Fox News, a news network in the US, negotiated one of the largest out-of-court settlements this week with Dominion Voting Systems to end a defamation suit over its amplification of rumours of election fraud during the 2020 US presidential elections. Here’s a look at the case
The lawsuit
Fox News had advanced former US president Donald J Trump‘s claims that Dominion’s voting machines had been used to rig the 2020 presidential elections in the country against Trump and in favour of the now-incumbent Joe Biden, part of the larger election fraud allegations that the Trump-side has been making since.
In 2021, Dominion filed a libel suit, saying Fox knowingly broadcast falsehoods with an aim to boost viewership. The channel is commonly watched by conservatives in the country, and Trump has been a favourite of ultra-conservative voters of different shades in the country. The settlement came just hours before the trial in the matter was to begin on Tuesday.
The settlement
At $787.5 million, the amount that Fox has agreed to pay Dominion is one for the largest in a defamation case. Fox was not required to apologise on air, though its statement admits that the court had found “certain claims about Dominion” aired on its programming to be false.
The settlement carried an implicit plea of “no contest” to several pretrial findings from judge Eric M Davis, who presided over the case. He had written in one ruling that it was “CRYSTAL clear” that Fox’s statements regarding Dominion and the election were untrue. Without the settlement, the option before Fox was to go into trial, which could have been much costlier, with embarrassing fallout — Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion in damages and a trial would have forced top Fox people to appear as witnesses and answer questions about whether they believed the election fraud claims.
Other lawsuits
The network faces a clutch of suits in relation to the election fraud claims aired and the aftermath. Smartmatic, another voting machine company, is suing for $2.7 billion. A New York appeals court rejected a Fox plea to dismiss the case and has allowed trial to proceed. The company had argued that it didn’t do any wrong, having simply reported on the newsworthy allegations from Trump. The judge in the Dominion case had already rejected newsworthiness of the allegations as grounds for defence.
The network also faces two other lawsuits from former employee Abby Grossberg. Grossberg, who worked as a news producer with the network (including with two of its star anchors, Maria Bartiromo and Tucker Carlson, both of who used their programmes to spread the election fraud claims), had alleged that she was coerced by the network to give misleading testimony in the Dominion case.
What this means for the network
The settlement amount will, without doubt, bite off a chunk from the company’s cash reserves. A recent corporate filing showed that the Fox Corporation had about
$4.1 billion “of cash and cash equivalents” in hand at the end of last year. It remains unclear whether the settlement will lead the network to change how it handles the coverage of conspiracy theories like the ones involving Dominion. While the settlement ruled headlines on the day it was announced, the network gave it extremely limited coverage in comparison with other networks.
How judge Davis’s refusal to allow newsworthiness of the allegations as a line of defence plays out in the other suits the channel is facing needs to be watched. NYT’s chief television critic James Poniewozik writes that the lawsuit “revealed what Fox thinks of its viewers and, more importantly, how much it fears the very audience that it created”. “That fear,” Poniewozik holds, “is the running theme of the voluminous body of texts, emails and depositions that showed the network freaking out over how its audience would react if it did not indulge the fraudulent belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J Trump.”
(Compiled from The New York Times)