<
https://theconversation.com/as-fox-news-settles-its-lawsuit-with-dominion-will-it-make-any-difference-to-how-it-reports-204360>
"The jurors were chosen. The packed court room was waiting for the lawyers’
opening statements in the defamation case launched more than two years earlier
by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News.
Then, without warning, the judge announced the two parties had agreed to
settle. And what promised to be six weeks of the biggest media circus of recent
times was abruptly cancelled.
Fox News had initially accepted Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential
election, but when it found itself losing audience share to two small, even
more right-wing, networks, and under attack from Trump himself, it made a
radical pivot and adopted Trump’s false stolen election narrative.
In the next two weeks, according to
Media Matters for America, Fox questioned
the results of the election or pushed conspiracy theories about it at least 774
times. In commercial terms – winning back its audience – it was very
successful.
Dominion had found itself collateral damage in Fox’s change of direction. It
was several times pictured as a major perpetrator of this imaginary electoral
fraud. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Dominion’s machines were developed to
steal elections; that Dominion was an organised criminal enterprise, started in
Venezuela with Cuban money.
Dominion responded immediately to Fox’s charges and communicated 3,600 times
with members of the company, but with no effect. Later it isolated 20 occasions
on which it had been defamed, and sought US$1.6 billion from Fox in the case
that has now been settled.
It takes two to settle, but typically the two sides come together with
contrasting fears and hopes. For Dominion Voting Systems the reason to settle
was clear. The company knew it was likely to win the case, but the dollar
amount the jury would then award was completely unpredictable. Moreover, at the
end of such a case Fox would definitely appeal, pushing any finality well into
the future.
The settlement gave Dominion certainty and US$787 million (A$1.2 billion) in
the bank. This figure dwarfs the previous largest defamation settlement on the
public record in the US (remembering that many defamation settlements are
confidential and so remain secret): in 2017 Disney/ABC paid US$177 million to a
meat producer whose product was described as “pink slime”."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
