It was going to be one of those weeks you were never going to forget.
Starting last Tuesday, you were finally going to discover how the world’s most famous/infamous media mogul and his constellation of glitter-sprayed, far-right TV news superstars would respond under oath about all those election lies Fox News dished to its please-lie-to-me viewers.
Even when Fox’s elites knew they were dishing lies – and knew those lies were sabotaging our democracy and tearing America apart. Just because it was good for their Fox brand.
But the only thing you discovered this past week is that zillionaires can always make their public embarrassment never happen.
And that’s what the zillionaire Rupert Murdoch, who was scheduled to be Witness Number Two, did last Tuesday. Jurors had been chosen and Judge Eric Davis was about to gavel his Delaware Superior Courtroom to order and begin the trial of the defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.
But at the courtroom door, Murdoch did his usual thing – and had his people agree to pay a humongous $787.5 million settlement to make Dominion’s suit disappear. So everybody went home. Never mind that justice wasn’t served for the American people. Our democracy was sabotaged. And our executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government apparently aren’t going to do anything about it.
King Rupert and his Superstars became the never-had-to gang: Never had to acknowledge under oath all the 2020 election lies Fox aired, falsely asserting Dominion’s voting machines flipped Donald Trump votes to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Never had to explain why all their frantic texts and emails to each other showed they knew Trump’s talking heads were lying about Dominion on Fox (Dominion discovered and revealed them months ago). Never had to testify about the messages where they warned each other that telling the truth would cause their please-lie-to-me viewers to switch to other right-wing news networks.
Maybe you’ve seen the myopic thinkers in my news craft moaning because Fox was never required to apologize. But who cares about a fake Fox apology? Not Dominion’s business brass – they got the only thing they wanted: Fox’s money.
Now you know what Rupert Murdoch always knew: $ettlement means never having to say you’re sorry. It’s just the price of doing business the Murdoch way.
We are waiting for another trial, a lawsuit filed against Fox by Smartmatic, which supplied Los Angeles County’s voting software. (Raise your hands if you think Rupert and his Superstars will end up testifying in that case.)
There may be nothing that America’s three constitutionally defined branches of government can or will do about it.
But it’s possible that our latest justice gap can be filled, in part, by America’s de facto Fourth Branch of governance: Yes, the news media. While we in the news media definitely aren’t a branch of the government we cover, we must acknowledge we are a player in the process of governance. Decisions about what we will cover and what we’ll overlook help shape government’s daily work agendas. And yes, often we end up fanning the flames when we cover the fires.
This past week, many of my news colleagues inadvertently let Murdoch escape public accountability for Fox’s election lies. Fox was permitted to issue a limp settlement statement that contained just one insultingly weak – and even deceptive – sentence of acknowledgment: “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
Time out: Just “certain claims"? Many news reports quoted Fox’s sentence – but overlooked evidence that proving Fox’s statement was still distorting what the judge really ruled after reviewing all evidence. On March 31, Judge Davis didn’t limit his ruling to just “certain” Fox claims – he ruled that “none” of Fox’s election claims about Dominion were true.
“The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that is CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true,” the judge ruled. He stunningly used those capital letters, in bold and italicized fonts, to emphasize that one word.
That may be news to you today – but it should have been prominent in every single news story. Instead, many accounts overlooked the judge’s March 31 but then quoted Fox’s very next, insulting sentence: “This settlement reflects FOX’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”
Absurd. Fox’s history has been quite the opposite. But while some legal scholars may have rushed to find a Latin legal phrase for “chutzpah,” Judge Davis preferred to make that same point in a stately, judicial way. Fox’s statements, he wrote, were “dramatically different than the truth. …Fox takes a nuanced approach to falsity.”
