You don’t often hear newscasters laugh out loud when you read statements about breaking news.
And yet, that’s exactly what CNN’s Jake Tapper did Tuesday afternoon. Fox News had just agreed to an 11th-hour settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million in a defamation case shortly after the jury was seated.
Fox News issued a statement that said, in part, “We acknowledge that the Court’s rulings found certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
That in itself is impressive enough (“impressive” was a word tossed around Tuesday as an election lie at a Rudy Giuliani press conference), if only to state the obvious. But that wasn’t what broke Tapper.
“Sorry, that’s going to be hard to say with a straight face,” he said. “‘This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitments to the highest journalistic standards.'”
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Fox settles with Dominion, which sought $1.6 billion for defamation
standards? We don’t need stinking standards.
That was the implication, no doubt, not only in the deposition, but more obviously in the long run-up to the trial, in which internal messages and emails revealed that some of Fox News’ most popular personalities, panicking about losing ratings, pushed absurd conspiracy theories that claimed Donald Trump had won the 2020 election when they knew he hadn’t.
Some of those theories involved Dominion suing Fox News for $1.6 billion in damages and more in punitive damages.
Tuesday’s deal didn’t exactly take the networks by surprise, but it was surprising. And to be honest, disappointing in some ways. The idea of Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Carlson on the stand under oath is pretty intriguing, you have to admit.
Or at least Andrew Weissmann, a legal analyst at MSBNC, did. Weissmann said it was disappointing that Fox News executives and stars did not have to acknowledge in person that they knowingly pushed lies and should not apologize for them.
“I think we’re all feeling a kind of schadenfreude, we wanted them to repeat themselves and feel the pain of having to say it out of their own mouths,” he said. “As a child, you want to hear them say, ‘I’m sorry.'”
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There is a lot of truth in this. Part of the Tucker Carlson-Sean Hannity-Laura Ingraham way of doing business is to maximize impersonation, as if they’re the ones who really know what’s what and anyone who disagrees is an idiot. Seeing and hearing them squirm would have been satisfying, no doubt. (Not that we’d seen them—the judge wouldn’t allow cameras in the courtroom.)
The deal is obviously bad for Fox News, though not as bad as it could have been financially. Recognition is worse. Whatever might have happened in the courtroom if the case had played out, the damage to Fox News’ reputation is done.
And it won’t matter at all.
Not to loyal Fox News viewers who get their information from the network and nowhere else. (Fox News briefly reported the deal, while CNN and MSNBC did their best with coverage.)
Many of them believe the election lies, conspiracy theories and other things. They don’t look to the web to find out what’s going on in the world. They seek confirmation of their pre-existing biases and ideas. This is exactly what the cynical Fox News crew worked on after the 2020 election.
It started with Arizona, naturally, when Fox News correctly called the state for Joe Biden on election night before anyone else. This infuriated Trump (add him to the list) and in the days and weeks that followed, even far-right networks like One America News Network and Newsmax began to gain some ratings. Meanwhile, Fox News’ ratings fell.
Messages and emails show the network panicked. There was talk that in the future Fox News should not only consider numbers when making projections. What about the feelings of your viewers?
what about them
Part of reporting the truth is making people angry with you. It’s called journalism.
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Facts are bad for business at Fox News
A Fox News reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, dared to check a tweet from Trump and said there was no evidence of fraud by Dominion.
“Please get her fired,” Carlson tweeted to Hannity and Ingraham. Also: “It must stop immediately, like tonight. It is hurting the company considerably. The share price is down. It’s not a joke.”
It gets worse. When former Fox News reporter Kristin Fisher fact-checked a news conference from Giuliani and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott complained in an email that “I can’t keep defending these journalists who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories.”
Fisher now works for CNN.
These are the most damaging revelations. Fox News has for years tried to shore up the often irresponsible claims and misrepresentations of its prime-time hosts by pointing to its news division. But what’s the point of having one if your most popular hosts and even your CEO act like this?
The deal doesn’t mean Fox News is in the clear. There are other defendants, and Smartmatic, another election technology company, has filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against the network.
But the deal ended that chapter, one that Tapper aptly described as “one of the ugliest and most embarrassing moments in the history of journalism.”
Now that’s accuracy.
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Arrive at Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Facebook @GoodyOnFilm and on Twitter @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly cinema newsletter.
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