The conflict echoes the media giant’s First Amendment fight against Ron DeSantis over the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
CBS, Cox and Fox have agreed to pay a total of $48 million to end claims in Illinois federal court that they participated in a scheme among major U.S. broadcasters to artificially inflate television advertising prices.
Fox’s handling of the defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, which settled for $787.5 million, left many unanswered questions.
Former CBS shareholders reached a proposed $167.5 million settlement to resolve allegations that Shari Redstone, the daughter of late media magnate Sumner Redstone, pressured the company into an unfair merger that created ViacomCBS Inc, now known as Paramount Global, according to a court filing.
Gray Television is suing the FCC over its decision to fine the broadcaster over half a million dollars for an affiliation move in Alaska the regulator said violates its duopoly restriction. That is according to an appeal filed late Wednesday (May 24) in the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Atlanta, where Gray is based.
The lawsuit by TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, follows one filed last week by five content creators that looks to overturn Montana’s ban on the video sharing app. They made similar arguments including that the state of Montana has no authority to take action on matters of national security. Both lawsuits were filed in federal court in Missoula.
Exclusives
The federal children’s privacy law doesn’t prevent parents from suing YouTube for allegedly violating California laws by tracking young children, the Federal Trade Commission is telling an appeals court. The federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act overrides claims rooted in inconsistent state laws, but doesn’t override state-law claims that parallel the federal law, the agency wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief filed over the weekend with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
DeSantis ‘ attorney filed a motion in federal court in Tallahassee on Friday seeking to disqualify Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker from overseeing the lawsuit filed by Disney last month. The lawsuit alleges that DeSantis and his appointees violated the company’s right to free speech, as well as the contracts clause, by taking over the special governing district that previously had been controlled by Disney supporters after Disney opposed Florida legislation that critics have dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.”
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered tech companies a reprieve Thursday by rejecting one lawsuit alleging social media platforms should be held liable for enabling a lethal attack on a Turkish nightclub and tossing another case back to a lower court.Those moves, coming three months after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the cases, preserve a law known as Section 230 that shields social media services from being held responsible for the material posted on their platforms.
It appears Michael Corn and ABC News are not out of the woods just yet. Portions of an August 2021 sexual harassment lawsuit filed by former Good Morning America producer Kirstyn Crawford against the former executive in charge of GMA that were dismissed by a New York judge last June were reinstated by a New York appellate court Tuesday morning.
The Walt Disney Co. is asking a judge to dismiss or stay a state lawsuit brought by the special district that oversees its Florida property, calling the litigation “moot” given recent actions taken by the state. In a motion filed in Florida state court in Orange County, Disney also said that Florida law requires that the state court sideline the lawsuit until the company’s own federal case against Governor Ron DeSantis is resolved.
Bob Chapek, the former Disney CEO who was abruptly ousted from the company last November, is among a group of executives facing a lawsuit claiming violations of securities law for allegedly providing misleading statements and omissions about Disney+ and its subscriber growth.
The suit, brought by a specialist in Russian disinformation, cites parallels with the recently settled Dominion Voting Systems case against Fox.
The lawsuit, brought by Abby Grossberg, accused the cable network of pressuring her to lie in a deposition. Her lawyers say they intend to refile the case in a different jurisdiction.
Byron Allen’s company claims McDonald’s has failed to honor its promise to spend 5% of its advertising budget on Black-owned media.
Fox News is opposing a renewed effort by the Associated Press, the New York Times and NPR to unseal documents related to its recently settled defamation lawsuit, saying it would do nothing but “gratify private spite or promote public scandal.”
Dominion Suit’s Revelations Damage The Entire Fox Brand
It’s not just Fox News that has been battered by the self-inflicted injuries exposed in its $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. By putting pandering before honest journalism, it has sullied the Fox brand and harmed other journalists far removed from its demagoguery and slanted reporting.
Fox News has agreed to give voting technology company Smartmatic additional documents about Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch and other senior corporate executives. Smartmatic is suing the network for $2.7 billion over its airing of 2020 election lies. The agreement was announced Wednesday at a court hearing in Manhattan. New York Supreme Court Judge David Cohen scheduled the hearing after Smartmatic raised concerns about whether Fox was complying with its pretrial obligations to turn over relevant evidence.
