Dershowitz to Newsmax: It’s a ‘Very Bad Day for the First Amendment’

Constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax Monday that Tucker Carlson’s parting ways with Fox News is “the fallout” from the settlement that the network “foolishly” made with Dominion Voting Systems and that it’s a “very bad day for the First Amendment.”

“The real problem is that you have government officials – the majority leader of the United States Senate – calling for censorship, and then you have a private company engaging in censorship at the request of the majority leader who has influence over the company,” Dershowitz said during an appearance on Newsmax’s “John Bachman Now.” “That sounds to me like it comes awfully close to government censorship, and what we’re seeing is the fallout of the settlement that Fox foolishly made with Dominion.”

“It hurt the First Amendment, it hurt freedom of speech, it hurt the Constitution,” he continued. “It may have selfishly helped Fox to avoid some internal problems, and it’s certainly fattened Dominion – it’s making more money on lawsuits now than they ever did on counting votes – but this is a very bad day for the First Amendment.”

“You don’t have to be a fan of Tucker Carlson or Don Lemon to be a fan of the First Amendment and say that viewers are entitled to hear views that many of us might disagree with. I think today we’re seeing milquetoast become the standard operating procedure at networks as they engage in self-censorship to avoid the kind of lawsuit that Dominion and others are continuing to bring.”

Tucker Carlson’s last week at Fox News coincided with the network agreeing to pay Dominion more than $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit and there was no immediate explanation from Fox about why it’s most popular host was leaving.

The Harvard law professor emeritus, a Democrat, said that Newsmax welcomes diversity of thought in a way that not all networks do.

“I surely don’t agree with some of the commentators on whose shows I appear, and that’s the virtue of Newsmax, and I would hope that both CNN, which has a long history of lying and distortion, including against me, and Fox continue to present a diversity of viewpoints,” he said. “Today, diversity is limited to race and the real meaning of diversity is diversity of viewpoints.”

“Remember too, the First Amendment is not only the right of the speaker, like Tucker Carlson,” Dershowitz continued. “It’s the right of the viewer and the listener to hear different points of view. Today we are a poorer country, under the First Amendment, than we were yesterday and we are a poorer country than we were a week ago before the benighted settlement that Fox foolishly made, I think, with Dominion – a case that they could have won.”

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