It cost Fox News $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over allegations of election fraud in 2020. But the revelations that Fox News knowingly reported falsehoods is unlikely to cost the right-wing outlet many viewers.
That’s according to MSNBC columnist Michael A. Cohen, who argues in a column published under the headline “What critics of the Fox News-Dominion settlement don’t understand” that in serving up lies about the 2020 election, Fox News was only telling their viewers what they want to hear.
Fox News after the settlement issued a statement acknowledging wrongdoing, saying that “We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
The Fox News statement goes on to say that the “settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards,” an assertion that given what is known about how the network practices journalism, Cohen writes “is akin to throwing irony into a pit of acid.”
Cohen notes that critics of the settlement argue that the settlement allows Fox News to escape accountability.
“Rupert wins again,” Politico media critic Jack Shafer asserted.
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Cohen doesn’t dispute critics of the settlement on the merits, but contends that “it’s hard to see how a public apology or contrition would change the cultlike hold that Fox News has on its viewers. After all, they don’t tune into the network because they want to get fair and balanced news and information.
“They want to be lied to.”
The settlement in the Dominion case may have been costly, but the cost of losing its viewership could be even more prohibitive.
“The entire reason this case emerged is that beginning on election night 2020, Fox News told its viewers the truth — Donald Trump was most likely going to lose his bid for re-election. When Fox correspondents corrected Trump’s repeated mistruths about the election, its viewers didn’t have a collective epiphany,” Cohen writes.
“They didn’t suddenly experience a moment of clarity and realize that everything they had been led to believe by Trump and his cronies was a lie. Instead, they demanded that Fox tell them what they wanted to hear — that the 2020 election was stolen. They changed the channel to Newsmax and One America News to get their daily falsity fix. They found other, even less scrupulous media outlets to tell them what they wanted to hear.”
