Fox gazes at the squirrel
Guess who hasn’t been reporting on the Fox News-Dominion settlement…
Fox News’s last-minute settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday earned banner coverage on every television news network but one: Fox News.
The $787.5 million settlement was covered only three times by Fox News in about four hours after the settlement became public, amounting to about six minutes of coverage. For most of the day, including during the network’s prime-time shows, hosts appeared to be focusing on other issues, like illegal immigration and Covid-19’s possible origins.
Sorry, we’re busy here, very very very busy, we’ve got breaking stories about immigration and Covid.
Anyway. The settlement is a record-breaker.
The $787.5 million that Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems to settle the lawsuit against the cable network appears to be one of the largest settlements in a defamation case in U.S. history.
While the terms of out-of-court settlements are not always revealed, the Fox-Dominion deal immediately enters the upper echelon of publicly disclosed damages and other payouts in defamation cases.
Fox makes a lot of $$$$. By destroying everything.
They are in for it. That amount wipes out roughly two quarters’ worth of net income, and there are more suits a-coming. God, I wish I could see their internal communications over this.
Ophelia, your post titling skill is outstanding. :D
Awww shucks.
I was thinking that just the other day – great subbing. If you were less principled you could work for the Graun.
Too kind!
Fox has to admit wrongdoing. So it’s not the typical, infuriating kind of settlement where the wrongdoer admits nothing. But they should have to broadcast at least as much coverage detailing their wrongness as they did spewing the lies in the first place. They should have to say 15 times a day that Biden was elected, there was no stolen election, and DJT is a liar, and their own hosts are liars.
From what I saw reported, Fox ran no news banners on the story and over some hours after the news broke ran the story four times totalling six minutes. Most of their viewers will never find out about it.
I guess that if I had represented Dominion I would have offered to settle for $50 million less and airing of an independently produced news story to be featured on primetime explaining the suit and the reason they settled out of court.
Mike, that’s sort of what I was thinking; the settlement should have included a clause requiring publicity.