Fox News, two years too late, settled its defamation case with Dominion Voting Systems, agreeing to pay the company a whopping $787.5 million over its false reporting on the 2020 elections.
“We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” Fox News said in a statement after the settlement was announced on Tuesday, which was to have been the opening day of an expected six-week trial.
At issue was Dominion’s claim that Fox News had repeatedly aired falsehoods about its voting machines in its coverage of the 2020 election; the news channel’s contention was that it had merely been reporting on what it considered newsworthy allegations coming from Donald Trump, and that it was protected in doing so by the First Amendment.
The judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, had already ruled that the statements Fox News had aired about Dominion were false, so the matter for the jury boiled down to deciding whether the news channel had knowingly disseminated what Trump would call “fake news.”
“An apology is about accountability, and today Dominion held Fox accountable,” a Dominion spokeswoman said. “Fox paid a historic settlement and issued a statement acknowledging that the statements about Dominion were false.”
Per reporting from the New York Times, settlement is the second-biggest penalty in a defamation case in U.S. history, trailing the $1.4 billion verdict against InfoWars conspiracy theorist talk-show Alex Jones over his trolling of the families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting.
And then, according to the Washington Post, the $787.5 million settlement – a smidge under half the $1.6 billion that Dominion had been seeking – amounts to roughly 20 percent of Fox’s cash on hand.
Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch had told analysts in February during an earnings call that the company had about $4 billion in cash on hand.
All of this in terms of the cash payout, and on top of the money, there’s the reputational damage to Fox News that came out in discovery, with revelations that top Fox News executives and news and opinion hosts did not believe the election lies being peddled by Trump and his allies, but aired them anyway, at least in part to avoid losing viewers to right-wing news competitors.
Fox News seemed to address the reputational damage in its statement following the settlement announcement.
“This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards,” the company said in the statement. “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.”
But before Fox News can “move forward from these issues,” there’s the matter of another lawsuit over its 2020 election coverage from another voting-machine company, Smartmatic, which is suing the broadcaster for $2.7 billion.
Similar to the Dominion case, Smartmatic is accusing Fox News of falsely implicating the company in a bogus narrative about vote rigging in the 2020 election.
“Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign,” a Smartmatic spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday. “Smartmatic will expose the rest.”
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Chris Graham
