Just hours before a trial was about to start in Dominion Voting Systems’s defamation suit against Fox News for its 2020 election coverage, the network reached a $787m settlement to avert further legal action.
Despite the settlement, there will be no retractions or on-air apologies on Fox, a source with knowledge of the agreement told The Independent.
The network, in a statement, admitted that a Delaware court found “certain claims about Dominion to be false”, but that’s likely as far as the broadcaster will go when it comes to considering its prominent role in broadcasting election conspiracies to viewers, despite records unearthed in the suit suggesting top figures at Fox knew such claims were false.
Following the settlement, the network devoted some time to covering the Dominion case and Fox’s role in it.
“The idea that Dominion voting machines, former president Trump and his allies made this case on Fox and elsewhere, were somehow stealing votes from Donald Trump and flipping them to Joe Biden, that’s obviously false. Those were conspiracy theories,” Fox media analyst Howard Kurtz said in one segment on Tuesday.
“The case would have revolved around whether Fox had done due diligence, whether it was reckless, whether it was simply reporting, as the network contends, on an extremely newsworthy matter argued by the the former, then-president of the United States.”
(In February, Mr Kurtz said, when it came to the Dominion case, the network “decided that as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about,” a decision he said he disagreed with.)
Outside of Fox News, the settlement prompted harsh condemnations of the conservative broadcaster.
“Today’s settlement ... represents vindication and accountability,” Dominion lawyer Justin Nelson told reporters outside the courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware, where the defamation trial was set to take place. “Lies have consequences. The truth does not know red or blue.”
“Money is accountability, and we got that today from Fox,” Dominion Lawyer Stephen Shackelford added. “But we’re not done yet, we’ve got some other people who have some accountability coming toward them.”
On CNN, meanwhile, anchor Jake Tapper said on Tuesday as he was announcing the news that the settlement “can only be interpreted as one of the ugliest and most embarrassing moments in the history of journalism.”
