I’m guessing, but lawyers cost a lot of money and time spent away from your primary business, so a settlement on (mostly) your terms with big enough bucks to pay the legal bills and have a lot left over for business purposes might be tempting.
…And Old Olds beat me to it, and said it better (dammit…)
A known amount of money now vs. unknown amount of money a decade from now after endless appeals may sound appealing to Dominion.
FoxNews has been running full-page newspaper ads touting their status as the “most trusted” news network.
I’m sure Dominion and Smartmatic will appreciate FoxNews openly undermining its own usual defense of “No reasonable person should believe us”.
The ostensible point of the lawsuit is that Fox’s dishonesty damaged Dominion’s business. Early on, Dominion made a statement along the lines of, we are not interested in a settlement where Fox writes us a check and doesn’t accept responsibility, which is the usual case when parties settle. (“Mutually agreeable terms were reached, which were not made public. Neither party admits fault or will comment further.” That sort of thing.)
Obviously, if Fox is coming with a gigantic financial offer, Dominion will consider it. But if part of the deal is that Fox gets to say “we do not admit that we knowingly gave a platform to defamatory content,” then those allegations continue to persist without retraction, and the financial settlement would need to be unprecedentedly huge for Dominion to accept it.
Dominion wants Fox to say, loudly and publicly, “it was all made up; none of it has a basis in truth; they were lies when they were first spoken, they continued to be lies when we repeated, and platformed them and they continue to be lies now; and we will make sure our audience knows this.” Fox doesn’t want to do that, which is why proceedings are still moving forward.
The fact that Dominion agreed to a slight delay to listen to the offer doesn’t mean their position has changed. It could be an opportunity for them to restate their expected terms (“okay, write that check, and make the statement above, and sign an agreement that you will never again allow a similarly dishonest word about this to be breathed in your media unopposed, or we get to come back for another judgment against you”). It could also be a matter of strategy — the size of the offer tells Dominion how worried Fox is about the outcome, which is useful information even if there’s no plan to accept.
Yep, I think this is the key to whether a settlement happens or not. Fox is thinking about how much avoiding apologies is actually worth to them. Dominion is thinking about certain money now or riskful money in the future. There’s room for compromise on both sides, but whether they can find a mutually acceptable agreement is far from clear.
As a cite, they use a poll from January 2010.
I don’t understand why they just did not go all in, and make up the numbers out of whole cloth. Why even bother with a 13 year old cite, when your target audience does not give a toss about facts?
Incidentally, there is a more recent (2020) poll on this from Pew research center on this. (pdf)
According to that Fox News is trusted by 43%, and distrusted by 40% which is worse in both categories than CNN (Trusted by 47% distrusted by 32%).
In terms of who is actually the most trusted News source,
ABC comes out at the top with 48% trusted vs 20% distrusted.
In terms of net trust, the surprise winner is PBS (42% trusted with only 11% distrusted).
Of course this was before the Dominion debacle which caused trust in Fox to further crater.
“Fox News: Formerly the most trusted news network over 10 years ago, before our lies and bullshit finally caught up to us”
Fox News: “We’re terribly sorry, but we lied to you.”
Fox viewer: “No, you didn’t.”
To be fair, the article itself is from 2010.
The actual source is “YouGov.com profiles+”:
I’m relieved it’s an old article, because otherwise it would be lying about their very trustworthiness, which would be like lying squared!
The ad itself says that the source of the poll is from 2023-03-26. (Interesting they used non-American date format.)
So, did they really lie in an ad about their trustworthiness?
Bullshit is 110% on brand for Fox at this point.
To course-correct would be tantamount to you hanging an “I HATE DOGS” banner on your storefront.
It just … isn’t done.
I just checked the yougov site for March 26 polls on news trustworthyness. There was indeed a poll on that date, but in 2022
The question was: How trustworthy do you rate the news reported by the following media aorganizations?
In order, the most trustworthy news (according to this poll) came from:
Fox News was 2nd from the bottom. I can’t see where Fox pulled their numbers for this ad from. Certainly not this poll.
Here’s a story on this advertisement by Fox:
The data from the survey, listed in the ad as being from “YouGov Profiles+,” don’t appear to be public. YouGov hasn’t responded to requests for the data, and a Mediaite story on the numbers from late last week doesn’t link to them.
More detail about how Fox is simply bullshitting here:
I would nit that it is the ISO 8610 date format, which is not particularly country-dependent (Europeans for example, are more likely to use DD-MM-YYYY). Its most important property is that it is written largest unit to smallest unit, so the standard lexicographic sort ordering is also the correct time order, so it’s most common in computing.
I looked at YouGov Profiles. It’s a data-aggregating service that promises this:
Find your perfect audience. Combine unique filters to build up an outline of your ideal audience, incorporating media consumption, psychographics, demographics and more.
Create a detailed portrait of them. Choose from millions of data variables, collected daily and updated weekly, including brand usage and perception, hobbies and interests, and media.
Target them with incredible precision. Pinpoint the channels and mediums your audience loves, and talk to them when they most want to listen.
In other words, you tell it the kind of audience you want (say, “trusts Fox news”) and it will build the profile for you.
I went to yougov to try to find this poll, but I’d never been there and I wasn’t sure how to navigate it, so I thought maybe I just wasn’t able to find it.
So, they just made it up?
If they were going for satire defense, they really should have put their rating at over 100%.
I would agree, but this was an ad by Fox, and that seems quite a wokert way to write a date.
Not exactly… but according to Johnny_Bravo’s post above, it was not one of their regular polls, which they post and are available to the public. It was a special service that is designed to give a company targeted information on who your audience is, using unique filters. So it’s really a targetted poll of the Fox News audience who love Fox News, asking them who they trust to give them news.
So not totally made up… but damn close.