Dominion v. Fox Won a Battle in a Losing War

A sign labeled “Fox News will lie about this” at a protest in Wisconsin. Photo by Patrick Finnegan.

Voices across the political landscape celebrated a victory over political disinformation when Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787 million in a defamation settlement last April. Dominion’s lawsuit alleged that Fox intentionally lied when they reported that the voting machine company manipulated the 2020 presidential election in favor of Joe Biden. The filings sought to prove that Fox had acted with “actual malice,” the legal standard required of public figures when they file suit for libel. One Dominion lawyer later remarked that Fox’s conduct so obviously met the standard that he “[was not] sure [he’d] ever see that type of evidence again.” Internal communications released during pre-trial discovery revealed that Fox’s executives and hosts knew the information they disseminated was false but continued to peddle it in order to drive viewership and, in turn, profit. A Delaware Superior Court ruled Fox’s statements to be false and ordered a trial to determine if the network had acted with actual malice. Before opening statements began, the Court announced that the parties had settled in what became the largest media-related settlement in U.S. history. 

Journalists, politicians, and lawyers praised the lawsuit as a proof-of-concept for combatting disinformation through the legal system. Michael Tomasky, the editor of the New Republic, argued that proof of Fox’s willful deception would demonstrate that they were “not a news organization in any normal sense of the word.” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said the settlement was a “vindication” of his state’s election system, which used Dominion’s machines in 2020. Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, told reporters that “the truth matters” and “lies have consequences.” Tom Clare, another Dominion lawyer, said that the case was “momentous … not only for Dominion, but for the entire country and the integrity of elections.”

Indeed, the lawsuit seemed to demonstrate a viable method for curtailing disinformation. However, nearly a year later, it is unclear that the lawsuit demonstrated much of anything.

While Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network held Fox accountable for a handful of lies, it is clear that expectations of the lawsuit’s political impact ran far too high. Despite the ruling, election disinformation continues to circulate with little sign of change.

To be sure, the idea that the 2020 election was distorted to favor Biden is demonstrably false. While purveyors of disinformation allege various means by which election fraud in 2020 supposedly took place, none survive scrutiny. Experts agree that individual fraud is exceedingly rare. Following Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, judges across the country dismissed several allegations of voter fraud that, even if they had held merit, would not have changed the election’s results. Allegations of systematic tampering, which typically allege that election data contains statistical anomalies, also hold no water. Indeed, one analysis found that the most prominent theories of systematic tampering relied on either incorrect analysis of data or wholly false claims about the data itself.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the Dominion case was that Fox’s employees were well aware that there was no substantial election fraud in 2020; they were clear-headed as they fabricated a theory to the contrary. Sean Hannity, who hosted Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as she made false claims about Dominion on his Fox show, told Dominion lawyers in deposition that he “didn’t believe [the claims] for a second.” Hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham also acknowledged Sidney Powell’s lies as false. Later testimony from executives at Fox, also presented in the filing, likewise revealed that they knew the allegations peddled on their channel were fictional. Rupert Murdoch, then-chairman of Fox Corporation, called the claims “really crazy” and “damaging” in internal communications. The whole ordeal met a climactic end with the massive settlement and the firing of primetime host Tucker Carlson shortly after. 

But little has changed in the disinformation world following the emergence of these facts. The data shows that many people remain misinformed about election security. A Monmouth University poll conducted after the settlement reported that 68% of Republicans still believe that Joe Biden only won the presidency in 2020 due to voter fraud—a proportion that has held steady since the election in November 2020. Associated Press polling suggests that Republicans’ belief in election fraud correlates less with actual information related to election security and more with the success of GOP candidates. Just 32% of Republicans had “high confidence” that votes would be counted accurately as Trump sowed doubt on the election heading into 2016, which increased to 54% two years after his victory. Confidence has decreased since then, with just 28% reporting high confidence in 2020 and 22% ahead of the upcoming 2024 election.

Coverage of the lawsuit has also done little to sway disinformation-fueled election policy. In Shasta County, California, a far-right board voted to terminate its contract with Dominion in January 2023, prior to the company’s settlement with Fox, but continued on its crusade even after the news broke. In November, the board entered a legal showdown with the state when it announced plans to institute a hand-count system for a local election, which would have violated a law requiring voting machines to be used in California elections with more than 1,000 voters. The county’s registrar, a political moderate, ultimately obeyed the law, but the board continues to push its election denial agenda.

