Fox News has had very little to say about Dominion Voting Systems' $1.6bn defamation lawsuit for nearly the entirety of its existence, but finally deemed the story worth covering on Tuesday when it announced the parties had settled.
Dominion sued Fox News for defamation, alleging that the Rupert Murdoch-owned broadcast network gave a platform to and failed to challenge conspiracy theorists that suggested Dominion was engaged in voter fraud during the 2020 election. Those conspiracies reportedly damaged Dominion's business and resulted in employees receiving threats from angry Fox News viewers.
The trial was scheduled to kick off this week, but on Tuesday, Dominion and Fox News reached a settlement. Fox News has agreed to pay Dominion $787.5m to put the issue to bed.
However, you would not know that if you read Fox News' own coverage of the settlement.
In Fox News' story — which comes in at 256 words, approximately 70 of which are a block quote from a Fox spokesman— we do not learn why the company was sued, just that it was broadly sued for defamation. We also do not learn how much it cost the network to make the trial go away.
(It was $787.5m, in case you missed it.)
We get two minor attempts at an explanation in the piece. The first is the canned Fox News spokesman's line that the network "acknowledge[s] the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false," — followed immediately by an assurance that the settlement "reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards."
The second is a bit further down, where the network essentially blames former President Donald Trump for everything.
"Then-President Donald Trump and his allies fiercely challenged Joe Biden's victory in the weeks following the election," the story reads. "Some of them, including members of his legal team, made false and unsubstantiated claims against Dominion Voting Systems and are the subject of separate defamation lawsuits."
Even that deflection is buried near the end of the story, placed after a bizarre inclusion about the judge saying both parties' lawyers did well.
“I have been on the bench since 2010. … I think this is the best lawyering I’ve had, ever,” reads the quote from Judge Davis said, who reportedly added: “I would be proud to be your judge in the future.”
Heartwarming, sure, but also not particularly newsworthy.
It’s notable that a line about how well the lawyers involved were made it into the story, but there is no mention of the scandals and revelations that resulted from the lawsuit. Thanks to discovery and public records, we learned that even the network's prime-time hosts thought Mr Trump's election deniers were raving maniacs. We learned that Tucker Carlson secretly hates Mr Trump and desperately wants to move on. And we learned that the network's top executives were terrified that doing actual journalism on election night by calling Arizona for Joe Biden wouldn't play well with their viewers.
Had the lawsuit gone to trial, it is likely some of Fox News' top personalities and officials would have been called to testify about their work, which would have been an obviously enticing bit of infotainment.
Dominion has also sued Mr Trump's "kraken" lawyer Sidney Powell, "melting/flatulent" lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and "weird pillowmonger" Mike Lindell for defamation, so it’s likely that there will be more trials involving the Fox News universe in the future.
