‘No They Didn’t!’ CNN’s Alisyn Camerota Shuts Down Colleagues Who Reported Fox News Admitted They Lied

CNN host Alisyn Camerota, who previously worked a Fox News for 16 years, was decidedly unimpressed with the settlement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox and rebutted her CNN colleagues on air insisting that Fox did not actually admit to any lies in the settlement.

“Were you surprised about what Fox did?” Jake Tapper asked Camerota about the $787.5 million dollar settlement.

“I haven’t been surprised by any of this, nor am I surprised by the settlement. I predicted there would be a settlement all along because Fox doesn’t want to air its dirty laundry in a court case,” Camerota replied, adding:

And forgive me, I don’t share quite Elie’s, I guess, being impressed at the outcome. This is half of what Dominion asked for, let’s remember. And yes, obviously, it’s a big windfall for Dominion. It’s chump change for Fox. They make more than $1 billion a year. Their news division.

And so this is I think this is a victory for Fox. They don’t have to put their big stars on the stand and they didn’t even have to issue a public apology. When you guys say that, they admitted that they lied.

No, they didn’t! They’re saying that we we acknowledge the court’s findings that certain claims about Dominion appear to be false. That doesn’t say we lied. That says they’re false. And they say certain claims. They’re not even saying they made those claims. They’re not even saying which hosts of theirs made their claims. I think that this is the best outcome that Fox could ever have hoped for. Once they got themselves into this mess.

“Well, we were translating it from lawyeress to English. But I take your point, Alisyn,” replied Tapper.

Camerota jumped back in and added, “I mean, they’re not going to, they’re not going to have to say anything on the air. They don’t have to say on the air, ‘We fudged the truth. We lied. We disseminated disinformation.’

“They’re not going to. I mean at least with Gretchen’s settlement. Gretchen had a public statement that said something to the effect of ‘we acknowledge, we apologize and regret the fact that Gretchen was not treated with respect and dignity.’ I mean, she got that in her settlement, and Dominion didn’t get that right?” Camerota concluded, referring to former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson who successfully sued Fox News amid sexual harassment allegations against then Fox News CEO Roger Ailes.

“Well, I mean, they didn’t apologize publicly for whatever they paid to the family of poor Seth Rich, who was murdered,” Tapper replied, adding:

And Fox put out a whole bunch of insane conspiracy theories about that. Sarah, do you agree with Alison here that this is the best possible outcome Fox could have gotten, even though it is this astoundingly huge check, embarrassing truly to any organization that considers itself journalistic or pretends to be journalistic to have to pay $787,500,000 to avoid a defamation lawsuit. But do you agree? I saw Colby Hall from Mediaite, wrote something about like, look, at the end of the day, Fox avoided six weeks of hideous coverage.

“Well, I do agree that reputationally this is good, Jake, but legally there are some problems. Fox faces a bunch of other defamation suits, most notably a $2.7 billion defamation suit from Smartmatic,” answered media analyst Sara Fischer, adding:

And so when you concede, even if it’s just in a legal context and you’re not apologizing that you did air falsehoods, that makes a lot harder for you to litigate some of those future defamation cases. And there are a lot of them now talking about the financial damages. Yes, 787 million is just, you know, less than half of what Dominion was expecting. But if you were to compound that amount with these other cases coming up, I mean, this is going to add up to be pretty significant for Fox.

Now, broadly speaking, I agree with Alyson. This, you know, is a win in some senses because Fox is not having to face its viewers. It’s not having to apologize. We were in a reporter scrum a few minutes ago with Dominion lawyers and we were asking them, are you going to demand retractions from Fox? They didn’t say anything along those lines.

Watch the full clip above via CNN.