In the largest known media libel payout in the US history, Fox News has agreed to pay staggering $787 million to Dominion, the voting machine maker resulting in a huge loss of face for the Rupert Murdoch owned channel. Dominion had sued the channel for $ 1.6 billion for deliberately airing false claim about the company’s voting equipments that they were used to rig the 2020 election in favour of Joe Biden.

Even though Fox was saved from tendering a public apology and avoid an embarrassing trial but the settlement amount is enough make Fox and its owners pinch hard.

The settlement also raises the question about credibility of election deniers in the Republican Party led by Donald Trump.

The case documents reveal that many top employees of Fox and anchors indeed knew that conspiracy theories about the voting machines were false but still they aired it.

Its still a humiliating chapter in Fox’s history and though we are yet to know how audience of Fox will see it but its scathing after-effects are sure to keep reverberating in the next years to come.


And the settlement is not gonna end all the troubles of Fox arising out of its coverage of the 2020 election. It is facing another defamation suit from another voting machine maker Smartmatic which has sought $2.7 billion in damages. And it is likely that Fox will settle that too mounting more financial trouble for the channel.

According to Washington Post Dominion showed through pretrial discovery of memos, texts and emails that Murdoch, Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott, and hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson doubted Trump’s allegations and considered Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell unreliable. At one point, Carlson privately referred to Trump as “a demonic force” and wrote that he hated him “passionately.”

And now Fox is gonna pay for it.