Put away the popcorn. The decision by Rupert Murdoch to spend $787.5m (£633m) to settle the defamation lawsuit brought against Fox News has allowed the media mogul to avoid having to take the stand and defend lies told on his television channel about the last US election. It’s an escape hatch. It’s also a massive humiliation.
As drama, Fox v Dominion would have been box office: a tale of truth and lies and almost limitless money and power that would have trumped any trial involving footballers’ wives, if not the fictional series about a powerful media mogul currently airing on a UK television channel once owned by Murdoch. Just to underline the entertainment value, one of the top Google search terms for “Fox and Dominion” just before the settlement was announced was, “Can I watch the trial for free?”
Now disappointed viewers are just left to count the cost to democracy and truth.
Pre-trial hearings and disclosure produced evidence that Fox repeatedly aired the lie that Dominion was linked to Venezuela, and helped rig the 2020 election against Donald Trump, bribing government officials to use its machines in order to do so.
It was a lie that withstood no fewer than 3,682 emailed denials from Dominion alone, and went on to inspire death threats against its employees and election officials across the country. It was also a lie that contributed in part to the violent attack on the US Capitol on 6 January in order to “stop the steal”. Nine deaths have been linked to the attack. Almost $1bn does not seem quite so high after all.
Among the questions raised by the legal drama unfolding in Delaware was how presenters and the owner of a broadcast “news” channel could knowingly have spread lies. Another question was how much a former reality TV star-turned-US president had changed not only democracy but also the journalism meant to hold the powerful to account by calling out “fake news”. As the Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson said in announcing the settlement: “The truth matters. Lies have consequences.”
One of the ironies of the defamation suit is that these momentous questions have been raised not by government or regulators, but by a voting machine manufacturer no one had heard of before guests on Fox News started to spread the lie that it had been founded in Venezuela to rig elections for the dictator Hugo Chávez.
Dominion’s triumph was in unveiling messages and emails showing that powerful figures at the news organisation knew how far-fetched some of the allegations it continued to broadcast to millions of voters really were. After watching the former high-profile lawyer and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani sweating hair dye while making false claims about Dominion at a press conference, Murdoch himself wrote in an email that it was, “Really crazy stuff. And damaging”.
Just how damaging is yet to be seen. The damage to Fox is putting yet another figure to match that of the phone-hacking scandal on what shareholders have long called “the Murdoch discount” – the cost of an organisation seemingly run like a personal fiefdom by the 92-year-old. Yet the settlement has avoided Fox presenters such as Maria Bartiromo – a friend of Trump’s on whose show the allegations against Dominion were first aired – having to apologise to viewers on air for helping to spread lies.
Such apologies could hurt Fox where it matters, by potentially driving its pro-Trump viewers, who continue to believe in electoral fraud, to even more outrageous rightwing US TV network rivals such as Newsmax and One America News Network.
Fox’s response will be an important marker of how much the Dominion win will matter to the rest of us – and not just the voting machine manufacturer’s private equity owners. In attempting to fight the case, Fox had claimed to be protecting the rights of a free press, claiming that a triumph for Dominion “would have grave consequences for the entire journalism profession”. In announcing the settlement, the broadcaster said, without a trace of irony, that it had a “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards”.
Let’s be clear about this: if the journalism profession lets a broadcaster cite the integrity of all journalists when it knew that its presenters were allowing guests to lie, then we really are all doomed. Journalism standards that promote “newsworthy” lies over dull truth lead to a situation where anyone can say anything they like in the media, if that’s what viewers – or powerful politicians happy to do a media owner’s bidding – want to hear.
The judge in the Dominion case knew this. It should go without saying that journalists, no matter their political or employment affiliations, should know it too. Otherwise the win in this trial will be worth nothing at all.
Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist
