Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox News was settled for $787.5 million at the start of a trial Tuesday. Based on a series of sneak peeks at the damning evidence against Fox developed in pretrial discovery, the lucrative payout wasn’t surprising: The case Dominion was prepared to present was beyond devastating.
The outcome underscored the tension between the public value of litigation and the private interests driving a lawsuit. Dominion had a killer case against Fox that had many eagerly anticipating a measure of accountability for the network’s knowing support of the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. But the company’s $1.6 billion claim for damages looked high. So the case was ripe for a settlement in which Fox paid a premium to avoid a debacle of a trial, serving the parties’ interests more than society’s.
Fox got off fairly lightly given the risks bearing down on it. By most accounts, it can absorb the settlement fairly easily. It’s a reasonable price to avoid the immense damage to its reputation — and consequently its bottom line — that an extended, detailed account of its knowing lies would have occasioned.
