Truth loses out in Fox News settlement, and that’s apparently what having a spare $780-million in your jeans can do

HALIFAX–Here’s the bottom line on last week’s epic debacle in the Fox News-Dominion Voting System lawsuit: cash by the carload ensured that the truth did not prevail, took Fox off journalistic death-row, and left the network’s host-serial liars in the same positions of power they used to divide a nation with information they knew to be false. That, apparently, is what having a spare $780-million in your jeans can do. The claim by Dominion’s lawyers that this unholy settlement was a victory for the truth doesn’t pass the laugh-test. It is as absurd as the network’s claim that the settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” Those words are the death march of effrontery. When you lie for pay, you have already established that you have no journalistic standards, unless it is Fox’s unique gold standard: converting bullshit into bullion. Under the agreement, Fox did not admit to lying, did not have to air a proper story about the settlement, or even broadcast an apology to the company that it defamed or the huge audience it misinformed. Instead, they got away with admitting that certain “falsehoods” about Dominion were aired on the network. The inference of that particular word is that the cable network got a few facts wrong. You know, the stuff of the “our mistakes” section in every newspaper. The reality? Fox knowingly fed its audience lies about the 2020 election to keep the cash rolling in from its Democrat-hating audience. Call it what it was: malicious perversion of the facts for profit, and pandering to a base that would pay for receiving its version of the facts. By legitimizing and spreading Donald Trump’s lie that U.S. President Joe Biden won a corrupt election with the help of doctored voting machines, Fox played a direct role in sending a violent mob to the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. That display of iconoclastic tribalism ended with the savage beating of Capitol policemen. It sent a slew of legislators, gathered in the Capitol to certify the election results, fleeing for their lives. A gallows was erected on site, and a chant went up to “hang” then vice-president Mike Pence. Most important of all, five people actually died in this coup attempt, and hundreds of others were permanently traumatized. As the chief echo chamber of Trump’s Big Lie, Fox was an accessory to that outcome. For these reasons, this is what should have happened in this important civil case: Rupert Murdoch should have taken the stand to answer questions. Since he knew that the story Trump was peddling about election fraud was false, why did he allow Fox hosts to incite MAGA supporters to riot at the Capitol by repeating ad nauseum Trump’s lie as truth? Why didn’t Murdoch listen to warnings from Fox board members like former House Speaker Paul Ryan who warned him that peddling such patently false narratives as “news” was dangerous business? And did "Murdoch the Mogul" really think that pursuing profits by telling lies to an audience his network duped was worth the violence, injury and death that Fox helped trigger? Did he think he had anything to apologize for? Tucker Carlson, the Benedict Arnold of journalism, should have testified under oath, as well. Why would Carlson demand that a colleague at Fox be fired for telling the truth? That is what he did to Jacqui Heinrich, and all because she had the temerity to fact-check and then debunk a Trump tweet claiming that Dominion voting machines had changed votes from Trump to Biden. Why would Carlson go on air and advance Trump’s conspiracy theories about crooked voting machines when he was privately writing to colleagues, "the software stuff is shit"? And why would he “slobber” all over a man he privately claimed to hate “passionately”, a politician he said was a “demonic force,” and a “destroyer”? That is exactly what Carlson did when he interviewed Trump on his program, after the former president was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush-money payment to an adult film actress who claims they had an affair. Carlson let Trump blab on about “nuclear warming” and a third world war without once taking him to task over his bizarre comments. Murdoch and Carlson should have been joined on the stand by all of Fox’s sorry sycophants to explain why they had such contempt for their audience that they publicly promoted what they laughed at privately and ridiculed. But the sultans of cynicism never faced accountability, just an accounting issue. By writing the biggest cheque in U.S. history in a defamation suit, Murdoch, Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, et al, were spared their moment of truth in front of the country. And that is the saddest thing of all in this shabby affair. Why? Because Fox has gotten away with treating the most egregious breach of trust in media history as a mere cost of doing business. In making the Dominion Voting System lawsuit go away, they can now go straight back to the work that might have been stopped if Americans had been given the opportunity to see the depth of this network’s depravity in court. Anything for a buck, including turning the United States into a house divided against itself after decades of polarizing lies from Fox. The surest sign that it will be funny business as usual at Fox News is the network’s response to yet another mega lawsuit coming its way from an election software company. Florida company Smartmatic is suing Fox News, hosts Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro, former host Lou Dobbs and former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for $2.7-billion. Smartmatic claims it was defamed by Fox more than 100 times with overt lies, including the allegation that the company played a part in fixing the 2020 election. Fox’s response? It was “newsworthy” to broadcast the false stories about Smartmatic, and the company’s lawsuit would put a “chill” on Fox’s First Amendment Rights. The right to lie for ratings and profit. No one should be surprised that more chequebook justice is on the way. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times