Fox News will pay $787.5 million for transmitting lies that a small voting technology firm helped steal the 2020 election. But it’s impossible to put a price on damaged trust in US democracy.
The last-minute deal Tuesday between the conservative channel and Dominion Voting Systems, halting a blockbuster jury trial, delivered a staggering financial settlement after a process that had already exposed Fox’s willingness to parrot election conspiracy theories that its executives and anchors knew weren’t true.
The agreement delivered restitution to Dominion for the hits to its reputation, and repudiated false claims that its machines were used to simply flip vote totals from ex-President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden. It represented a huge victory for the firm’s lawyers and, in the context of a civil legal suit, the massive payoff validated the decision to bring the case.
“This is really the first time that anyone has paid a price for telling the lies about the 2020 election and we are very proud about that,” Dominion’s lead lawyer, Justin Nelson, told CNN’s Alex Marquardt, arguing that the settlement secured accountability for the firm and solidified a shared vision of national facts vital to the survival of democracy.
There have indeed been few consequences for the Trump lawyers and supporters who spouted falsehoods and nonsense about a fair election in 2020 that the ex-president lost, although some key figures and other right-wing networks face their own pending defamation suits from Dominion. Smartmatic, another voting technology company, is also suing Fox News for defamation in a case that’s pending. And Trump himself is facing several criminal probes related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and the run-up to the January 6, 2021, insurrection.
Dominion’s lawyers argued that they performed a valuable civic service by teasing out the truth of how Fox News operates and the way that its leaders feared that fact checking Trump’s claims would cause viewers to defect to other right-wing outlets. Much of this information came out in a flurry of pre-trial legal filings that got huge media coverage.
But outside of the legal and financial context, does Nelson’s statement that this was a moment of public accountability really ring true, especially when Trump is continuing to make election falsehoods a central currency of his 2024 campaign? And is there any chance that Fox’s humiliation can repair some of the damage from the disastrous election aftermath in 2020? Will the settlement do anything to change a conservative media model that monetizes falsehoods?
Fox News is set to pay a heavy financial price in the settlement, and its reputation took massive blows after it emerged that its anchors knew Trump’s claims were spurious. But those prime-time stars will not be required by the terms of the settlement to apologize on air.
Ironically, the viewers whom they didn’t want to alienate by telling them the truth about the election may never know they were misled without the channel’s anchors having to admit it on TV.
This is one reason why it’s unlikely that news of the massive payout will make much of a ripple in the conservative media bubble and among the millions of Trump voters who have embraced his lies about 2020.
There is, therefore, very little hope that the settlement will do anything to puncture the alternative reality concocted by the ex-president that he was illegally ejected from office. And while the magnitude of Tuesday’s settlement might make conservative networks more cautious about defaming individual firms like Dominion, it’s unlikely they will ditch their lucrative business model. So while the outcome of this case carries important media and business consequences, it may not have much impact on future US elections.
Fox’s statement Tuesday hinted that while the massive check it will cut to Dominion is effectively an admission of guilt and a stunning blow to its finances, the public spin around the judgment – and the way it will be filtered through the conservative media world – will be very heavily conditioned.
“We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” Fox said in a statement that fell well short of a public mea culpa. “We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues,” the statement went on.
Another way for the country to have been spared such acrimony would have been for no one to have made or amplified false voter fraud claims, which were initially spun by Trump and eventually helped lead to an unprecedented mob attack on Congress by his supporters.
By settling before the trial, Fox avoided having the billionaire chair of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, top editors, and stars like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson being potentially called to testify under oath about its coverage of the election. For the conservative news channel’s opponents, that will be a lost cathartic opportunity to hold Fox’s leadership to account for their conduct. Even given the conservative bubble, such a spectacle would have been hard for Fox to hide.
That missing moment of accountability will be important because claims that the 2020 election was corrupt are not some artifact of recent history. They are a corrosive and self-perpetuating reality two years on. Trump rarely misses a chance to refresh his lies about 2020 and he uses the perception that he was kicked out of office unfairly to fire up voters for his bid to regain the White House in 2024. Polls show large numbers of conservatives have lost faith in the electoral system and falsely believe that Biden did not win sufficient votes to win the presidency. A CNN/SSRS survey in July 2022 found that only 29% of Republicans had confidence that US elections truly represent the will of the people.
The extent to which Trump’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories harmed democracy is open to debate. After all, the constitutional guardrails protecting the transfer of power did hold firm in Congress and in the courts despite the insurrection. When voters in swing states were presented with GOP nominees in the midterms who supported Trump’s lies, they were most often rejected in a manner that dampened Republican hopes of a red wave election.
Yet the decline of democracy isn’t necessarily always visible. In nations where political freedoms have been eclipsed, a slow erosion of confidence in democratic institutions builds over time. Growing public distrust in the integrity of elections and judicial and political institutions has a damaging cumulative effect. So while the $787 million payment to Dominion can help repair the company’s own reputational loss, it will not wipe lies about 2020 out of public consciousness or reverse their impact among conservative voters. The damage is done.
Still, some Washington veterans were more optimistic about the long-term impact of Tuesday’s settlement.
Norm Eisen, a former White House special assistant for ethics and government reform, marveled at the size of the settlement, which he argued sent an unequivocal message.
“It’s a gigantic number for a settlement of a case of this kind,” Eisen told CNN. “That sends a message, Fox has also had to acknowledge the false statements that they made. Even if Fox doesn’t report on this, it is such a big news story it is going to penetrate to every part of our country.”
And Benjamin Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election lawyer, said that “all settlements end up with a little bit of good and a little bit of disappointment.” He told told CNN’s Erin Burnett that the settlement was “really damaging to those who say the election was stolen. This was an important day potentially for restoring faith in American elections.”
But Dominion’s lawyer, Nelson, acknowledged that despite delivering a statement about democracy, even a settlement worth three-quarters of a billion dollars could not repair the damage wrought by lies about the 2020 election.
“I think it shows that we are not going to stop holding people accountable for these election lies, that to be clear, are continuing to cause tremendous damage to Dominion and to our country. There are a tons of people who still falsely believe it.”
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