Earlier this week, Fox News finally paid a price for years of spreading lies and misinformation — and at $787.5 million it was, to put it mildly, an extraordinarily expensive lesson. To settle the lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems over false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 election, Fox will pay one of the largest monetary settlements ever in a defamation case.
Some critics of the agreement, however, are publicly wondering whether Fox really learned its lesson. “Rupert wins again,” declared Politico media critic Jack Shafer, in a reference to Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch. While $787.5 million is nothing to sneeze at, Fox News has more than $4 billion in cash on hand. So it’s not as if it can’t afford to pay Dominion.
And as critics of the settlement ruefully note, Fox News isn’t required to tell viewers that it lied to them about Dominion or the 2020 election. As liberal writer Molly Jong-Fast noted, the lack of public comeuppance for the nation’s most-watched cable news outlet “is why a lot of us feel like Fox won.”
It’s hard to see how a public apology or contrition would change the cultlike hold that Fox News has on its viewers.
Indeed, even in announcing the agreement, Fox continued to gaslight. It acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” but it asserted that the “settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” The latter clause, when applied to Fox News, is akin to throwing irony into a pit of acid.
But while it’s easy to sympathize with the frustrations over the settlement, it’s hard to see how a public apology or contrition would change the cultlike hold that Fox News has on its viewers. After all, they don’t tune into the network because they want to get fair and balanced news and information.
They want to be lied to.
The entire reason this case emerged is that beginning on election night 2020, Fox News told its…
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