Vindication and Accountability

That’s what one of Dominion’s lawyers said the company had achieved in a statement he made on the courthouse steps in Delaware after the judge announced that the defamation case the company had filed against Fox had been settled for $787.5 million in Dominion’s favor.  John Paulos, the Dominion CEO, told reporters, “Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company, our employees and the customers that we serve.”

You’re forgiven if that doesn’t sound like a confirmation that Fox News spread Trump’s big lie about the 2020 election and continues to spread it at this moment, even after they have to pay a record-breaking amount of money in the settlement.  It’s not a statement about Fox’s lies about Trump, election fraud, voting “irregularities” or anything else.  The Dominion CEO did what business leaders do:  his company had been damaged, Fox agreed to make a cash payment of about three-quarters of the adjusted amount they had sought at the time the trail began (just over one billion), and he took the money and ran.

The case was never about the damage Fox did to our democracy after Trump lost in 2020.  The revelations that came out in depositions and in evidence presented during discovery before trial, most prominent among them that Fox News executives and hosts knew what they were saying was false but said it anyway to cater to their viewers, may have been repeated if the case had gone to trial.  It would have provided a certain amount of satisfaction to see Rupert Murdoch on the witness stand being laid low with his own words.  The same with Hannity and Ingraham and the rest of them.

All Fox had to do was issue this statement: “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”  There is nothing in there about the claims on Fox News that Trump was the real winner of the election, that votes had been stolen, or any of the rest of the entirely bogus claims the network made on the air and continues to make.  There is no bar to Fox doing what it does every day and night:  it caters to the MAGAs that are its base in order to keep their ratings up and make more money.

I know that I had invested more than I should have in this lawsuit and its outcome.  I think a lot of us did.  A defamation suit against Fox by Dominion was never going to put right all the crimes Trump and his minions committed after he lost the election.  Nor was it going to put right the way Fox helped to spread those lies.

The case was about money.  Dominion Voting Systems sought money to replace the money they lost when Trump and Fox trashed their company and its voting machines.  Dominion sought vindication of the claim that its voting machines had never done what Trump and his lawyers and supporters said they did.  They got it. Dominion sought accountability.  They got $787.5 million dollars worth of accountability.

On to Smartmatic, which has sued Fox and Fox News for even more than Dominion did, $2.6 billion.  The case is in its infancy.  Unless Fox settles the suit quickly, we’ll be treated to at least another year of revelations about what Fox did behind the scenes of the lies it told on the air about Smartmatic.  We might even learn some new stuff.

But I wouldn’t get too hopeful about this lawsuit either.  It’s about money, and although they say money talks, it doesn’t speak truths we would like to hear about the liars at Fox News and their boss Rupert Murdoch.