There will be no trial. But we learned plenty. And there’s more to come.
The long-anticipated defamation trial in Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News ended before it truly began Tuesday, with a judge announcing the two sides had agreed to a settlement. Dominion says Fox has agreed to pay $787.5 million — nearly half of the $1.6 billion Dominion sought.
The settlement, the full terms of which weren’t immediately clear and could remain shrouded, will spare Fox a lengthy spectacle delving into those issues. But it came after a series of ugly disclosures about the cable news leader.
Below are some takeaways.
1. The damage done
The name of the game for Fox and its owners in such situations — be it the British phone-hacking scandal, sexual misconduct, gender discrimination cases or others — is almost always to settle. Often, and evidently by design, that deprives us of a true hearing on the merits of the allegations.
But in this case Fox didn’t reach a settlement until after a series of thoroughly damaging revelations via the legal discovery process and early court maneuvers. The documentation in the case showed that many at Fox indeed knew better about the conspiracy theories the network aired, that it chose to air them anyway in the name of appealing to an audience that believed these claims and wanted to believe Trump had won, and that even Fox’s news product toed the company’s political line.
The judge also ruled that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that the claims Fox aired were false.
What will continue to linger over the network are the lessons of all that evidence. Given what we’ve learned about Fox’s focus on its business model, other outlets will view its news product — its journalism — accordingly. It reinforced the idea that the shows put on by Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are just that: shows tailored to an audience, and they might not reflect what the hosts or the people behind the scenes actually know or believe.
Perhaps as much as anything, the case reflected the control Trump has over the conservative movement, given the fear Fox demonstrated of what Trump could do to it — a fear that echoes the broader Republican Party’s posture toward Trump.
Of course, whether Fox viewers will ever consume any of that is another matter. Fox covered the trial sparingly after initially barring even its media reporter from weighing in. The conservative media ecosystem is exceedingly insular.
