No Changes Seen for Fox News After Massive Court Settlement
Network not even required to apologize for the lies it told
There are no changes in the air for Fox News, despite the mammoth, $787.5 million that the right-wing network has agreed to pay out to settle charges that Fox personalities knowingly lied on-camera about the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Fox executives agreed to the massive settlement rather than face a public trial in which the judge in the case had already stipulated that Fox News statements were false when its hosts repeated Donald Trump's lies that he was the real winner of the 2020 election.
Although Fox News now must pay Dominion Voting Systems, whose voting machines were caught up in the lies told by Trump and his supporters, observers and former employees of the Rupert Murdoch-owned network don't think anything at Fox will change.
“I don’t think that this will change the way Fox does news, and therefore I don’t think it will change the way viewers view them,” said former anchor Gretchen Carlson, whose allegations of sexual harassment helped force out one-time Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.
MSNBC host Joy Reid noted that Fox News wasn't even required to issue an apology as part of the settlement.
“Unfortunately, ‘I am sorry' was too hard for Fox to utter as part of its $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, the largest settlement by a media company in history,” Reid said, on-camera. “As VICE News explains, there was no apology for repeatedly airing the lies that played a key role in convincing a large swath of Americans that the 2020 election was rigged, which did irreparable damage to voters' trust in the democratic system. Not even a peep.
“And what that signals, which may not be all that surprising, is that Fox’s behavior is not likely to change -- well, except perhaps causing their anchors to use a self-deleting text platform to exchange their true views about Donald Trump, their viewers and what’s happening in the news,” she added, referring to the explosive internal messages between Fox News personalities that revealed that they knew Trump's claims of election fraud were truly a lie.
However, Reid also allowed that “Fox is not out of the legal woods yet, however, when it comes to their coverage following the 2020 election,” in reference to another, forthcoming legal case by a second voting systems company.
Fox News has only encouraged the worst elements of the Republican Party, according to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.
“As the lawyer just noted, the environment there was toxic. It was misogyny. It was gross well, that environment allows — is allowed to exist because the higher up starting with the owner of the company reflects that back in the way that they go, ‘Well, you know, it doesn’t affect me,’” said Steele. “They turn a blind eye. They walk away that is similarly what you see playing out inside the GOP the ugly behavior, the Marjorie Taylor Greene's, the Matt Gaetz, it’s not berated — it’s accentuated, it’s elevated.”
Greene and Gaetz are two of the hard-right members of Congress aligned with Trump's MAGA movement.
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