Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax, it appears, remains a little touchy about its legal exposure regarding bogus claims it promoted accusing voting-tech companies like Dominion of changing votes to make Donald Trump lose the presidential election. In a Feb. 22 article on Dominion suing MyPillow guy Mike Lindell for spreading lies about the company, Newsmax inserted a familiar disclaimer:
Newsmax received a letter from Dominion in late December threatening litigation.
While Newsmax covered and reported on allegations made by President Trump and his attorneys, it never claimed such allegations were true. Newsmax published and aired several stories and reports sharing Dominion’s response to the President’s allegations.
To further clarify its position, and before any legal action was threatened against it, Newsmax stated that it had had found no evidence that Dominion manipulated voting software during the 2020 election.
As we've noted, that's not the whole story -- Newsmax presented those claims uncritically, and without noting that the claims were false, until Dominion sent that letter to it. The double "had" in the final paragraph was repeated in an article five days earlier, showing that someone just copied and pasted it while not copy-editing it.
Newsmax repeated its disclaimer (though not the same exact language) in a March 26 article on Dominion filing a defamation suit against Fox News for doing essentially the same thing Newsmax did. But it also tried to play whataboutism with the Mueller investigation into Trump:
Conservative critics of the suits claim the litigation has been an attempt to squelch dissent about the election results that emanated from then-President Donald Trump and his lawyers.
They also noted that major media and networks published and broadcast multiple stories relating to claims of a conspiracy between the Russian government and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Exhaustive investigations by Congress and Special Counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence such allegations were true.
In fact, there were numerous contacts between Russias and the Trump campaign, but the evidence did not rise to a criminal level.
