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And just like that, it was over.
For months, Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News for broadcasting false claims about election fraud in the 2020 election ground forward. Dominion obtained thousands of documents and depositions demonstrating how Fox News hosts and executives, spooked about being outrun by conspiracy-theory-mongers to their right, gave airtime and credence to baseless claims about Dominion’s vote-counting tools. A judge cleared the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit to go to trial, and a jury was selected on Tuesday morning.
Then, on Tuesday afternoon, a settlement. Fox News would pay Dominion $787,500,000, more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. But Fox News did avoid paying the most costly possible punishment: admitting to its viewers that it had spoon-fed them what they wanted to hear, rather than the truth.
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Which isn’t to say that a…
This article was written by Philip Bump and originally published on www.washingtonpost.com