Analysis
‘Dominion wins but the public loses’: Fox
settlement avoids paying the highest price
Sam Levine
in
Wilmington, Delaware
The news corporation will have to shell out $787.5m
but, for them, it’s just ‘the cost of doing business’
.jpg)
Wed 19 Apr
2023 03.45 BST
The
staggering $787.5m settlement between Fox and the voting equipment company
Dominion marked the end of one of the most aggressive efforts to hold someone
accountable for spreading misinformation after the 2020 election.
Dominion
sued Fox for $1.6bn in damages for knowingly broadcasting false information
about the company after the election. The money from the settlement, one of the
largest libel payouts in media history, was just the icing on a cake Dominion
had, in many ways, already won.
And yet,
while Fox doled out an unprecedented sum, they were able to avoid something
priceless: the public humiliation of a trial and an apology.
Rupert
Murdoch<br>FILE - Rupert Murdoch introduces Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo during the Herman Kahn Award Gala, in New York, Oct. 30, 2018. Tucker
Carlson, Sean Hannity and Bret Baier are among the stars that both Fox News and
the voting machine company suing it for defamation have signaled could testify
if the explosive case heads to trial next month.(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
Over the
last several months, Dominion has created a valuable historical artifact,
publishing an internal trove of messages that showed Fox hosts and executives
knew their claims about Dominion were false and advanced them anyway. It was
cache that laid bare how America’s most powerful media outlet lies and distorts
the truth to whip up its conservative base.
“The
interesting and important aspect of this settlement is that it came well after
we might have expected Fox wanted it to occur. All of the sordid details from
behind the scenes – about what key Fox players said about Fox sources, about
Trump, and about the network’s own audience – came to light,” said RonNell
Andersen Jones, a first amendment scholar at the University of Utah.
“It seems
clear that Dominion was motivated not just to win compensation for its own
injury but to have a public-facing accountability for election denialism and
disinformation. The timing of the settlement reflects that.”
But the
lack of a six-week trial meant that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Tucker Carlson,
Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro would not have to own up to
their role in spreading dangerous misinformation after the 2020 election. It
suggests that lies, no matter how dangerous or insidious, are tolerable as long
as you have the money to back it up. “You could argue that Dominion wins but
the public loses,” Brian Stelter, the respected media reporter who has written
extensively about Fox, tweeted after the settlement.
Despite the
hundreds of millions of dollars Fox will have to pay, it appears that it also
won’t have to suffer an even more brutal penalty: while the full terms of the
agreement were not disclosed, CNN, Axios and the New York Times reported that
it reportedly does not contain a clause that forces the network to apologize on
air for making false claims about Dominion. Such a statement would have forced
America’s most powerful media organization to look its millions of loyal
viewers in the eye and tell them that it lied about the 2020 election being
stolen, a belief that has now become orthodox among Republicans.
“I’d
expected, given the wider public lesson that Dominion said it wanted to teach
in this case, that it would have insisted on more acknowledgment or apology in
the settlement,” Jones said. She said Fox’s tongue-twisting statement
recognizing that the court found its statements about Dominion were false was
likely the best concession Dominion was able to get.
The
settlement will not undo the damage done at the local level, where officials
continue to face harassment and pressure to get rid of Dominion voting
equipment. It’s also unclear if anyone at the network or its parent company
will be fired for airing false statements. “The part that I’m interested in
seeing is: what does the apology sound like? Who gets fired? What are the
consequences inside the company?” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News
political director who was fired after correctly calling the 2020 election for
Joe Biden, to Semafor after the settlement.
Already,
Murdoch and Fox seem to be brushing off the suit. In its own post-settlement
statement, Fox half-heartedly acknowledged it had broadcast false claims about
Dominion. “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about
Dominion to be false,” the company said.
Jane
Kirtley, a media professor at the University of Minnesota, expressed doubts
that the settlement would result in meaningful change at Fox.
“I’m not
saying it shouldn’t change things at Fox. But, they seem so convinced that
their approach to news is the right one – some would call it arrogance – that I
can’t imagine that they feel chastened,” she said.
There were
plenty of good reasons, however, why both sides settled the case. Fox was
facing a swell of strong evidence against it – and Dominion may have had a hard
time getting a jury to believe it had suffered the full $1.6bn worth of damage.
Still, a
settlement may reflect the limits of using defamation as a tool to police
misinformation. Defamation law is a field that uses money to address an injury.
It can protect an individual or organization that has been reputationally
damaged, but may not get at bigger, societal issues.
“We can’t
get from this suit one clear answer about the so-called big lie,” Jones said
before the trial. “This suit isn’t asking or answering the question, ‘Was the
election stolen?’ ‘Did voter fraud take place?’ It’s asking the very specific
question of ‘did this news organization tell knowing lies about this company in
ways that hurt this company?’”
Fox’s legal
troubles aren’t over. It still faces a $2.7bn defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic,
another voting equipment company. It also faces a shareholder lawsuit seeking
damages for spreading false claims, as well as a suit from a former employee
who says she was coerced into giving misleading testimony in the Dominion suit.
Dominion
isn’t ending its push for accountability for 2020 lies either. It has ongoing
defamation lawsuits against some of the most prolific spreaders of election
misinformation: Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, Rudy Giuliani, Patrick Byrne, as
well as One America News Network and Newsmax.
But will
the landmark settlement change anything at Fox? Probably not, said Lee Levine,
an attorney who has defended news organizations in defamation suits.
“For Fox,
this is, however sadly, a cost of doing business,” he said.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário