Fox News pays the price for its election lies
T oo many purveyors of the Big Lie — the baseless accusation that the 2020 presidential election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump — have escaped consequences. Lawyers who pushed falsehoodriddled allegations in court have kept their law licenses; media personalities who gave airtime to conspiracy theorists remain on the air; Trump himself is running for president again and is his party’s clear front-runner.
Against that backdrop, Fox News’s acknowledgment on Tuesday that it aired false claims about the election — and its agreement to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit against a company that makes voting machines — is welcome news indeed. Fox becomes the first cog in the disinformation machine that undermined the 2020 election to pay a significant price for its actions.
The company had little choice but to settle; the pretrial discovery process produced reams of evidence that figures at the company knew the election fraud allegations involving Dominion machines, including that they supposedly switched Trump votes to Joe Biden, were false even as the company aired them. Based on the evidence, Fox faced one of the strongest defamation cases in recent history.
Nonetheless, news of the settlement produced a wave of disappointment among the station’s critics. A trial might have forced on-air figures like Sean Hannity and owner Rupert Murdoch to testify under oath, which likely would have been an embarrassing spectacle for the station. The settlement did not require Fox to apologize. And it’s always possible — though far from certain — that Dominion would have won an even larger monetary judgement against Fox.
But $787 million is still serious money. It’s the largest known media defamation settlement in US history. And the outcome is a favorable sign for the other lawsuits pending against election deniers that they, too, will be held accountable for their actions. Another voting machine company drawn into the right-wing conspiraverse, Smartmatic, is also suing Fox, and Dominion has lawsuits pending against right-wing media outlets Newsmax and OAN, lawyer Sidney Powell, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, and pillow tycoon Mike Lindell for their roles in spreading lies about the company.
As a general matter, newspapers don’t tend to cheer lawsuits against other media outlets. Mistakes happen in reporting, and if they lead to ruinous judgments, that will inevitably have a chilling effect on the news media. Companies — including voting machine companies — should be subject to aggressive coverage. But what happened at Fox was so beyond the pale, so unlike what mainstream news outlets try to do, that it deserves no sympathy from the rest of the media. “The evidence does not support that [Fox] conducted goodfaith, disinterested reporting,” the judge in the case, Eric M. Davis, wrote in a pretrial finding.
Of course, while companies can sue for defamation to repair their reputations, democracy can’t. The deeper damage that Fox and its ilk caused with their lies won’t be fixed in a courtroom. Their two-month campaign to discredit the election defamed American democracy itself, eroding public confidence in the results and culminating in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Its toxic legacy continues as Republican candidates in places like Arizona increasingly feel emboldened to reject the results of elections they don’t win, something that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
The Fox settlement is a warning that right-wing firebrands can’t just say anything in their echo chamber and that, however slowly and imperfectly, consequences are catching up to Trump’s allies. But while courts can hold outlets and individuals accountable for their own big lies, it falls to voters to root out the Big Lie — by relegating Trump and his conspiracists back to the fringes of American politics.
The Fox settlement is a warning that right-wing firebrands can’t just say anything in their echo chamber.