“There are people who are so committed to the perpetuation of this narrative that it won’t die completely,” said Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (R), a top election official in Arizona’s largest county. “There are organizations, candidates, fundraisers who this has been their life for a few years, and one settlement isn’t going to make them probably throw away their entire business model.”
Election officials and academics described Fox’s settlement with Dominion Voting Systems as one small part of a broad effort to restore Americans’ faith in elections and hold those who tell falsehoods accountable. On its own, the settlement might not change much, they said.
“We shouldn’t think that defamation suits are going to solve our problems with mass disbelief in the fairness of the 2020 election,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project.
Hasen said Fox News and other outlets are “going to be less likely to make statements about individuals or companies who could be defamed.” But the need to keep viewership high could lead to decision-making driven more by ratings than truth, as illustrated by documents — released as part of the lawsuit — that showed an all-out push to stay on top of smaller right-wing cable network Newsmax.
“So you can imagine them still at least allowing guests to push election conspiracy theories so long as they don’t defame identifiable people,” he said.
Dominion sued Fox for $1.6 billion in 2021 after the network spent weeks broadcasting false claims about the company and its voting machines. A Delaware judge last month determined the statements were obviously false, undercutting many of Fox’s defenses. The network agreed to the massive settlement — the largest known publicly disclosed defamation settlement in U.S. history — on Tuesday, just before opening statements began in a trial that was expected to last six weeks.
Fox acknowledged in a Tuesday statement that the court had found some of its claims about Dominion were false. It said its settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” In a statement Wednesday, Fox said that it is committed to “expanding our newsgathering footprint both domestically and abroad while providing state-of-the-art resources to enhance our coverage.”
The Dominion case, experts have said, was particularly strong because it focused specifically on defamatory comments made about a business that could point to government contracts that were lost as a direct result of misinformation — even as Fox News contested the extent of the damage.
David Becker, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Election Innovation and Research, said that the settlement may change how some news outlets deal with false claims but that falsehoods about elections will persist.
“The entire disinformation landscape is massive, and this lawsuit really demonstrated exactly how massive it is because of what it didn’t cover. It didn’t cover any of the lies about election officials or mail voting or drop boxes or any of the specific conspiracy theories around bamboo ballots and German servers and Italian satellites,” he said, referring to some of the far-fetched conspiracy theories and disinformation that have bounced around the internet.
After Fox’s settlement, media companies may shy away from statements that could prompt litigation. But Becker said those interested in spreading election falsehoods may see less risk by making false claims that don’t mention companies or individuals by name, such as by maintaining that elections are rigged or falsely suggesting that large numbers of ballots are cast in the names of dead people.
“The continued spreading of lies on social media by people who profited from the lies for so long and even candidates themselves, that’s ongoing,” he said.
University of Cincinnati journalism professor Jeffrey Blevins, a misinformation expert, predicted that news networks “will be more careful.”
“I think they’ll get more savvy about how they cover [baseless claims], but I still think they’re going to give platforms to those,” he said. “If I had to guess, I would think the conspiracy theorists would move on to something else. Maybe the culprit won’t be voting machine companies next time, but individual people. Those individuals don’t have the resources to fight them in court.”
Fox’s critics have celebrated the size of the settlement — which was made public by Dominion — but said a trial featuring testimony from Fox executives and hosts may have done more to show the public that Fox officials knew what was being said on its shows was false.
“I think that the settlement is a good move on Dominion’s part. As a private company, they should have, and they have been worried about their reputation and their own financial interests,” said Yotam Ophir, a University at Buffalo communications assistant professor and misinformation expert. “For society at large, I’m not very convinced that the decision to settle outside of court will be beneficial.”
The settlement will probably have major ramifications for Dominion’s lawsuits against Newsmax and One America News — even though Newsmax is contesting that notion.
“Newsmax believes that the facts at issue in Dominion’s case against it are materially different from those that may have driven Fox to settle and no conclusion about Newsmax should be drawn from that settlement,” the company said in a statement Wednesday. “Newsmax stands by its coverage and analysis of the 2020 election and will continue to vigorously defend against the claim.”
While Fox News did not issue a correction regarding the inaccurate claims, Newsmax published a statement in April 2021 telling online readers that the allegations made against Dominion and one of its employees were false. “Newsmax subsequently found no evidence that such allegations were true,” the network said. “Many of the states whose results were contested by the Trump campaign after the November 2020 election have conducted extensive recounts and audits, and each of these states certified the results as legal and final.”
Fox, Newsmax and other outlets will face challenges covering the 2024 presidential race because former president Donald Trump is running again and has not backed away from his falsehoods about the 2020 election. A day before Fox reached its settlement, Trump wrote in all caps on his Truth Social platform that the network and the chairman of its parent company, Rupert Murdoch, should “EXPOSE THE TRUTH ON CHEATING IN THE 2020 ELECTION.”
“RUPERT, JUST TELL THE TRUTH AND GOOD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. THE ELECTION OF 2020 WAS RIGGED AND STOLLEN … YOU KNOW IT, & SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE!” Trump wrote, misspelling “stolen.”
Sentiments like that in recent years have led to threats against those who work on elections. That worry was made plain this week in Wilmington, where a police officer was stationed outside the hotel conference room where Dominion attorneys prepared for court proceedings.
“I don’t think the settlement will reduce threats against election workers or elections in 2024 because really those who are most culpable were not even a part of the suits, those being the politicians and candidates and political leaders who continue to come up with these lies and then spread them,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D).
She called Trump “one of the loudest voices in spreading misinformation” but said others are culpable, too.
“We also have to recognize the damage has been done, and … many people have lost faith in the integrity of our elections despite no evidence to suggest they should have lost faith,” she said.
Two people who were deposed in the case and were expected to testify as witnesses for Dominion said they hope the settlement will lead Fox News to reassess its commitment to journalism.
“In an ideal world, what would come from this is that Fox thinks about the role it can play in both our culture and in journalism and the standards by which it should operate,” said Frank Sesno, Dominion’s expert witness on journalistic standards who is a George Washington University journalism professor. “Fox has a huge and dedicated audience, and they deserve the truth.”
During the discovery process in the case, Fox executives revealed that the network does not have a written set of standards and practices, unlike most television networks. That should change, said Sesno, who served as CNN’s Washington bureau chief. Fox News, he said, needs clear, documented standards “that constitute professionalism, excellence, and accountability.”
Chris Stirewalt, who served as Fox News’s political editor during the 2020 presidential election and was expected to testify, said Fox needs to choose between being a news organization and being an opinion organization, the latter being the direction he believes it has moved in recent years.
“Where they can’t stay is being a little bit news,” he said. “There’s too much exposure attached to that.”
Stirewalt, who now works for the cable news channel NewsNation and writes for online publication the Dispatch, said that Fox News and the Republican Party more broadly have fallen prey to a similar dynamic — choosing short-term gains by allowing viewers and voters to ignore hard realities and hear only what they want to hear.
“I think the risk for Republicans generally is most of them know the truth, but they would like to not have to say it,” he said. “Life is hard, and sometimes you have to tell people the things they don’t want to hear. Fox’s experience in this is analogous with the GOP’s experience with not wanting to confront its own voters and experience short-term defeats.”
Richer, the election official in Maricopa County, said he wasn’t sure yet how much Fox’s settlement would affect the spread of falsehoods, but he was confident it would change the network’s behavior in some important circumstances.
“If President Trump’s the nominee in 2024, and he loses, and in January of 2025 — I don’t think Fox treats this the same way as they did in January of 2021,” he said. “And I think that that matters.”
