Dominion Voting System reached a last-minute $787.5 million settlement for its defamation lawsuit against Fox News on the 19th of April 2023.
The voting machine company was suing the news network for $1.6 billion due to defamatory comments tying the company to election fraud over the 2020 presidential election. These claims by Dominion were after the news network had Trump’s associates and Fox News hosts accusing Dominion’s voting machines of rigging the election result in favour of Joe Biden, even though there was no evidence to back their claims.
For Dominion to win the case, they had to prove that the publisher had “actual malice” to harm the company. To do this, text messages and emails from journalists and hosts at Fox News were assembled that showed that many of them knew that the claims were false but continued to air the conspiracy theories. Some of the text messages and emails in question were from Tucker Carlson, who stated in his messages that “Sydney Powell is lying” and that the news channel airing the conspiracy theories was “unbelievably offensive to me. Our viewers are good people, and they believe it”.
These comments made by hosts and journalists were defended by Fox News, stating how Dominion was cherry-picking their argument and using the lawsuit to attack press freedom. Fox believes that they aired both sides of the debate to create a fair story. They continued to protect themselves by stating that Dominion’s claims were going against the first amendment, which states that the media has the absolute right to cover the news. This suggests that Fox would have been protected by the American Constitution.
Even though they continued to defend themselves against the claims made by Dominion, Fox News still settled the lawsuit. The reasoning behind this may be because high profile individuals at Fox News were going to testify in the trial, including Fox Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch.
So, what happened after the settlement? Firstly, John Poulos, co-founder and the chief executive of Dominion Voting Systems, has said that he is not done with the news network until they publicly apologise and take accountability for lying to their audience, as well as damaging their voting machine company. However, these demands are extremely unlikely to occur, as Fox News did not cover the case on their news channel and the settlement means the channel does not need to make an on-air apology.
Furthermore, Dominion is continuing to pursue defamation lawsuits against four of Trump’s major allies for their involvement in the spread of conspiracy theories against the company. The four in question are Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell and Patrick Byrne. Moreover, the voting machine company is also suing Fox New’s competitors: One America News and NewsMax, in their pursuit to defend democracy.
Since the settlement, Fox has fired one of their most popular hosts, Tucker Carlson, without notice or explanation. This has led to speculations as to why the news network sacked the presenter. One speculation suggests that the leaked text messages from Carlson that showed how he believed the news network was airing people that were not telling the truth about the election led to his sacking. This suggests the news network is trying to stamp out the story, by eradicating those involved in the lawsuit.