A $787.5 Million Settlement and Embarrassing Disclosures: The Costs of Airing a Lie

NYT TECHNOLOGY: A $787.5 Million Settlement and Embarrassing Disclosures: The Costs of Airing a Lie
By Jim Rutenberg and Katie Robertson
Section: Technology
Source: New York Times
Published Date: April 18, 2023 at 03:00AM

Fox News’s late-stage agreement with Dominion Voting Systems came with a rare acknowledgment of broadcasting false claims by the conservative media powerhouse.

In settling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided an excruciating, drawn-out trial in which its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, its top managers and its biggest stars would have had to face hostile grilling on an embarrassing question: Why did they allow a virulent and defamatory conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the network when so many of them knew it to be false? But the $787.5 million settlement agreement — among the largest defamation settlements in history — and Fox’s courthouse statement recognizing that the court had found “certain claims about Dominion” aired on its programming “to be false” at the very least amount to a rare, high-profile acknowledgment of informational wrongdoing by a powerhouse in conservative media and America’s most popular cable network. “Money is accountability,” Stephen Shackelford, a Dominion lawyer, said outside the courthouse, “and we got that today from Fox.”

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/fox-news-dominion-settlement.html