National Review Issues Scathing Indictment of Fox Settlement: ‘Disgraceful Situation’ Conservatives Are ‘Quietly Mortified By’

AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura

National Review‘s Jeffrey Blehar issued a scathing indictment of Fox News’ coverage of the 2020 presidential election and legal strategy in defending it after the network reached a $787,500,000 settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for defamatory statements made about it on-air on Tuesday.

In a no-holds-barred post about the settlement, Blehar characterized the defamation suit against Fox as “something of a black hole in conservative media discussion — ‘Look away for pity’s sake!’ — a disgraceful situation everyone is quietly mortified by.”

Blehar continued:

It was made even worse by the humiliating revelations churned up during the discovery process, where multiple FNC hosts were revealed to be cynical hypocrites knowingly soft-selling preposterous and ultimately civically destructive lies to their audience for no better reason than that they were afraid of losing said audience to rivals.

According to Blehar, the settlement was the result of an inadvisable legal strategy that resulted in not just an enormous payout, but the negative news cycles and brand damage that came with pre-trial discovery. “They suffered the public humiliation and ended up writing a historically enormous check anyway,” observed Blehar.

Elsewhere on the site, National Review senior political correspondent and Washington Post columnist Jim Geraghty also commented on the case:

If you choose to believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, you must believe Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion in a settlement, rather than present any of that evidence. You must believe that Fox News had a quick and easy way to win this lawsuit and simply refused to use it — even though the news distributor had more than 700 million good reasons to point to this evidence, if it existed.

He went on to argue that the monstrous settlement would compel Fox and other right-of-center networks to “push back against” future false, potentially defamatory claims made by former president Donald Trump “early and often, and on-air,” as well as to cut loose loose-cannon hosts.

“The cost-benefit analysis of cable-news personalities is about to change — and the market for ‘you never know what he’s going to say next’ is about to crash,” argued Geraghty.

Reacting to the settlement on Fox News shortly after it was reached, Howard Kurtz offered another perspective on the matter:

And, although much of the media was looking forward to six weeks of…frankly, a lot of people in the mainstream media are anti-Fox and rooting for Fox to lose. They’re now going to be deprived of that opportunity and the rest of us get to go home…

In a statement, Fox submitted that the settlement “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards” and that it is “hopeful that our decision to resolve the dispute with Dominion amicably instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

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