Fox’s agreement to pay $787.5m in damages to Dominion Voting Systems is the largest publicly known defamation settlement in history, and included an acknowledgment that a news network that has always claimed to be “fair and balanced” had spread baseless conspiracy theories.
Not that you’d know about it from actually watching Fox News.
There was a brief mention of the decision during the network’s “news” hours. Host Neil Cavuto gave 30 seconds to the story in passing, citing a Wall Street Journal report about the settlement, before quickly moving on.
Earlier in the program, media analyst Howard Kurtz was invited on for a brief segment in which he called the lies about Dominion “obviously false” and “conspiracy theories” – but said the trial would have revolved around proving it was Fox News hosts spreading disinformation rather than Trump spokespeople.
And that was very much that.
As Fox News moved into its opinion hours – which run from 5pm to however much of late-night host Greg Gutfeld a human being can stand – there was not a peep about the Dominion case.
Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s most popular host, began as he normally does – trying to make his older white viewers very scared. He showed videos of antisocial behavior by small groups of mostly black teenagers in Chicago and Compton over the weekend.
“This is why we used to shoot looters,” he said over footage of the skirmishes – “in order to defend the foundation of all that we have … without that we’d be living in savagery and chaos. In Chicago they already are.”
About the black teenager Ralph Yarl, who was shot after mistakenly ringing the wrong doorbell by an 84-year-old white man, Carlson offered: “These kinds of mistakes do happen, and they’re always sad. Assuming this was a mistake – we don’t know all the details.” He then admonished Joe Biden for trying to use the incident to “incite racial conflict”.
There was, perhaps, a coded mention of the Dominion lawsuit at the end of the program, when Carlson pleaded with his viewers to ignore other news. “We bid you goodnight, [and] wish you the best evening with the ones that you love. You can ignore the noise, because the people around are way more important than the news media: that’s what we’ve learned today.”
Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, whose programs follow Carlson’s, both led on “Biden’s war against women’s sports” stoking fears about trans athletes. Neither mentioned the Dominion case. Finally, Gutfeld, a self-proclaimed comedian who occasionally strays a little further in his talking points, didn’t dare go near the story either.
On the Fox News website there was a short stub about the case that did not mention the size of the settlement, only that the judge had praised the legal teams of both parties for their “lawyering”.
It’s possible the network’s silence on the issue may be a condition of the settlement, which is private. It also has to prepare for defending itself in another similar libel trial, brought by the voting technology company Smartmatic, which is seeking $2.7bn in damages in New York state court.
There was one famous Fox News personality who was happy to talk about Dominion – the network’s former No 1 host Bill O’Reilly, who left in 2017 after settling five sexual harassment lawsuits.
O’Riley, posting on his own blog, wrote: “Since I left FNC [Fox News Channel], the template changed from ‘fair and balanced’ to ‘tell the audience what it wants to hear’.” He said Fox was now being “punished” for its “foolish coverage of the 2020 election” and called its legal troubles “a disaster”.