Beyond local county boards and far away from Dominion machines, other policies aimed at nonexistent voter fraud remain in place. In 2022, the Florida legislature capitalized on fears about voter fraud to create an election crimes office, and Governor Ron DeSantis appointed election denier Cord Byrd as Secretary of State to oversee it. Both the office and the election denier remain there today. In neighboring Georgia, lawmakers previously used election fraud as a pretext to create obstacles to voting, including banning people from providing food and water to voters waiting in line. Though a judge struck down the provision preventing food and water distribution, other portions of the law restricting early and absentee voting, modifying ballot verification procedures, and granting the legislature more control over elections remain in place for the time being. Nationally, voters in 27 states will head into the 2024 election with new restrictions enacted after 2020.

The one place where Dominion may have made an impact was on trust in Fox News itself. A Variety poll found that 21% of Fox viewers said their trust in the network declined following the lawsuit. But there are several problems with this statistic. The survey specifically asked participants: “How has your trust in the information provided by Fox News changed following Murdoch’s testimony and private texts from Fox News hosts that voter fraud claims were false?” Not only is this a leading question, but it also requires respondents to perform a self-assessment of how their beliefs have changed rather than asking them about a concrete belief they have. The results are also undermined by other responses. Just 9% of respondents said they actually watched less Fox following the lawsuit, and this similarly relies on people to report their own behavior. This potentially-flawed polling is yet another source for inflated expectations about Dominion’s impact on disinformation. Fox remains the most-watched news network in America. 

Expectations that Dominion would have a significant impact on belief in disinformation came in part from a lack of perspective on the conservative news sphere. While the Dominion settlement may have made headlines in the mainstream press, it remained obscure in right-wing media. Just eight of the 26 largest conservative news outlets reported on Dominion as details began emerging early last March. Of those, only four mentioned the private communications between Fox employees. One of the outlets reported on the lawsuit and then proceeded to publish three more articles with disinformation about Dominion machines. Fox News themselves spent just six minutes of airtime on the settlement. Today, Trump—who lied about the election over 3,000 times during his presidency—continues to deceive his supporters by repeating lies about the 2020 election and overblowing the threat of fraud in 2024. It is clear that the audiences who were most misinformed about the election have not received the information necessary to correct it. 

The impracticality of using lawsuits as an independent tool to deter disinformation should’ve been another clear signal that Dominion would have such a small impact. Even if it was practical to challenge every lying news outlet or public figure in court, it would be impossible to utilize lawsuits on social media, where disinformation can spread rampantly among millions of users. While lawsuits can garner huge amounts of news coverage, they can only target the loudest peddlers of disinformation because of the massive amount of resources they require—Dominion needed 31 lawyers, 9 law firms, and two years of time to resolve. Meanwhile, disinformation can continue circulating, as it has, without any one clear target to file against. While lawsuits may be a good way to prove innocence and recoup losses for an individual company like Dominion, we cannot expect them to have a major impact on deeply rooted national problems.

Despite Dominion’s failure to reduce the spread of disinformation, similar cases continue to receive a great deal of news coverage and a similar level of optimism. Smartmatic, another voting machine company, is still litigating its own high-profile defamation case against Fox originally filed in February 2021. A lawyer for Smartmatic stated that his lawsuit would “expose the rest” of Fox’s disregard for the truth. MyPillow CEO-turned-election-denier Mike Lindell continues garnering media attention as he fights his own defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion. Prominent disinformation cases outside of elections have also received plenty of attention. Alex Jones, for instance, made headlines in 2022 after he was ordered to pay $1.4 billion for defaming the families of children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. 

Disproportionate, positive news coverage provides a false sense of optimism to believers in the truth by distorting defamation lawsuits into standalone tools to fight disinformation. It fails to account for the context in which the average believer in disinformation lives, thus distorting expectations about their impact. Lawsuits cannot make up for deficiencies in media literacy or lack of coverage among the groups that need it most. They cannot function as a “vindication” in their own right. We must recognize that, in the wake of Dominion, the struggle to uphold the truth is still one we’re losing. If we are to win the war on disinformation, we need to be realistic about the role defamation lawsuits will play in fighting it.

Jacob Gold (CC ’27) is a staff writer at CPR from Castle Rock, Colorado. He looks forward to a career in law, with particular interests in civil rights, free speech, and misinformation. Outside of CPR, you can find him listening to Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, and The Rolling Stones.