Fox News managed to negotiate an 11th-hour settlement with Dominion Voting Systems the same day opening statements were set to be delivered in the $1.6 billion lawsuit over their promotion of election conspiracy theories.
The $787 million settlement was at least 10 times the value of Dominion as a company — but, wrote Ankush Khardori, Fox had little choice but to pay up, when faced with the alternative of actually letting this go to trial.
Among other things, Fox promoted claims from pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell that deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez created a backdoor in Dominion's equipment that could be used to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump, and put on air claims from a woman who alleged to have found proof of election fraud through time travel. Dominion laid out reams of internal communications showing Fox executives and on-air personalities knew the claims were false.
"The massive payout reflects the fact that Dominion had put together a strong case that Fox had acted with 'actual malice,' a high bar under defamation law that has historically been difficult for plaintiffs suing media outlets to satisfy," wrote Khardori. "Dominion’s considerable success in this case indicates that Fox acutely understood that there was a high risk that the jury would side with Dominion on this crucial legal point. The settlement also spares the network from weeks of embarrassing testimony that would have put the widespread internal dysfunction at Fox News on full public display."
Moreover, Fox has been claiming from the outset that the case poses a massive threat to the basic protections of reporters outlined in the Supreme Court's landmark New York Times v. Sullivan ruling — but they never actually explained how.
"Despite hundreds of pages of pretrial filings, Fox never managed to identify a single instance of legitimate newsgathering that would have been credibly endangered in the future if Dominion prevailed, as the company has now done," wrote Khardori. "And, of course, the backdrop here is that Fox’s business model has for years drawn intense criticism from media analysts who have argued that the network routinely crosses the boundaries of responsible reporting by pandering to its mostly conservative audience and elevating dubious but politically convenient claims."
Fox will face further problems even with the Dominion suit settled; another elections equipment firm, Smartmatic, has its own suit in the works, and this all comes as the network must renegotiate its license fees with multiple cable providers.
