On the floor, Fox News acquired pummeled.
Rupert Murdoch, its founder, agreed to an enormous settlement of $787.5 million, roughly two-thirds of the Fox Corporation’s web annual revenue. Fox News was embarrassed by revelations that its anchors privately despised former President Donald J. Trump. And Dominion Voting Systems, the election expertise agency derided on Fox airwaves, declared victory Tuesday on the courthouse steps.
Yet for some Murdoch critics, the end result of this landmark libel case fell in need of one thing to rejoice.
“Rupert Wins Again,” declared the Politico press critic Jack Shafer, who famous Mr. Murdoch’s lengthy historical past of paying tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to settle claims of cellphone hacking, office harassment and different ignominies.
“Country lost, democracy lost,” the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus wrote in an e mail, predicting that Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo could be feted by conservatives as “heroes” who “stood up against the liberal world.”
Others lamented what they perceived to be a misplaced alternative for a authorized reckoning for the misinformation that has poisoned many Americans’ belief within the democratic course of.
“Great win for democracy? I don’t know about that,” stated the MSNBC host Joy Reid, who advised viewers that Fox News “saved their stars from having to take the witness stand and answer questions about all those embarrassing texts and revelations.”
Three-quarters of a billion {dollars} isn’t any small sum, even for Mr. Murdoch, and Fox continues to be going through an identical defamation go well with from one other elections agency, Smartmatic, which has requested for $2.7 billion in damages. (Dominion initially demanded $1.6 billion.) The community has typically argued that its newsroom is walled off from ideological forces, however emails revealed within the case made clear that high executives rebuked their very own journalists who tried to fact-check Mr. Trump.
Still, Fox News was not required beneath the phrases of the settlement to difficulty an on-air apology for the baseless claims it aired about Dominion, asserting the corporate had tried to rig the 2020 presidential election in Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s favor. Of the anchors cited within the lawsuit, all however Lou Dobbs stay employed. And Fox’s public assertion on Tuesday in regards to the settlement was hardly an apology.
“We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” the community wrote, including, with Murdochian defiance, “This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” (That line prompted the CNN anchor Jake Tapper to inform his viewers that it was “difficult to say with a straight face.”)
For Dominion, a for-profit firm that argued its popularity and future revenues had been devastated by Fox’s protection, the settlement was a win. John Poulos, Dominion’s chief govt, praised the end result throughout an interview on Wednesday on ABC News, solely to be grilled by the anchor George Stephanopoulos, who identified: “What you didn’t get was an apology.”
“There was an acknowledgment — and certainly it’s not the way I wrote it — and I had some conversations with our team, my co-founder and I, and at the end of the day, the court system is really about accountability,” Mr. Poulos replied, a bit haltingly. He added: “For us it was never really about Fox per se. It was about telling the truth, and the media telling the truth.”
His phrases echoed the remarks of one in every of Dominion’s lead attorneys, Stephen Shackelford, who argued on Tuesday that the scale of the penalty paid by Mr. Murdoch was itself a type of reckoning.
“Money is accountability,” he advised reporters, “and we got that today from Fox.”
The view inside Fox News — that the Dominion case was an overblown spectacle fueled by the channel’s devoted critics — was voiced partially by Howard Kurtz, the community’s media correspondent, who reported the news of the settlement on two afternoon applications on Tuesday. (The case didn’t advantage a point out in the course of the community’s extremely watched prime time hours.)
Mr. Kurtz stated on the air: “Much of the media was looking forward to six weeks of — frankly, a lot of people in the mainstream media, anti-Fox, rooting for Fox to lose. They’re now going to be deprived of that opportunity and the rest of us get to go home.”
So far, no reporters on Fox News have disclosed the particular $787.5 million determine to the community’s viewers. Mr. Kurtz and others stated on the air that whereas Dominion disclosed a greenback quantity, they personally couldn’t affirm it.
On Wall Street, traders appeared principally unfazed by the end result. Fox’s inventory was down barely greater than 2 % in Wednesday morning buying and selling. SVB MoffettNathanson, a analysis agency, wrote in an analyst notice on Wednesday that “it isn’t clear there has been much, if any, impact of these lawsuits on Fox News’s viewership and business.”
The notice concluded: “The network remains a key growth driver for the overall company.”
Source: www.nytimes.com