“Lies have consequences”

“Lies have consequences” sounds like a parent reprimanding a child, but the line actually comes from Dominion Voting Systems attorney Justin Nelson, delivered soon after a judge announced that Fox News will pay Dominion $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit. Even in politics, a business where hyperbole is a widely accepted part of the game (hence the old joke that every election is “the most important election of our lifetime”), truth still matters. And this remains the case not only for what comes out of our own mouths, but also the statements we host, sponsor, or promote.

Fox and Dominion were on the verge of going to trial in a Delaware courthouse for what could have been another O.J. Simpson-style media circus. The witness list included Fox’s 92-year-old chairman and media legend Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan Murdoch, now CEO of the company, and the brand’s most high-profile hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.

The judge had already concluded, based on extensive evidence exchanged prior to trial, that 20 of Fox’s broadcasts shortly after the 2020 election contained false information about Dominion's role in supposed electoral fraud, a theory largely associated with attorney Sydney Powell. Judge Eric Davis wrote in a comprehensive 130-page opinion that the evidence was “CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.

Fox’s decision to settle spares the company—and the country—a six-week trial and the inevitable appeals that would follow. Fox itself would have been the story, as its media competitors right and left eagerly seized the opportunity to cover its failures, foibles, and factual mistakes exposed before a jury. It was not a pretty prospect for the company, which presumably desperately wishes to move on from the entire imbroglio.

The network had extensive legal arguments about the First Amendment and the rights of a free press to report and opine on the news. Even those rights are circumscribed within a responsibility to truth, both morally and in the legal context of defamation. The case raised interesting and important questions about the standards for judging those rights, questions that will now be deferred to some future case for resolution.

I doubt this settlement, any more than a verdict either way, will change anyone's mind about the 2020 election result. Those who believe the election was stolen will persist in that view and those who believe that is a pack of lies will also continue to believe so. Both believe our democracy is in peril, and that is the deeper issue. No amount of relitigating the past will change our fundamental problem: a significant portion of the country, more precisely a significant portion of the GOP base, does not trust the results of elections. There are any number of confidence-building measures that can be taken to help restore trust: universal voter identification, excuse-based absentee balloting, equalized early voting access or an end to widespread early voting, an end to grant-funded election “improvements.”

But these are largely state and local decisions. Blue states and cities are not going to take these steps, and as a result people who live in red states are going to continue to believe their votes are canceled out by fraud (or bad election policies) in big cities. Come Election Day 2024, we will all be parked on our couches—perhaps watching Fox—anxious as the absentee ballots post all at once in one city in a swing state, and the numbers suddenly radically change, or as our Twitter feed screams fraud. This is not a new problem—one can date modern distrust to the Kennedy-Nixon election in 1960—but it is important to address to ensure the overall health of our democracy.

The aftermath of the 2020 election was a tough time for our country–regardless of any individual’s politics, we all feel it was not a good moment for the nation. We can hope Fox’s decision to settle and spare us and itself a trial will put the country one step closer to collectively focusing on the future and reinforcing our common commitment to truth as the foundation for freedom.

This story has been corrected to reflect that Fox and Dominion were to appear in a Delaware state court.