Don’t Settle, Dominion! Drag Fox News Across the Hot Coals

That’s not just a smoking gun. That gun is still sizzling, two and a half years later. Before Scott’s email, Shawn had done two segments on his weekend show debunking various Trump claims—he said claims of a rigged ballot were “false and unsubstantiated,” and he asserted that Trump’s claims about massive vote dumping to help Biden were also untrue.

What Shawn was saying was true. He was doing journalism; delivering news. And that, not Maria Bartiromo’s propaganda, is what Scott ordered stopped. In addition to that, we know that in the aftermath of the election and Biden’s victory, Fox didn’t fire any of the anchors spreading poison and lies. It fired the two guys who ran the Decision Desk, which was the first to call Biden as the winner in Arizona, which was the crucial call that propelled him to victory. Fox fired the two people trying to do news. The people doing propaganda, it kept and protected, and most of them are still on the air.

Why Rupert Murdoch didn’t settle this suit like all the others boggles the mind. Because this chain of events will find him, possibly this week, in a place he’s spent decades trying to avoid—a courtroom, on a witness stand, under oath, answering hostile questions from smart lawyers. But he made his choice. He has a lot of fancy lawyers himself, and rich people find many sleazy ways to wriggle out of blame and responsibility. So I make no predictions here. But based on what we know publicly, it shouldn’t be too hard for a smart litigator to paint Murdoch into a grim corner where he has to end up admitting that his news organization knowingly aired lies for the sake of ratings.