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One Big Story

Fox News learns free speech isn’t always free

Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million on Tuesday making it the largest media defamation settlement in history.

What happened?
On election night in 2020, Fox News projected that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would win the state of Arizona. Trump and his team tried to get the network to reverse the call, but they stood by their initial report. However, when viewers started to turn their attention elsewhere, some of Fox’s anchors began pumping the narrative that Dominion’s machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden. Fox also gave Trump’s allies airtime to spin similar stories of misinformation. Investigations proved that Dominion did not commit voter fraud and they sued Fox for defamation. Later, court documents revealed that Fox News stars and executives privately trashed Trump’s election fraud claims, but still allowed the lies to be aired about the election.

Why it matters:
The settlement prevents Fox News executives from having to testify in court where more embarrassing and incriminating evidence could have been made public. The settlement also sets financial precedence for anyone bringing a defamation lawsuit against Fox, or any other news outlet in the future.

Moving forward:
Fox isn’t in the clear just yet. They face a few other lawsuits including a $2.7 million case brought by another voting company, Smartmatic.

Little Stories

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