Surprise! Fox News Mostly Avoids Airing How It Paid Out $787 Million For Spreading Election Lies

Late Tuesday afternoon, amid a swirl of confusion over why the Dominion v. Fox trial had been delayed for hours, Judge Eric Davis announced that the “parties had resolved the case,” thus marking an abrupt end to one of the most highly anticipated defamation trials in decades. Every major media outlet, many of which had correspondents in Wilmington, immediately jumped on news of the settlement and its $787.5 million price tag. But one outlet was noticeably loath to get in on the feeding frenzy.

Fox News, the network at the heart of the story, covered the settlement only three times in about four hours after news of the settlement broke, “amounting to about six minutes of coverage,” according to The New York Times’ Stuart Thompson. One such instance occurred during the final moments of Fox anchor Neil Cavuto’s 4 PM hour. “Fox has agreed to pay $787 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit,” Cavuto said, a figure that he said came “officially from the Wall Street Journal”—an outlet that, like Fox News, is owned by Fox Corp. And yet, as The Daily Beast’s Justin Baragona noted, Fox media analyst Howard Kurtz claimed in a broadcast about an hour and a half later that he was unable to “independently confirm” the dollar figure of the settlement that Dominion’s lawyer gave reporters. 

Kurtz—who, back in February, publicly voiced his disagreement with Fox’s decision to prevent him from covering the trial—went on to mention Dominion CEO John Poulos’ statement to reporters that “Fox has admitted telling lies about Dominion.” To which Kurtz added, “Now, both sides had an incentive to avoid a costly six-week trial. Dominion might have lost and gotten zero. Some of Fox’s top executives and Opinion hosts would have had to testify. But there’s undoubtedly disappointment at other networks that were relishing this spectacle.”

Meanwhile, during the Tuesday broadcasts of hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity—both of whom were expected to take the stand in the Dominion trial—no reference to the settlement was made, according to Reuters. (Statements made on both hosts’ shows back in 2020 were among the 20 specific broadcasts and tweets in question that Dominion had alleged were defamatory.)

As for atonement, Fox’s statement acknowledging that “certain claims” about Dominion were false is apparently as far as the network is going to go. Multiple outlets reported that Fox will not have to issue an on-air apology or correction for the erroneous statements its stars made about Dominion as part of the settlement agreement. “There’s no doubt that the $787.5 million settlement is an emphatic win for Dominion. I can’t help but think, though, about the significance to Fox of not having to acknowledge, on air, that the network spread falsehoods,” tweeted media law professor Jonathan Peters. “Fox gets to duck *full* responsibility and avoid a head-on reckoning with its viewers.” That might have something to do, as Peters noted, with the fact that Fox “wanted to avoid statements that could be used against it in the future,” as the network is still facing another defamation lawsuit, filed by another election technology company, Smartmatic, over its 2020 election coverage. 

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Inside the Hive: Fox on Trial podcast now.