The Media Research Center found even more ways to minimize and play whataboutism over Fox News paying Dominion $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit. An April 22 “flashback” post by Rich Noyes complained that Fox News has always been a target of the “liberal media”:
Fox News’s liberal competitors are happy at this week’s news that the network will pay nearly $800 million in damages to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, but they are sad that the settlement means they won’t be able to jab Fox with the daily negative headlines they could hope for from a trial.
“Capitalism won. Dominion won. Did democracy get anything out of this?” CNN’s John King whined on Wednesday’s Inside Politics. By “democracy,” of course, King was referring to CNN’s (and the larger liberal media’s) anti-Fox agenda.
This disdainful attitude has been a feature of the media’s treatment of their rival since Fox News debuted in 1996. That year, Los Angeles Times TV writer Howard Rosenberg sneered at Fox News boss Roger Ailes for building a news organization around “the ditsy notion of the media having perverted the United States by being a cesspool of lefty ideologues.”
[…]A quick reminder: For 85 consecutive quarters (21.25 years), Fox News has been the most-watched cable news network in prime time.
Of course, “liberal media” critiques have nothing to do with Fox News choosing to lie to its viewers about election fraud, and popularity does not equal moral superiority as Noyes seems to suggest.
Mark Finkelstein spent an April 24 post complaining that a Dominion lawyer said the settlement doesn’t restore the company’s reputation that was destroyed by lies from right-wingers (like Fox News):
Cry me a river—788 million miles long!
On Katie Phang’s Saturday show on MSNBC, Stephen Shackelford, a lead lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems, echoed the claim by the company’s CEO that the settlement payment of $787.5 million from Fox News was “bittersweet.”
In a New York Times op-ed, the CEO, John Poulos, in addition to calling the settlement “bittersweet,” actually wrote:
“If we could, we would trade it all in a heartbeat to go back in time to get our reputation back. “
Riight. The entire company was most recently valued at $226 million. The $778 million settlement thus represents more than three times that valuation! And as for CEO Poulos wanting to get Dominion’s reputation back, the company got untold millions in free publicity supporting its reputation. This will turn out to be a windfall for Dominion that goes beyond the huge settlement.
Moreover, the majority owner of Dominion is Staple Street, a private equity firm. They’re in the business of making money, not of serving as social-justice warriors. Odds they would have traded $788 million for a more profound apology from Fox News? Precisely zero.
Shackelford added to the farce by saying that the $788 million settlement represented “some measure of compensation” for Dominion. Some?
And then there’s the “measure of compensation” for Shackelford and the other Dominion trial lawyers on the case.[…]
It’s fair to assume that the lawyers will receive tens of millions in compensation. Hopefully, that will be sufficient to assauge poor Shackelford’s “bittersweet” feelings.
Finkelstein didn’t explain where Dominion should go to get its reputation back, or why his ffellow right-wingers won’t do their part by admitting they were wrong to spread false conspiracy theories about the company.
In an April 25 post, Clay Waters complained that critics wanted to see evidence that Fox News had learned something from falsely defaming Dominion:
Before the Tucker Carlson stunner, the Jeremy Peters “Media Memo” on the front of Monday’s New York Times Business section was headlined “Will the Fox-Dominion Settlement Affect Its News Coverage? Don’t Count on It.” Peters went beyond the embarrassing particulars of the Fox News settlement with Dominion Voting Systems to hint racism at the right-leaning network, and also chided it for not showing “humility” by bowing to Democratic President Biden after the settlement.
[…]Peters’ desire for Fox News to be “humbler or gentler” sounds like code for “tacking leftward.”
Waters then got mad at the Times writer for calling out Fox News for continuing to give airtime to election fraud conspiracy theories:
Peters lamented that Jesse Watters didn’t push back on Clay Travis when he claimed Biden “only won by 20,000 votes after they rigged the entire election, after they hid everything associated with Hunter Biden, with the big tech, with the big media, and with the big Democrat Party collusion that all worked in his favor.”
Trump lost the popular vote by seven million votes, but why can’t the Times admit they were on the team hiding all the Hunter Biden laptop developments with the Democrats? The Times has admitted the laptop contents were real, so don’t Republicans have a reason to complain about suppression?
Peters added “Stories of voter fraud, often exaggerated and unsubstantiated, have been part of the network’s D.N.A. well before 2020. In 2012, Roger Ailes, who founded Fox News with Mr. Murdoch, sent a team of journalists to Ohio to investigate still-unproven claims of malfeasance at the polls after former President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there.”
The paper did not address how it has sent teams of journalists to investigate suspected election fraud in the presidential races in 2000, 2004, and 2016.
All of Waters’ whataboutism obscured the fact that he wouldn’t criticize Fox News for still spreading lies and conspiracy theories.