The Walt Disney Co. is suing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other state officials, alleging that DeSantis is harming the company’s business operations. The lawsuit comes after months of Disney and DeSantis sparring over legislation that DeSantis has signed and steps the governor has taken to increase the state’s control over Disney.
Circle City Broadcasting filed papers appealing summary judgments dismissing its discrimination suits against DirecTV and Dish Network. Circle City is asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to reverse a federal court judge’s decision to throw out the case without a trial and order the district court to hold a jury trial. DirecTV had no comment on the appeal.
Elon Musk accused Microsoft of using data from Twitter without permission to train its chatbot. Then he threatened to sue the company. Microsoft retaliated by ending support for Twitter in its ad platform for search and social campaigns.
Paramount Global has agreed to a $167.5 million settlement of a case stemming from the controversial 2019 merger of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. that created the entertainment company, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing shows.
Two months after Warner Bros. filed a lawsuit against Paramount over streaming rights to the long-running animated series South Park, Paramount Global has finally responded with a lawsuit of its own. In a countersuit filed in the New York Supreme Court, Paramount says Warner Bros. owes it more than $52 million in unpaid licensing fees.
Several similar lawsuits to the just-settled one by Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News Channel are teed up against those who have spread election lies, including another against Fox. The plaintiffs range from a different voting technology company to Georgia election workers who were falsely accused of tampering with the vote count in that state. The defendants include close advisers to former President Donald Trump and a conservative group that funded a film last year alleging widespread voter fraud during the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
Judge Eric Davis of Delaware Superior Court has been evenhanded and reasonable, legal analysts say. The defamation suit is his highest-profile case.
Mo’Nique has filed a lawsuit alleging that Paramount and CBS owe her millions in profit participation from her show The Parkers. The show ran for five seasons on UPN, from 1999 through 2004. The show’s creators — Ralph Farquhar, Sara Finney-Johnson and Vida Spears — filed a similar lawsuit last June, alleging that CBS had engaged in various forms of “financial malfeasance” to artificially inflate expenses and suppress profit payments. The network settled that case out of court in November.
The judge presiding over a voting machine company’s defamation lawsuit against Fox denied the company’s request Wednesday to hold separate trials — one for Fox News and another for the network’s parent company.
Newly revealed recordings of Maria Bartiromo’s conversations with Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others have left a Delaware judge again upset with Fox’s legal team. Judge Eric M. Davis indicated that he would appoint a special master to investigate Fox’s representations to the court, including declarations made in December over the extent of discovery materials that have been produced to Dominion Voting Systems in their $1.6 billion defamation case. Davis said that he was “very concerned” that Fox made it seem as if it had met its discovery obligations.
Attorneys defending Fox in the $1.6 billion defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems over alleged false claims about the 2020 election withheld critical information about the role company founder Rupert Murdoch played at Fox News, a revelation that angered the judge when it came up at a Tuesday hearing. It was not clear whether the development would affect a trial scheduled to begin Thursday with jury selection.
Major League Baseball has asked a federal court overseeing the bankruptcy case involving Sinclair Inc.’s Diamond Sports Group to terminate the broadcaster’s rights to games played by the Cleveland Guardians and Minnesota Twins if it does not make an immediate payment connected to licensing rights.
Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier is perhaps the best personification of Fox Corp chief Lachlan Murdoch’s description of Fox News as a network that targets the “center-right.” While his selection of stories and analysts often appeal to conservative sensibilities, Baier presents the news from a journalistic standpoint, covers major developments of the day, and corrects misstatements of facts.
A lawsuit filed against the SAG-AFTRA Health Plan, which claimed that changes to eligibility for benefits “illegally discriminated” against older members, has been settled. The suit was filed in federal court in December 2020 by former SAG President Ed Asner and nine other SAG-AFTRA members. The Health Plan, which had been facing staggering deficits, said that the changes were necessary to keep it from going broke. Asner died in 2021, but a federal judge allowed the case to continue.
