Ultraconservative Fox News, America's most-watched cable news channel, agreed Tuesday to pay $787.5 million (€718 million) to vote-tallying company Dominion Voting Systems to avoid a lawsuit over defamation in which the company asked this medium for 1.6 billion in damages.
With this pact, the television of the tycoon Rupert Murdoch admits that the accusations of electoral manipulation that he launched against Dominion after the 2020 presidential elections were deliberate falsehoods: malicious lies - according to the judge's statements admitted by Fox - , with an indisputable goal: to prop up Donald Trump's big lie about alleged election fraud that he lost to Joe and, in doing so, to stem the hemorrhaging of ratings and revenue that the network had begun to experience by to disappoint the most faithful television viewers with some attempt by the journalists to explain the truth.
The lying nature of the allegations by the loser of the elections was already well established, despite the fact that he continued and still continues to repeat the song. But now it is Trump's main accomplice in the defense of the aforementioned falsehood who, in front of a judge and at a historic cost in economic terms, recognizes that the alleged technical basis of the falornia was a lie.
In the lawsuit, Dominion accused Fox of having presented the company as an instrument at the service of Democrats for elections. And now the liars have to swallow this accusation. "We recognize the decision of the court, according to which certain statements about Dominion are false," Fox had to admit before the magistrate of the Superior Court of Delaware, Eric Davis.
But the admission of guilt goes much further. Because, as the lawyers explained yesterday, the agreement implies the non-challenge and, therefore, the assumption of two resounding conclusions of the judge prior to the trial: one, that "the evidence does not support" the fact that Fox News reported about alleged "good faith and disinterested" vote rigging, and the other, which is "clear as water that none of the statements related to Dominion about the 2020 election are true."
The pact shows Fox's priority interest in avoiding the reputational cost and embarrassment that the trial would have caused it, due to the global echo it would have given to the falsehoods it incurred to support Donald Trump in the electoral fraud complaint.
The judge had planned for the hearing to appear as witnesses the main managers of the media company, including Rupert Murdoch, 92 years old, and the star presenters of the chain, with the ultra Tucker Carlson at the head. It was "the libel trial of the century," said The New York Times.
Murdoch would have had to explain why he allowed the network to lie over and over again about something as serious as who was the rightful president of the country while managers and bigwigs in television mocked each other in private, in numerous cross-messages, of Trump's fraud allegations.
And Carlson would have had to endure Dominion's lawyers reading the confessions about the secret, but "passionate hatred" of the Republican leader, while, on the air, the farce continued.
"Lies have consequences," said one of Dominion's lawyers, Justin Nelson, after sealing the deal with Fox. Among the consequences will not be, however, that the chain directly apologizes to the audience for having deceived them.
But the legal nightmare over the election fallacies has just begun. More cases are underway, including that of another election technology company, Smartmatic, which has a $2.7 billion (€2.464 billion) lawsuit against Fox for the same reason as Dominion: “ Implicate the company in a false narrative about the manipulation of the elections”.
Trump's Big Lie has already been sentenced. The question is: How much does all this matter to his voters? How many of them would stop supporting him because of that?
