Settle and Keep Lying

Even a settlement of $787.5 million is no more than a slap on the wrist for Fox. It would have been worse for them to have to admit to fake news.

The U.S. cable network Fox News has to pay a record sum of $787.5 million to the voting machine firm Dominion — and the right-wing spin doctors under CEO Rupert Murdoch should be happy to do so. Because what they negotiated in the settlement out of court only hours before the scheduled start of the court proceedings saved them many days in court, in which the fake news spinner Fox News would have been dismantled in public.

Fox News may be paying a lot of money with this settlement, but is obliged to do nothing else otherwise. No response, no apology for the claim, reported for months, that the 2020 presidential election was falsified and the voting machines produced by Dominion had played a possibly significant role in this.

The settlement is making headlines in the liberal U.S. media. Its audience has generally known for the past quarter of a century that the old Fox News slogan, “Fair and Balanced,” has always been cynical and that the station’s reporting was unfair and unbalanced long before the time of the notorious moderators Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

The deal, on the other hand, merits only a small report on Fox News itself. This way, U.S. citizens who get their information mainly through this highly viewed cable channel will not be bothered by the fact that they were deliberately lied to and deceived around the 2020 presidential election. “The Big Lie” that Donald Trump released into the world about the lost election remains alive and well in the parallel universe.

So whoever hoped that the trial against Fox News could have a healing effect and help U.S. citizens agree on at least a few things again will be disappointed. Fox News has an economic empire to defend whose core business activity is this type of journalism. Now, it is costing money to maintain that — but only money.