A lawsuit filed by former “misinformation czar” Nina Jankowicz against Fox News has been dismissed.
Jankowicz was head of the 2022 Disinformation Governance Board for less than a month before she resigned.
She sued Fox News for defamation, according to The Hill, and claimed the outlet falsely said she “intended to censor Americans’ speech” and that she “wanted to give verified Twitter users, including herself, the power to edit others’ tweets.”
A federal judge in Delaware, Chief Judge Colm Connolly, dismissed the complaint. He wrote in the opinion that the one statement from Fox News relating to Jankowicz “is not defamatory because it is not false.”
The statement involved Sean Hannity calling the Disinformation Governance Board a department “dedicated to working with the special media giants for the purpose of policing information” and showing an image of Jankowicz.
Connolly added in the ruling that the “Board was formed precisely to police information and to work with nongovernmental actors.”
“Fox contends, and I agree, that Jankowicz has not pleaded facts from which it could plausibly be inferred that the challenged statements regarding intended censorship by Jankowicz are not substantially true. On the contrary, as noted above, censorship is commonly understood to encompass efforts to scrutinize and examine speech in order to suppress certain communications,” Connolly wrote. “The Disinformation Governance Board was formed precisely to examine citizens’ speech and, in coordination with the private sector, identify ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’ For the reasons discussed above, that objective is fairly characterized as a form of censorship.”
Fox called the case a “politically motivated lawsuit aimed at silencing free speech,” adding that it is “pleased with the court’s decision to protect the First Amendment.”
