Fox News Settles Dominion Suit

Narrative Intelligence: Fox News Settles for $787 Million in Dominion Lawsuit

On Tuesday, Dominion Voting Systems agreed to settle with Fox News in a defamation lawsuit. Fox News decided to pay Dominion $787 million rather than litigate the suit in court over the coming months. Dominion claimed that Fox News was running untrue and unfounded stories and initially filed for $1.6 billion from Fox. The settlement marked the largest publicly disclosed defamation payout in U.S. history.

The settlement also included a statement from Fox News stating, “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false”. The settlement news broke just before the jury was to begin hearing opening arguments. According to The Washington Post, via documents released as a result of the lawsuit, “Murdoch, who was expected to testify at the trial, said in a deposition that he didn’t believe Trump’s claims but decided not to intervene as Fox hosts, such as Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro, repeatedly bashed Dominion”.

Key Insights from the Kudzu narrative brief 

• Right-leaning news sources have a very small portion of the coverage on this topic. The “least-bias” section of our brief nearly triples the coverage of the “right-center” and “right” bias sections.
• “Donald Trump” is the most popular name in this brief. This is because the voting machines narrative stems from claims by Donald Trump, and other supporters of the former president, that the voting machines may had been “rigged”. His name was mentioned 1946 times in the last 30 days.
• “Sean Hannity” and “Tucker Carlson” also saw a fair share of coverage in this news event, and garnered over 2,500 mentions between the two of them. 

Note: Cover Image by Elliot Stallion