NEW YORK – Days after Fox News agreed to the payment nearly $800 million To settle a lawsuit for broadcasting 2020 election lies, it’s hard for you to notice anything changed there.
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham headlined their shows Thursday and talked about Hunter Biden, the president’s son. Ingraham’s show warned, “The left wants the government to be your only family.” Hannity took aim at known villains — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., and Vice President Kamala Harris. Carlson mocked a speech about racial justice, saying it meant “straight white men are bad.”
Experts doubt the settlement will prompt a major course correction in the conservative media, barring a little less specificity to avoid future lawsuits.
So far this has been the main result of a The Connecticut Jury Verdict last year that Alex Jones must pay $965 million to parents of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting after he claimed the 2012 massacre was a hoax and that grieving parents were actors. Now Jones is more likely to keep names out, said Nicole Hemmer, a professor at Vanderbilt University and author of Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.
“It hasn’t changed his conspiracy theories,” Hemmer said. “He’s just a little more cautious about not saying legally enforceable things.”
Heading into the 2024 election, radio host Erick Erickson predicted more reluctance in the conservative media to accept demands from former President Donald Trump or anyone in politics who preaches election denial. Fox’s response is the most watched.
If anything, Fox is just as dominant among Conservatives today as it was after the 2020 election, the period to which the Dominion lawsuit relates. That’s when Fox aired false claims Dominion Voting Systems helped rig the election against Trump, despite many on the network knowing the allegations were false.
Documents in the case revealed the Fear in Fox that it would lose viewers if the network didn’t tell Trump fans what they wanted to hear.
A former Fox personality, Bill O’Reilly, wrote after the reckoning: “That’s what happens when money becomes more important than honest information.” However, his own experience shows that there was reason to be afraid. O’Reilly said he lost more than 1,000 premium subscribers to his site after telling them the election results would not be overturned.
Fox supporters were apparently more upset with the election coverage than with revelations in the lawsuit about those on the network who did not believe the allegations of fraud and expressed private contempt for trump.
There has been little noticeable change in Fox’s television ratings over the past few months, certainly none attributable to the lawsuit. In March, Fox’s website had 88.7 million unique visitors, marking its fourth straight month of double-digit growth, said Howard Polskin, whose website The Righting monitors conservative media.
Most conservative websites either ignored the Dominion lawsuit or gave it only superficial coverage, he said.
“Right-wing coverage would not suggest at all that a landmark deal was reached,” Polskin said. “It was completely wrong with the scale of the news event itself.”
While Fox conceded in the settlement the judge’s verdict Fox made no apology for the network spreading false material about Dominion. That probably would have meant more to Fox’s critics than to its fans anyway, said Megan Duncan, a communications professor at Virginia Tech who studies news audiences.
For Fox supporters, criticism of the network wouldn’t mean much unless it was voiced by someone who shared their ideology. For most of Fox’s audience, the agreement will be quickly forgotten — if followed at all, she said.
For Fox, it’s all a case for the importance of keeping your audience happy.
That audience has for several years made Fox the leading cable network, so profitable that it’s able to absorb the $787 million Dominion settlement as a cost of doing business.
Fox still has legal challenges, with a pending defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic, another voting technology company. But Dominion also has a case against Newsmax, Fox’s main TV rival for conservative audiences. Newsmax insists its case is different and that it has better defamation protections than Fox.
But as a smaller company, if Newsmax gets it wrong, a financial verdict could cripple or kill it in Fox’s favor, Hemmer said.
“Fox would definitely go after that audience,” she said.
Fox is soon facing crucial negotiations with three major cable companies — Comcast, Spectrum and Cox — over royalty payments, the amount they will pay Fox for the right to offer the network on their systems, said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America. a left-leaning media watchdog group.
Since a Boycott of advertisers against former Fox personality Glenn Beck, largely orchestrated by Media Matters, Fox has focused on increasing carriage fees. It’s succeeded to a point where Fox would have a 35% profit margin even if it had no advertising revenue, he said.
As such, it’s important for Fox to reassure these companies that it has a large, valuable audience to rely on when the time comes when cable services are shutting down.
Fox may use the litigation’s conclusion to build up its news operation, which has lost figures like Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith in recent years, said Chris Stirewalt, a senior executive fired by Fox after the quick but ultimately correct decision on election night 2020 to nominate Arizona in the presidential race for Democrat Joe Biden.
Fox said it’s doing just that, saying it’s increased its investment in journalism by more than 50% over the past week.
“Being a news organization is expensive and dangerous,” said Stirewalt, now political editor at NewsNation. “Not only expensive because you have to pay to get news, but also expensive because you can lose your audience because sometimes you have to tell them what they don’t want to hear.”
It might be easier and a good deal to double down on programs that appeal to viewers’ attitudes and emotions, he said. Fox wouldn’t be the only one following this direction.
“I don’t envy them their choices,” he said.
Erickson, the radio host, said he would expect more managerial control over Fox’s personalities, although that wouldn’t necessarily be something viewers would notice. That would return to the days of the late Fox leader Roger Ailes, drummed out of the network in a sexual misconduct scandal in 2016.
“Whether you liked Roger Ailes or not, he understood that you shouldn’t lie to your audience,” Erickson said.
The ovation delivered by an audience in Hannity’s studio on Thursday night – for him and for Carlson and Ingraham at the beginning and end of their shows – illustrated a lasting point.
Fox has several solid journalists on its payroll, but its stars, the main reason viewers tune in, are the ones that offer tough talks and opinions.
“I think they’ve backed themselves into a corner, and that corner is full of Trump supporters,” said Hemmer, the Vanderbilt professor. “That’s the business model.”
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