The right-wing U.S. network Fox News agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for disseminating fake news in the aftermath of the last presidential election. Yet this sort of thing is priced in. A commentary.
“Money is accountability,” said one of the plaintiff’s attorneys in the defamation lawsuit brought by voting machine maker Dominion against the right-wing opinion network Fox News, after the parties reached a settlement of approximately 730 million euros before the trial was to start.
Fox must, in fact, register the affair as a political defeat, while Dominion is receiving financial compensation for the attacks directed toward it. However, the settlement prevents two things from happening. First, there will be no judgment related to when biased media coverage gets so far away from journalism that it becomes possible to litigate against the propagation of false assertions. And second, Fox’s high-profile opinion hosts will not have to testify and face critical questions.
It is true that we were given an in-depth look behind the curtain at Fox before the trial was set to begin. It became apparent, for example, that owner Rupert Murdoch did not believe the lies disseminated on his network. However, Fox’s audience has not grasped that lies are told on its airwaves and is therefore not putting any pressure on the network to follow the facts.
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