For anyone not yet inured to the perfidies of the Fox News Channel—the partisan shilling, the conspiracy peddling, the fear-mongering, etcetera—the revelations contained in this week’s Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against the network may have felt colossal. Contained in a nearly 200-page suit were troves of evidence—emails, texts, etcetera—indicating that the network’s top executives, producers, and talent knew their guests were hawking false claims about election fraud, but that they let them hawk away regardless, all in the interest, according to Dominion’s lawsuit, of maintaining Fox News’ position as the most preeminent and lucrative conservative media operation in the business.
Through discovery, Dominion has succeeded in putting the apparent hypocrisy of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham et al. on the record, but their attempt to force the Murdochs to pay $1.6 billion for defamation is by no means guaranteed. Thanks to the First Amendment, the bar for proving defamation by a media company is incredibly high, and the plaintiff has to prove actual malice. The evidence may seem damning, confirming what most educated liberals already believed, but it’s also very unlikely that anyone will be damned, or even give a damn.