN’s messages showed was a “systemic problem” inside the network. He added that their internal mechanism for accountability had “clearly failed” and opened themselves to “massive, massive liability.”
Freedman told NewsBusters that his client had lost between $40-60 million in economic opportunity over the course of his now-damaged career as a security contractor since people in the field no longer wanted to work with him. If a jury awarded his client for emotional damages, the upper end could be as high as $600 million. The court recognizing the malice and outrageous conduct by CNN, effectively removed the cap on punitive damages in the State of Florida.
All of that meant CNN could be facing upwards of $1 billion in total damages.
From there, Fondacaro made it clear he would be colluding with Young’s lawyers to push biased “
reporting” promoting his side of the story and denigrating CNN. He cranked out a series of posts to further that narrative:
- Do They Know ‘What Words Mean?’ Judge Grills CNN’s Lawyer in Defamation Hearing
- ‘Jackass With a Microphone’: Experts React to CNN Sued for Defamation (those “experts” included a witness for Young and Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military company Blackwater)
- CNN Attempting to Block Tapper Deposition — and Destroying Evidence?
- EXCLUSIVE: CNN Journo Admits No Evidence of Criminality in Defamation Deposition
- EXCLUSIVE: CNN Refusing to Turn Over Their Journalist Conduct Guidelines in Defamation Case
- EXCLUSIVE: CNN Asks Court for Meeting to BEG for Defamation Settlement
- CNN Cites Taliban’s SHARIA LAW for Their Innocence in $1 Billion Defamation Suit
- EXCLUSIVE: CNN Receives Major Blow from Court in Defamation Case
- EXCLUSIVE: Defamation Judge Says He Has ‘Hard Time Believing’ CNN’s Jake Tapper
- Scathing Reply to CNN’s Sharia Defense: ‘Masterclass in Absurdity and Desperation’ (the reply was from Young, hardly an objective source)
- Defamation Judge Pushes Back on CNN’s Use of Sharia Law for Defense
- Warner Bros. Discovery to Be Subpoenaed as Part of CNN Defamation Case
- Off to Trial: CNN’s Defamation Settlement Offer Gets REJECTED (Fondacaro helped Young whine that he had to fly to the U.S. from Austria to give his deposition since, allegedly, “Young suffers from pain in his legs when he sits for a long time.”)
Fondacaro rarely reached out to CNN for comment to the degree that he enthusiastically quoted Young’s lawyers, and published only one response from that wasn’t taken from court records. Clearly CNN knew that Fondacaro had an agenda and couldn’t be trusted to report fairly — ironically, this is a complaint he and the rest of the MRC routinely hurl against reporters in non-right-wing media. Fondacaro did not tell his readers that Young refused to cooperate with CNN before the story. Then again, being fair and balance is not his agenda here — smearing CNN is.