Fox Corp. has settled the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems, but the company’s troubles are far from over.

In addition to the $787.5 million payout to close the Dominion case, Fox must now contend with a second defamation suit filed by rival voting machine company, Smartmatic USA, which has demanded $2.7 billion.

other

Fox investors are also lining up with their own lawsuits,

claim to claim that

Rupert Murdoch and other board members neglected their duties by allowing Fox News to promote election lies, damaging the network’s reputation as a news organization.

Revelations from emails and text messages, revealed in the court’s motions, tarnished Murdoch and high-profile hosts including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and

Mary

Bartiromo. Murdoch and others privately admitted that they knew former President Trump’s “election stolen” claims were nonsense, but they turned out to be so.

were seemed

more interested in protecting Fox News’ big profits than telling the truth to its millions of viewers,

according to court documents.

Tuesday’s resolution spares the 92-year-old mogul, his son Lachlan, the company’s CEO; and their anchors from the embarrassment of taking the witness stood in a court of law

right

uncle full of reporters. There they would

have

are

in

grilled about why the network broadcast lies in the service of Trump and his staunch supporters in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

But the settlement is one of the largest ever in a libel case

if not the biggest

marks another blot on Murdoch’s 70-year legacy as a trail

–

blazing mogul who built a global empire

rich

from a single newspaper in his native Australia.

“There is

is

a tremendous amount of evidence that Murdoch is not at the top,” Yale University management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld said Tuesday. “

Murdoch’s own testimony, given in late January at a deposition at the Fox studio in

W

est Los Angeles, hurt the company’s cause, Sonnenfeld and others have argued. During that statement, Murdoch acknowledged that Fox News hosts, including

Mary

Bartiromo and Hannity had “endorsed” the lies, well beyond passive listening or pushing back claims made by Trump’s supporters.

Emails revealed that Murdoch, the company

managerial

chairman, was uncomfortable with the claim of electoral fraud and called it “silly stuff”, yet the reinforcements of the lies continued.

When asked during the statement if he had the authority to stop the distortions, Murdoch replied, “I could have. But I didn’t.”

Such acknowledgments suggested Fox News leadership

What

indifferent to the truth,

further weaken their position in the Dominion case

.

Murdoch told Fox News chief Suzanne Scott on January 5, 2021, on the eve of Trump’s rally at the Mall in Washington and the riots at the Capitol, that Hannity, Carlson, and Laura Ingraham, Fox’s prime-time anchors, would do something like this. could announce as if the election is over and Joe Biden won, Murdoch reportedly said, noting that this would go a long way in stopping the Trump myth that the election was stolen.

instead of,

But

Shot

blew off her boss’s suggestion, tellingly told

a lieutenant: I’ve told Rupert that privately they’re all there, we have to be careful about using the shows and pissing off the viewers, but they know how to navigate.

While other news outlets drooled over the details of the case, Fox News largely avoided it in their programming. Fox News business anchor Neil Cavuto interrupted normal coverage Tuesday afternoon to announce the settlement and brought media commentator Howard Kurtz on the air to discuss the matter.

“We recognize the

C

our statements find that certain claims about Dominion are false,” the network said in a statement. This settlement reflects F

ox

s ongoing commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, rather than the bitterness of a divisive process, will allow the country to move forward with these issues.

With Tuesday’s settlement, the damaging revelations came to an end.

Court statements, which were released, were heavily redacted, prompting some

legal experts

to speculate that more bombs might eventually fall.

“It is clear that Fox paid to ensure that the evidence would not be publicly displayed,” said Los Angeles trial attorney Ryan Saba. “There was probably a lot more damning information that was about to come out. … There were a lot of benefits to Fox in settling this case.”

Another major blow to Fox’s case came late last month when Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric M. Davis rejected Fox News’ defense that the stolen election lies were “newsworthy” because they were created by the then-incumbent president, and thus, protected by the 1st amendment.

Davis said he would not allow Fox to advance that argument at trial.

“The evidence developed in this civil suit demonstrates that [it] is CRYSTAL clear that none of the

S

statements regarding the Dominion regarding the 2020 election are true,” Davis wrote in a March 31 statement.

Davis also ruled that the Murdochs would have to testify should they be called at the trial, which was expected to last well into May.

That left only the question of whether Fox acted recklessly, or with actual malice the standard for defamation cases.

“Now Fox will also avoid a public statement,” Saba said.

“There is no finding that they actually did anything wrong.” Don’t think this is entirely true given their statement

Dominion’s Chief Executive John Poulos

called called

the settlement hugely “historic”.

“Fox has admitted to lying about Dominion that has caused massive damage to my

C

company, our employees

,

and our customers,” Poulos said in a statement. “Nothing can ever make up for that.”

In addition to the upcoming Smartmatic lawsuit, which also charges Fox News with libel in the aftermath of the 2020 election, attorneys representing Fox Corp. shareholders prepare lawsuits

take away tea

on some of the evidence presented by Dominion.

The first such shareholder lawsuit was filed last week

in Delaware.

Fox executives and hosts knew Trump’s election fraud claims were “really crazy stuff,” as Rupert Murdoch, the head of the F.

ox

media empire, so to speak, but pushed them into the air anyway,” according to a lawsuit filed by Fox shareholder Robert Schwarz.

“Fox was more concerned with short-term ratings and market share than the long-term harm of not telling the truth,” Schwarz’s lawsuit said. “The

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Oord’s decision to harass viewers by advertising the bogus stolen election claims has the

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This has negatively impacted Fox News’ credibility as a media organization that is expected to accurately report newsworthy events.”

It’s unclear whether the settlement will stop Fox News viewers from watching the popular channel or change their opinion of prominent hosts.

So far, the Dominion lawsuit has done little to dampen the network’s ratings. The judge announced that the settlement was reached about three minutes before markets closed. Fox shares closed at $31.20, down 2 cents.

“Fox has done a good job of not making information about this case available on their channel,” said former Fox News contributor John Ellis. “It’s like old East Berlin.”

But the network is in a quandary as Trump is currently leading polls of possible Republican candidates for the 2024 presidential election.

And documents that turned up in the Dominion case exist

showing that Murdoch and others were ready to put Trump in the back

view mirror.

Tucker

For example, Carlson privately acknowledged in his posts that he disliked Trump.

“I hate him passionately,” Carlson said in a text message.

But statements like that may not move the needle for Fox News’ core viewership, largely because Fox towers over the other conservative-leaning channels, Ellis and others.

the

experts said.

“The fact that Tucker Carlson is being attacked by this voting machine company doesn’t really stand out to viewers,” Ellis said. “Tucker is their man.”

Saba added: “Their viewers will get over it.” The Dominion case wasn’t the first time Fox News had been accused of conspiracy theories.

The network provided a platform for previous false claims, including Trump’s unfounded claims more than a decade ago that President Obama was not born in the US, or falsely accusing Seth Rich, a young Democratic National Committee aide who was fatally shot in Washington in 2016. for leaking Hillary Clinton emails.

Fox News paid millions to Rich’s family to settle that case.