Disappointments as Fox News, today, announced a $787 million out-of-court settlement with the voting machine manufacturing company– Dominion.
Dominion, in 2021, filed a defamation lawsuit against the Rupert Murdoch news channel over several reporting of its voting machine inconsistencies in the 2020 US presidential elections.
Fox News had called out Dominion over the integrity of its voting machines which have been widely reported to be susceptible to the most rudimentary hacks and vote manipulations.
Fox’s claims was widely corroborated by many top Democrat politicians, including Hillary Clinton, Val Demings, Adam Schiff, Ted Lieu, Ron Wyden, Amy Klobuchar, and Vice President Kamala Harris, over the last five years. VP Kamala was once quoted as referring to Dominion systems as “antiquated machines which are vulnerable to being hacked.”
Dominion’s integrity is further put to test in a 2019 study by the Associated Press which categorized voting machines in over 10,000 US polling units as “nearing obsolescence.”
Matt Blaze and Alex Halderman, computer science professors at Georgetown and Michigan University, attested to this high vulnerability of voting machines like Dominion on separate occasions before the US Congress.
With such a level of bipartisan concerns over Dominion’s voter machine integrity, the burden of proof ought to lie on Staple Street-owned company, not on Fox News. Thus, it remains further disheartening to see Fox unwilling to build a solid evidence-backed challenge against the lawsuit, opting rather, to make Dominion appear right, and in the process damaging widely held beliefs of corrupt electoral malpractice in 2020.
Dominion, in singling out Fox for its lawsuit, exposes its leftist-party allegiance—given the stark absence of similar lawsuits against Democrat lawmakers who have criticized its machines in the past.
However, the case may turn out, $787 million is a massive settlement figure capable of significantly impacting Fox’s finances and future efforts toward responsible journalism. But the biggest damage would go to its reputation.
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