Fox News Dominion case: Rupert Murdoch son drops lawsuit against news site as Smartmatic eyes trial

In an interview with Reuters out this morning, the head of a private equity firm that owns Dominion Voting Systems said they had held Fox News accountable.

Staple Street Capital’s Hootan Yaghoobzadeh told the news wire: “We exposed the truth and we did create accountability for their actions.”

Mr Yaghoobzadeh told Reuters that Fox’s “despicable” practices had been laid bare through the discovery process, and they had achieved their goals from the $787.5m settlement.

Fox News has had very little to say about Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6bn defamation lawsuit for nearly the entirety of its existence, but finally deemed the story worth covering on Tuesday when it announced the parties had settled.

In Fox News’ story — which comes in at 256 words, approximately 70 of which are a block quote from a Fox spokesman— we do not learn why the company was sued, just that it was broadly sued for defamation. We also do not learn how much it cost the network to make the trial go away.

(It was $787.5m, in case you missed it.)

Graig Graziosi has the story.

Stephen Colbert could barely contain his laughter as he discussed the news that Fox News has settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion for $787.5m.

“Damnit! I want my trial! I want it!” he shouted. “I wanted to see Rupert Murdoch put his hand on the Bible and burst into flames.

“I guess it’s satisfying for Dominion that Rup-y had to fork over a pile of cash, but that does nothing for our democracy.”

Isobel Lewis has the full story.

Mountains of evidence boxes were wheeled into a seventh-floor courtroom on Tuesday morning, moments before lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems planned to eviscerate Fox News and its Fox Corporation leadership for the volley of false claims about the company in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Later that morning, jurors were sworn in. They ordered lunch. Hours later, it was over. And Fox News admitted that statements on its airwaves about Dominion were false, agreeing to pay the voting machine company more than $787m in a settlement that averted one of the biggest-ever defamation trials in American history.

Alex Woodward on the made-for-TV courtroom drama that would never be televised.

Former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, who was fired after correctly calling Arizona for Joe Biden in 2020, told the Washington Post that the network needs to choose between news and opinion.

“Where they can’t stay is being a little bit news,” he told the Post. “There’s too much exposure attached to that.”

Mr Stirewalt said that Fox and the broader right-wing movement had shifted towards telling voters and viewers what they wanted to hear, while ignoring hard truths.

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg writes:

For a good portion of the network’s quarter-century on the air, Fox News went by the mantra of “we report, you decide”.

But after the network wholeheartedly embraced Donald Trump in 2016, the reporting became optional because their viewers had already decided.

They decided to believe whatever Trump told them. And when they heard something that contradicted that, they looked elsewhere for more comforting lies.

Two years later, Fox’s audience has remained loyal to Trump, but the twice-impeached ex-president’s lies are still exacting a cost.

Some of that cost may yet to be extracted from Fox’s bottom line.

Another voting machine manufacturer, Smartmatic, still has a multi-billion dollar lawsuit pending against Fox for many of the same lies that pushed Rupert Murdoch and his organisation to offer more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to get Dominion to drop their case.

But it may be Mr Trump who ultimately pays the highest price.

Noah Berlatsky writes for The Independent:

To the general disappointment of progressive observers, Fox settled its lawsuit with Dominion voting systems just before the trial’s opening arguments were slated to begin.

I, along with plenty of others, had been hoping for a full trial. We wanted to see Fox anchors like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity testify in open court under oath that they had lied to their viewers about the election, insisting that the vote was rigged against Donald Trump when they knew it was not.

Fox was desperate to avoid that, and with a $787.5 million settlement – the biggest libel payout in American history – they did.

A long trial underlining the perfidy and recklessness of right-wing media would have been a healthy outcome for democracy, and could have even undermined Fox’s reputation with some of its fanbase.

But it’s important to acknowledge that the lawsuit does provide some accountability, and, just as important, it makes future coup attempts or assaults on democracy more difficult. We know from discovery that Fox carefully weighed incentives and financial consequences before pushing election lies. This payout changes those incentives for the future. That’s a good thing.

Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle its defamation lawsuit with Fox News for $787.5m on Tuesday — but its legal battles are far from over.

While the Fox News case attracted most of the headlines, Dominion filed a swathe of defamation suits against right-wing networks, lawyers and media personalities in the months after the 2020 election.

Here’s everyone who is being sued by Dominion.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson cracked a smile as he listened to Elon Musk describe slashing 80 per cent of Twitter’s employees after taking over.

“Turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter,” Mr Musk said. “If you’re not trying to run some kind of glorified activist organisation, and you’re not caring that much about censorship, you can really let go of a lot of people it turns out.”

Josh Marcus has the full story.

The former American president who was once a fixture on Fox News before turning against the network after losing the 2020 election has remained silent on the right-wing channel’s decision to settle a defamation lawsuit with the voting machine maker he had falsely accused of rigging the election.

Former president Donald Trump’s social media output in the hours since Fox News reached a $787m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems has included numerous posts promoting a series of digital trading cards he is selling, attacks on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and bizarre complaints about Elon Musk and alleged censorship on Twitter.

But Mr Trump has not weighed in on Fox’s decision to offer more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to Dominion since his last tweet on the issue on Monday.

“If Fox would finally admit that there was large scale cheating & irregularities in the 2020 presidential election, which would be a good thing for them, & for America, the case against them, which should not have existed at all, would be greatly weakened,” he said.