If Fox Was Sorry, They Would Have Said So in Their Statement
Anyone thinking that Fox News had caved to Dominion Voting Systems in reaching a last-minute, whopping $787.5 million settlement of the huge libel lawsuit filed over repeated election lies should check out the network for a few minutes.
If Fox was sorry, they would have said so in their statement. The network didn’t do so, only acknowledging that the court had determined that there had been some number of on-air lies in lieu of straight election information. A real apology is what a libel finding usually requires.
If the settlement was a concession by Fox, you might think the network’s premiere opinion anchors, whose own emails and messages emerging in courtroom documents reflected their distribution of on-air lies about voting machine manipulation, would show some post-settlement, on-air attention to whether they were now reporting fact rather than propaganda,
Nope. For openers, anchors who were not reporting breaking headlines, simply ignored the case altogether, and it took Fox and other right-leaning media a good while before they even picked up the settlement announcement on websites. Meanwhile, on MSNBC, the news was being greeted with a certain glee. If Fox is your sole news outlet, you might not really get that this was a huge case or the extent of the lying that has gone on for years about the 2020 election since Fox didn’t cover what was learned in court depositions and the court evidence,
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and their mates found plenty of other topics with which to beat up the Biden administration without discussing their promotion of election information the evidence – and even the Fox statement, weak as it was – established that they knew to have been wrong.
The court said that repeated and “endorsed” claims by Fox anchors, like Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, have been central to Donald Trump’s effort to persuade Americans that he had not actually lost. They continued to air unquestioned election conspiracy information from Trump surrogates, even when counter-information was available and common, the evidence showed.
Business as Usual?
In the end, Dominion got its big money settlement to cover financial losses and the very minimum of acknowledgement that the principal Fox opinion hosts are serial liars in pursuit of keeping a liberal-resistant audience entertained. As owner Rupert Murdoch had acknowledged in his own deposition, the lying was not about red or blue politics, but about the green of continued business success in keeping a rapt conservative audience that needs to be fed disinformation in a manner they have come to expect.
Fox found that lying about the news, and libeling companies or people insisting on the truth can go away with a check – a big check, but a pay-out, nevertheless. Then business and its billion-dollar annual profit can go on as usual.
The network will need that reassurance, of course, because there are more libel actions lined up from Smartmatic, the election software company used in Dominion machines, from a renegade Fox producer who thought she was being set up to take the fall for the network, and from stockholders who think their money should go to other causes than bad legal judgments.
Dominion may have gotten what it needed, but the reason the rest of the country was focused on the trial was for a mistaken belief that it would be a cleansing to hear Fox personalities have to apologize on air or in open court for substituting propaganda for news. Those who thought this was somehow a court proceeding about saving democracy will have to be satisfied with an outcome that falls far short of that goal.
Indeed, there was no evidence in post-settlement airtime that Fox and its network friends see any upside in fact-checking, rigorous reporting or statements that might suggest there is more than a single political side to questions before the nation.
Indeed, despite the public statements, understanding that two warring companies could find their way through disagreement to a watered-down settlement seemed ultimately a salute to capitalism than to issues of truth and justice.
One Upside
There was one clear upside to the settlement news that was not part of the immediate analysis, which concentrated on the size of the money figures.
Because the trial was cancelled, Fox, which clearly saw that it was most likely on track for an adverse verdict by a citizen jury, cannot appeal any outcome.
That is good because the promise to appeals to the Supreme Court would have opened the door for a conservative majority to revisit the nation’s precedent libel standard, the New York Times v. Sullivan case.
The 1964 case made it more difficult that set a high legal bar for public figures to prove that they had been defamed. A plaintiff must prove not just that a news organization published false information, but that it did so with “actual malice,” either by knowing that the information was false or displaying a reckless disregard for the truth.
In recent months, Republicans including Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argue that the Sullivan case granted too much leeway to news outlets, which should face harsher consequences for their coverage – not thinking that this might apply to Fox News, of course.
The Sullivan protections clearly are needed in a democracy to support an independent press.
What we learned in this settlement is that even Fox had to acknowledge that it was engaged in something other than news coverage. It would be nice to see the network act on its newfound knowledge and not just keep writing damage checks.
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