There are 787 million reasons to consider Fox News’ settlement of the libel case a stunning victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the millions of dollars Fox is paying Dominion will put an end to false claims about the 2020 presidential election or help discourage misinformation more broadly remains much less clear.
In the blinkered information bubbles where the lies about Dominion’s vote-rigging were concocted and spread, conspiracy theories about the company continue to thrive — at least among those who resist overwhelming evidence, including new revelations about Fox News and its most famous hosts who are Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.
And Dominion is just one part of a broader conspiracy theory that the US electoral system is corrupt. That view, despite all evidence to the contrary, is still espoused by former President Donald J. Trump, who remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination.
“Part of the power of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different parts that lead to the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy a thread or a thread, and you would still have enough threads to support it, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and founder of FactCheck.org.
The $787.5 million settlement, one of the largest ever in a defamation case, will undoubtedly have a punitive effect on Fox, though it allowed the company to avoid a potentially embarrassing lawsuit. Like the verdicts last year against Alex Jones, the broadcaster that discredited the families of schoolchildren who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School and paid them more than $1.4 billion, the result showed that lies can be costly for those who distribute them.
Still, Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news site, while employing legal strategies that could help him evade some of the financial penalty.
For researchers studying disinformation, the abrupt end to the Fox lawsuit raised hopes that a lengthy trial — featuring testimony from hosts who repeated allegations against Dominion that they knew were false — would do more to address the dangerous consequences of spreading disinformation. expose falsehoods and conspiracies.
Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, a digital rights and liability advocacy group, was among those disappointed. She said the settlement — for half of what Dominion originally sought — reflected Fox’s “desire to prevent any more damning facts from coming out at trial.”
“Yet money alone will not bring us responsibility, and it will not correct the ongoing damage Fox News is doing to democracy,” she said. “If $787.5 million is the cost of repeatedly telling a lie, what is the cost of healing that lie?”
Fox was spared extensive and potentially damaging testimony. The network did not have to apologize on air. Instead, in a carefully crafted statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings that certain claims about Dominion are false” and praised its “ongoing commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”
While major news networks scrambled to cover the abrupt end of the trial on Tuesday, Fox devoted just six minutes and 22 seconds to the subject in three segments. None of the primetime hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had ever perpetuated voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in the Dominion lawsuit, mentioned the case.
Instead, Mr. Carlson began his show with a segment about violence in Chicago, airing video clips showing mostly black Chicagoans during a weekend of violence. “This is why we shot looters,” he said. This was followed by an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter.
“So what would you think about when you look at Tucker Carlson?” said Mrs. Jamieson. “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’s important.
A similar phenomenon occurred among other news organizations of the political right in the aftermath of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a site known for spreading voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted a 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not updated.
Far more words were uttered in reader comments, where nearly 4,000 posts raised new conspiracy theories. Among them was a story that the Fox News settlement was actually a shrewd maneuver that would help Dominion obtain debilitating amounts of money from Fox competitors, including conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, who have also been sued by Dominion.
In the two hours following the settlement announcement, Zignal Labs, a company that monitors the online activity, saw a surge in activity. References surged again on Wednesday after a prominent Twitter commentator, Rogan O’Handley, rebuked those who “cheered” the settlement. “We know it was manipulated,” he wrote.
On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app, users claimed without evidence that the deal was a way for Fox to launder money; that the network was collaborating with Dominion to stage an electoral coup; that Dominion was trying to avoid a trial that would expose its corrupt practices; and that the justice system was controlled by the mafia.
Even if the Dominion’s victory causes news organizations to think twice before reporting lies about election technology providers in the future, the damage has already been done.
Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the election and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the settlement would do little to protect election workers abused by anonymous conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false stories about voting fraud. .
“Lies about our elections have really swamped our society and I don’t think that’s changing,” he said. “Not all of those lies carry the possibility of a libel suit; it really is the extreme cases where people can collect monetary damages.
Legal experts said the Dominion case against Fox had several key features that set it apart. The voice technology company had gathered evidence suggesting that some Fox hosts had been sharing the false election-rigging story with viewers, despite privately expressing serious doubts about the claims. The company had also filed charges alleging that Fox’s repeated election lies caused Dominion to lose business.
In fact, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark in the fight against false information, and not just in extreme defamation cases, such as those involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after court rejected legal challenges to the 2020 ballot for lack of evidence. This week, an arbitration court ordered Mike Lindell, the CEO of My Pillow, who alleged, among other things, that China had rigged the vote, pay a $5 million reward to a software engineer who refuted the claims as part of a “Prove Mike Error.” ” contest.
The legal traditions that enabled Dominion’s attorneys to receive the scathing emails from Fox executives and anchors and make them part of the public record were essential to proving the allegations baseless.
“Before we give up on the system’s ability to determine what is currently known fact, we must say that the courts have worked well so far,” Ms Jamieson said.
Election disinformation will almost certainly remain a problem leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it will be difficult, but not hopeless, Mr Norden said. While some die-hard conspiracy theorists may never be convinced of the legitimacy of the vote, many people are simply unfamiliar with the mechanics of US elections and may feel more confident in the system if exposed to accurate information.
“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity leading up to the next election to build more resistance from most of the public,” said Mr. Norden. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem with defamation cases alone, but there’s a lot we can do between now and November 2024.”
