So the professional liars at the Fox News Channel will now fork over $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems in the largest financial penalty in the entire history of journalism and jurisprudence.
So, big deal.
Dominion pockets the money, but America gets short-changed.
Fox isn’t required to admit the truth about their lies. And they never will. Instead, the Murdochs and their corporate bullies are already crouched in their bunker and hoping the whole thing will blow over. What the hell, Americans have such short attention spans.
For weeks, Fox broadcast preposterous stories about the 2020 presidential election — about Dominion’s voting machines allegedly switching votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden — that Fox knew were lies. Their private emails and texts tell us explicitly how well they knew.
But they kept lying anyway.
They did it because they were beholden to the lies already launched by Trump himself over the years of his presidency. They did it because they worried about losing viewers loyal to those Trump lies. They lied to cover previous lying.
They did it so recklessly that the judge in this case issued statements calling it “CRYSTAL clear that none of (Fox’s) statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.”
And so Fox caved, settling the case just moments before trial was supposed to start, despite having to fork over the staggering $787.5 million.
And they’ve already issued a sniveling statement claiming settlement was their noble move to “resolve this dispute amicably.”
This, while burying the actual story so their loyal viewers have only the dimmest impression — if any — that Fox was penalized for lying to everyone about the 2020 presidential election.
In the four hours after the settlement was announced, while other TV news operations were offering virtually nonstop coverage of the case, Fox mentioned the story three times — for a total of six minutes. They had one story on their home page, more than an hour after settlement. That’s it.
There’s nothing in the settlement that requires them to apologize for their lies. There’s nothing that says they have to confess their sins on their very own airwaves. There’s nothing that makes them promise to start telling the truth, or else.
There’s nothing that says they have to mention it at all.
And so this fabulously wealthy corporation simply pays its way out of a legal fix. It sounds like a lot of money, $787.5 million, but not to a company with Fox’s wealth. Pay the bar tab and move on.
They got caught lying to all those chumps who watch them every night and imagine they’re watching actual journalism and believe there’s no connection between that kind of lying and the mob violence that erupted one awful January afternoon when democracy itself could have been strangled.
So good luck to Dominion as the company counts its winnings. “Got ours,” they can tell themselves. They pocket the money, but their settlement leaves America short-changed on the full truth.
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