There are 787 million causes to think about Fox News’s settlement of the defamation lawsuit a surprising victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the hundreds of thousands of {dollars} that Fox is paying to Dominion will put to relaxation false claims in regards to the 2020 presidential election or assist deter misinformation extra broadly stays far much less clear.
In the blinkered info bubbles the place the lies about Dominion’s rigging the vote have been fabricated and unfold, conspiracy theories in regards to the firm proceed to thrive — a minimum of amongst these proof against overwhelming proof, together with new disclosures about Fox News and its most well-known hosts that Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.
And Dominion is just one a part of a broader conspiracy principle that the American electoral system is corrupt. That view, regardless of all of the proof on the contrary, continues to be cheered on by former President Donald J. Trump, who stays the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.
“Part of the strength of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different strands that yield the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy one thread or one strand, and you’d still have enough strands to sustain it,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center on the University of Pennsylvania and a founding father of FactCheck.org.
The $787.5 million settlement, one of many largest ever for a defamation case, undoubtedly has a punitive impact on Fox, despite the fact that it allowed the corporate to keep away from a probably embarrassing trial. Like the verdicts final 12 months in opposition to Alex Jones, the broadcaster who defamed the households of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School and was ordered to pay them greater than $1.4 billion, the end result confirmed that lies may be pricey for many who unfold them.
Yet Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news web site, whereas using authorized methods that would assist him evade a number of the monetary penalty.
For researchers who examine disinformation, the abrupt finish to the lawsuit in opposition to Fox dashed hopes {that a} prolonged trial — with testimony from hosts who repeated accusations in opposition to Dominion they knew to be false — would do extra to show the harmful penalties of pushing falsehoods and conspiracies.
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, was amongst these expressing disappointment. She stated that the settlement — for half of what Dominion initially sought — mirrored Fox’s “desire to avoid further damning facts coming out during trial.”
“Yet money alone won’t bring us accountability, and it doesn’t correct the ongoing harms Fox News causes to democracy,” she stated. “If $787.5 million is the cost to tell a lie, repeatedly, what’s the cost of curing that lie?”
Fox was spared prolonged and probably damaging testimony. The community didn’t need to concern an apology on air. Instead, in a rigorously crafted assertion, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and touted its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”
While the key news networks pivoted to cowl the trial’s abrupt finish on Tuesday, Fox devoted simply six minutes and 22 seconds to the subject throughout three segments. None of its prime time hosts, together with Tucker Carlson, who had as soon as bolstered the voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in Dominion’s lawsuit, talked about the case.
Instead, Mr. Carlson started his present with a section about violence in Chicago, airing video clips largely exhibiting Black Chicagoans throughout a weekend of violence. “This is why we used to shoot looters,” he stated. That was adopted with an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new proprietor of Twitter.
“So what would you be thinking about when you’re watching Tucker Carlson?” Ms. Jamieson stated. “Not the Fox settlement, but crime in the cities, interesting interview with Musk. And now our media diet for the day has told you what matters.”
The same phenomenon unfolded in different news organizations on the political proper within the wake of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a web site identified for pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted one 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not up to date.
Far extra phrases have been expressed in feedback left by readers, the place almost 4,000 missives raised recent conspiracy theories. Among them was a story that Fox News’s settlement was really a shrewd maneuver that might assist Dominion extract debilitating sums from Fox opponents, together with the conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, which have additionally been sued by Dominion.
In the 2 hours following the settlement’s announcement, there was a major spike in references on-line to the discredited movie “2000 Mules,” which spun an elaborate principle of individuals delivering hundreds of ballots in drop bins, in response to Zignal Labs, an organization that tracks exercise on-line. The references surged once more on Wednesday after a outstanding commentator on Twitter, Rogan O’Handley, chided these “cheering over” the settlement. “We know it was rigged,” he wrote.
On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app,customers claimed with out proof that the deal was a manner for Fox to launder cash; that the community was in cahoots with Dominion to engineer an election coup; that Dominion was attempting to keep away from a trial that might expose its corrupt practices; and that the judicial system was managed by the Mafia.
Even if the Dominion victory makes news organizations assume twice earlier than reporting lies about election know-how distributors sooner or later, the injury has already been finished.
Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and authorities program on the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, stated the settlement would do little to guard election employees who have been abused by nameless conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false narratives about poll fraud.
“Lies about our elections have really inundated our society, and I don’t think that’s changing,” he stated. “Not all of those lies involve the potential for a defamation suit; it’s really the extreme cases where people are going to be able to collect monetary damages.”
Legal specialists stated that the Dominion case in opposition to Fox had a number of vital traits that set it aside. The voting know-how firm had compiled proof suggesting that some Fox hosts had shared the false election fraud narrative with viewers regardless of privately expressing severe misgivings in regards to the claims. The firm had additionally submitted filings claiming that the election lies repeated by Fox brought about Dominion to lose business.
In reality, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark within the battle in opposition to false info, and never solely in excessive circumstances targeted on defamation, like these involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after courtroom rejected authorized challenges to the balloting in 2020 for lack of proof. This week, an arbitration courtroom ordered Mike Lindell, the chief govt of My Pillow, who claimed amongst different issues that China had rigged the vote, to pay a $5 million reward to a software program engineer who debunked the claims as a part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest.
The authorized traditions that allowed Dominion’s attorneys to obtain the damning emails of Fox executives and anchors and make them a part of the general public file have been important in proving the allegations have been baseless as a matter of file.
“Before we give up on the capacity of the system to work to determine what constitutes knowable fact in the moment, we should say the courts have worked well up to this point,” Ms. Jamieson stated.
Election misinformation will nearly actually stay an issue heading into the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it is going to be tough, however not hopeless, Mr. Norden stated. While some hard-core conspiracy theorists might by no means be satisfied of the legitimacy of the vote, many individuals are merely unfamiliar with the mechanics of American elections and may have extra religion within the system if uncovered to correct info.
“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity ahead of the next election to build more resilience against that with most of the public,” Mr. Norden stated. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem through defamation suits alone, but there’s a lot that we can be doing between now and November 2024.”
Source: www.nytimes.com