MSNBC host Rachel Maddow is defending herself in court by claiming her statements on air should not be taken as fact.
Maddow’s lawyer referred to her “rhetorical hyperbole” in a $10 million defamation lawsuit brought by One America News Network, which the host of “The Rachel Maddow Show” claimed, “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”
Theodore Boutrous Jr. claimed in a defense motion, according to Culttture, that the liberal host “was clearly offering up her ‘own unique expression’ of her views to capture what she saw as the ‘ridiculous’ nature of the undisputed facts. Her comment, therefore, is a quintessential statement ‘of rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proved true or false.’”
OANN, filed the $10 million defamation lawsuit in a federal court in California in September against Maddow, Comcast Corporation, NBC Universal, and MSNBC, accusing Maddow of “maliciously and recklessly” smearing the network.
“In this case, the most obsequiously pro-Trump right-wing news outlet in America is really, literally is paid Russian propaganda,” Maddow had declared in a July segment on her show. “Their on-air politics reporter (Kristian Rouz) is paid by the Russian government to produce propaganda for that government.”
A linguistics expert believes Maddow’s comments would not be perceived as an opinion by most of her viewers.
“It is very unlikely that an average or reasonable/ordinary viewer would consider the sentence in question to be a statement of opinion,” UC Santa Barbara linguistics professor Stefan Thomas Gries said, according to Culttture.
“Maddow did not use any typical opinion-markers when she stated that OANN ‘really literally is paid Russian propaganda,’” Gries added, citing analysis that studied the MSNBC host’s words, tone, and cadence.
The remarks by the 46-year-old liberal commentator were known to be “false” by the defendants named in the lawsuit, the OANN complaint alleged, and her words were “meant to damage” the conservative channel, which was launched in 2013.
