‘The View’ Fumes Over Fox News Not Having to Apologize On Air for Its Lies About Dominion
The View hosts are frustrated that Fox News isn’t being made to apologize on-air as part of their settlement with Dominion Voting Services, prompting Whoopi Goldberg to ask, “What was the point of all this?”
“Fox News CEO admitted in a deposition the network knew they were pushing lies,” Goldberg said. “Should they have had to go onto their own network and say, look, yes, we lied to y’all. And we knew it and we had to pay this money because we lied to y’all. They don’t have to do that. They don’t have to admit any wrongdoing.”
Fox settled the defamation suit with Dominion Tuesday for a whopping $757.5 million for spreading lies that the 2020 election was rigged, but the terms of the settlement did not require the network’s biggest personalities to admit any wrongdoing on air.
“That’s my biggest problem with it because we already know the Fox News viewer exclusively gets his or her news from Fox News on air,” said Sunny Hostin. “They don’t read other newspapers, they don’t get news from any other outlet, and the fact the New York Times is covering it and CNN is covering it, that’s fine. But they need to be able to get on air and tell their viewers, ‘you can’t trust us. We lied to you. We affected our very democracy. Some of our anchors can’t be trusted,’ and they needed to say that.”
Some of the authentic views of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, among others, became public record, however, after a trove of Fox texts and emails was released during discovery. The communiqués revealed the personalities did not believe the election conspiracies they were pushing.
Hostin didn’t think $787.5 million was enough of a penalty for Fox, even though this is the largest defamation settlement in history. Dominion had initially requested $1.6 billion.
“To me, anything under $1 billion I don’t think sends sends the right message because Rupert Murdoch, every year, I think he has $2.9 billion in pro forma earnings that Fox News makes, and he still has $4 billion in cash as of February. In my view, it didn’t sting enough for what they actually did,” Hostin said.
“You wanted to hear Tucker go out there…but I think is’ good, it’s OK, because, I mean, you’re disappointed, but there are other lawsuits coming up,” Behar said, adding, “If Rupert [Murdoch] wanted to maintain any integrity, he’d fire Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity.”
“I understand there’s a lot coming down the pike,” Goldberg said, “but I don’t like the idea that they don’t have to say it out loud. I don’t like that you’re hoping people will read the deposition. I wanted them to have to say, ‘we lied. And we knew we were lying but we lied anyway.'”
Watch above, via ABC.
