Fox settlement seen as unlikely to change conservative media
NEW YORK >> Days after Fox News agreed to pay nearly $800 million to settle a lawsuit over its airing of 2020 election lies, you’d be hard-pressed to notice anything had changed there.
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham led their shows Thursday talking about Hunter Biden, the president’s son. Ingraham’s show warned, “The left wants the government to be your only family.” Hannity targeted familiar villains — Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez, D-N.Y., and Vice President Kamala Harris. Carlson mocked a speech on racial equity, saying it meant “that straight white men are bad.”
Experts doubt the settlement will lead to much of a course correction in conservative media, save for a little less specificity to avoid future lawsuits.
So far, that’s been the chief result of a Connecticut jury’s verdict last year that Alex Jones must pay $965 million to parents of Sandy Hook school shooting victims, after claiming the 2012 massacre was a hoax and that grieving parents were actors. Now Jones is more likely to keep names out of it, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of “Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.”
“It hasn’t changed his conspiracy theories,” Hemmer said. “He’s just a little more careful about not saying legally actionable things.”
Heading into the 2024 election, radio host Erick Erickson predicted more hesitancy in conservative media to embrace claims by former President Donald Trump or anybody in politics preaching election denialism. Fox’s response will be most watched.
If anything, Fox is just as dominant among conservatives today as it was in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the period addressed by the Dominion lawsuit. That’s when Fox aired false claims that Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the election against Trump, despite many at the network knowing the allegations were bogus.