The Guardian
Fox News
paid out a record $787.5m to settle a defamation suit for broadcasting lies about the 2020 US presidential election. The case had been brought by Dominion, a company that makes voting machines and which objected to Fox News airing, for instance, the wholly false claim that Dominion devices had deleted millions of votes for Donald Trump, replacing them with votes for Joe Biden â aided by an âalgorithm to calculate the votes that they would need to flipâ.
The last-minute deal came as a surprise to those who were looking forward to a blockbuster courtroom drama, but the bigger shock might be that Fox didnât settle earlier. Given that the judge had already gone into caps-lock mode when he
ruled in March that it âis CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are trueâ, the chances of a Fox win were always dicey.
Evidence revealed in the Dominion case exposed the channel as the hostage of its viewersâ fantasy: a Trump election victory, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
www.theguardian.com