The ordeal of the gout of a six-week trial, parading Fox News figureheads to the helm as well as the embarrassing detail of their malicious contributions to spreading Donald Trump’s ‘big lie’, has just been shunned for media mogul, Rupert Murdoch.
On Tuesday evening, when the jury had just been sworn in by the court in Wilmington, Delaware, in the trial between its American ultra-conservative megaphone network and the company Dominion Voting Systems, the two parties arrived at an amicable agreement. The document thus puts an abrupt end to a long-awaited trial, supposed to mark the history of the fight against disinformation, even before the event has had the chance to really take off.
But if this settlement represents a victory for Dominion, whose reputation was dragged through the mire of radicalism and baseless accusations of voter fraud by former Republican President Donald Trump in 2020, it can also represent a defeat for democracy: the 7,021 exhibits, the list of which was filed on Tuesday before Judge Eric Davis by Dominion to support its libel suit, have just been withdrawn from the eyes of Justice and the public, and this, in exchange for a check for $787.5 million paid to Dominion by Fox News for inconvenience and damages.
The majority of this evidence directly targeted network heavy hitters Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, former star host Lou Dobbs and Fox media empire owner Rupert Murdoch. Pieces exposing the hypocrisy with which they promoted on the air an alternative reality supposed to inflame the electoral base of the populist Trump, while acknowledging in private exchanges the ridiculous, the absurd, the danger and the baselessness of these accusations.
Recall that these accusations, by fabricating a story of fraud supposedly fueled by Dominion voting machines, have contributed to undermining public confidence in the United States electoral system. And keep doing it.
” Disappointment “
“For many observers who hoped to see Fox put on the grill of a court for its electoral lies, the announcement of this mutual agreement is received with disappointment”, summed up Wednesday Quinta Jurecic, specialist in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, detailing on the LawFare blog the complexity of a libel lawsuit that certainly prompted Dominion to “accept a settlement, even though a lawsuit might have served a purpose [sociale et démocratique] more important”.
Disappointment ! The feeling seemed to be shared by several defenders of democracy in the face of an agreement that avoids the network of the ultra-right to face its journalistic and social responsibilities during a trial that everything predestined for high-level media coverage.
What we are witnessing right now is a battle between authoritarianism and democracy. However, we cannot have a functioning democracy if we do not have a common understanding of the facts.
Worse, the terms of the agreement, while not made public, do not appear to seek to coerce Fox News into an inevitably embarrassing public apology that might have embodied the network’s admission of its contribution. to the cleavage of the American social climate and to the pollution of the space of public debate by its disinformation, often hateful, and this, in full knowledge of the facts.
“We are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems,” the chain simply mentioned in a press release on Tuesday, while timidly acknowledging “certain allegations concerning Dominion” as “false”. He added, “This settlement reflects Fox’s ongoing commitment to the highest journalistic standards. [sic]. We hope that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, rather than in the acrimony of a divisive trial, will allow the country to move forward on these issues. »
“Who’s going to get fired? »
“What I’m interested in seeing now is what the apology will look like. Who’s gonna get fired? What will be the consequences within the company? summarized in the wake of the announcement of the amicable agreement Chris Stirewalt, quoted by the Semafor site. This is the ex-political official at Fox News, dismissed for having allowed the announcement, however supported by the facts, of the victory of Joe Biden during the presidential election of 2020.
We remember: the decision had raised the ire of the ex-president and populist, who would have preferred that Fox announce his victory, in contradiction with the reality of the ballot box. She had also launched the ball of the animators of the network against Dominion and the American electoral system, to delegitimize the victory of the Democrats and to tell the defeat of the Republican.
A trade in the “big lie” that this week forced Fox to take a few million dollars out of its coffers, without however having to expose how many it brought in at the time with this institutionalized disinformation campaign.
However, if the price has been deemed fair by both parties, it resolves a dispute, but certainly not the big problem of the present raised in 2022 on the airwaves of NPR, the American public radio, by the lawyer for the defense group Protect Democracy, John Langford.
“What we are witnessing right now is a battle between authoritarianism and democracy,” he said. at the microphone of David Folkenflick. “But we can’t have a functioning democracy if we don’t have a common understanding of the facts. And we cannot have a common understanding of the facts if there is a constellation of groups that intentionally, willfully, or recklessly spread lies about things like the legitimacy of elections or important public facts that are central to the debate. »