The news corporation will have to shell out $787.5m but, for them, it’s just ‘the cost of doing business’
The staggering $787.5m settlement between Fox and the voting equipment company Dominion marked the end of one of the most aggressive efforts to hold someone accountable for spreading misinformation after the 2020 election.
Dominion sued Fox for $1.6bn in damages for knowingly broadcasting false information about the company after the election. The money from the settlement, one of the largest libel payouts in media history, was just the icing on a cake Dominion had, in many ways, already won.
And yet, while Fox doled out an unprecedented sum, they were able to avoid something priceless: the public humiliation of a trial and an apology.
Over the last several months, Dominion has created a valuable historical artifact, publishing an internal trove of messages that showed Fox hosts and executives knew their claims about Dominion were false and advanced them anyway. It was cache that laid bare how America’s most powerful media outlet lies and distorts the truth to whip up its conservative base.
“The interesting and important aspect of this settlement is that it came well after we might have expected Fox wanted it to occur. All of the sordid details from behind the scenes – about what key Fox players said about Fox sources, about Trump, and about the network’s own audience – came to light,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah.
“It seems clear that Dominion was motivated not just to win compensation for its own injury but to have a public-facing accountability for election denialism and disinformation. The timing of the settlement reflects that.”
But the lack of a six-week trial meant that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro would not have to own up to their role in spreading dangerous misinformation after the 2020 election. It suggests that lies, no matter how dangerous or insidious, are tolerable as long as you have the money to back it up.
