The Fox-Dominion Settlement

The wailing you heard across the land Tuesday afternoon was the sound of thousands of journalists lamenting the settlement of the defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. An entire industry of reporters has been denied the schadenfreude of seeing their hated political and media competitor in the dock. An hilariously revealing courtroom account in Politico laments that “hopes were dashed—dreams torpedoed” by the settlement.

The settlement is a victory for Dominion, which said Fox will pay $787.5 million. Fox didn’t apologize, though it said “we acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” Those claims involved statements aired on Fox from the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell that blamed Dominion’s voting machines for Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020.

These columns never saw any evidence for such claims, and we said so in a Nov. 18, 2020, editorial, “Rage Against the Voting Machine.” Dominion cited that editorial more than once in its legal filings. On Dec. 1, 2020, we ran an op-ed from Dominion CEO John Poulos rebutting the claims against his company.