Did you know Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. settled its defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting System on Tuesday afternoon?
Odd are if you only get your news from Fox News Channel or the conservative network’s website for information, you might have no idea that settlement happened. The network itself barely covered the story that it has agreed to pay roughly $800 million to avoid a trial over whether or not it knowingly spread lies about the 2020 election and the voting company that sued it.
Instead, the network’s primetime stars talked about other matters and later in the night, the channel’s late night news team focused more on a story about what it warned were out-of-control teens in Chicago over the weekend.
Meanwhile, on the network’s official website there wasn’t a single mention of the settlement. As of this writing, readers instead are being treated to stories about Joe Biden’s taxes, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Elon Musk, Ray Romano’s heart surgery, and yes, that story about a goose rescue.
Former Illinois congressman and now CNN Senior Political Commentator Adam Kinzinger was among those pointing out the omission on Twitter.
“Just looked at Fox News, no mention of the settlement on their website,” Kinzinger wrote.
Kinzinger also retweeted a post that showed The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post front pages on their websites reporting the news.
The lack of coverage on the lawsuit doesn’t stop at the network level, even the owned and operated stations like WFLD-TV Fox 32 Chicago, KTTV-TV Fox 11 Los Angeles, have dozens of stories on their webpages, but only one mention of the settlement under the “national news section” – which requires quite a lot of scrolling down the page to see.
Interestingly enough, when the settlement was announced earlier Tuesday, Fox said in a statement that it “reflects FOX’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.” It’s weird then, we’ll admit, that the network is choosing not to brag about that commitment on its own platform. Oh well.
