he stage is set in Wilmington, Delaware, for a high-stakes legal drama pitting media giant Fox against a voting machine company over false claims its machines rigged the 2020 presidential election.
Dominion Voting Systems, which makes machines for casting and counting ballots as well as software for election officials to track results, is suing Fox News and its parent company Fox Corporation for $US1.6 billion ($2.4 billion).
It alleges Fox News "endorsed, repeated and broadcast" wild conspiracy theories that linked Dominion to a communist plot to steal the election from Donald Trump and accused the company of manipulating vote counts and paying off government officials who used the machines.
Fox argues that it was simply reporting the news and that its viewers knew that the allegations of dodgy algorithms, kickbacks and Venezuelan connections were not statements of fact.
The trial, set to begin in April, puts a key pillar of US
defamation law to the test and could have ripple effects on the country's media landscape and the
Murdoch empire.
It all started on US election night in 2020
The case boils down to Fox's coverage in the weeks after the 2020 election.
Around 11:20pm on election night, the Fox News decision desk was the first major network to call the battleground state of Arizona for Joe Biden, with 73 per cent of votes counted.
On air, Trump's former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted it was too early to declare, and a Fox host asked the decision desk director to explain how he could be "100 per cent" on that call.
Trump, members of his inner circle, and an army of vocal supporters who made up a sizeable chunk of Fox's core audience, expressed outrage.
The result that would come to foreshadow Biden's victory became central to Trump's long-running claims that the 2020 election was "stolen" from him.
With his chances of a path back to the White House narrowing, Trump declared victory and argued, without evidence, that a "major fraud" had occurred.
A conspiracy theory soon began circulating on QAnon forums and social media claiming that a company called Dominion had intentionally "deleted 2.7 million votes nationwide".
The allegation, picked up by far-right One America News Network, was that Dominion was built by associates of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez to rig elections and that its machines had switched millions of votes from Trump to Biden.
Five days after the election, Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell was a guest on Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo's show, where Powell discussed "evidence of fraud" relating to the Dominion machines.
In the subsequent weeks, Powell and another Trump ally, his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, appeared on several prime-time Fox shows where they repeated these claims.
On November 19, the theory reached maximum exposure in a disinformation-riddled press conference where Giuliani alleged a communist plot involving Dominion, Venezuela, Cuba and "likely China".