Von Drehle on Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News

And, you know, hearing Rupert Murdoch admit that Fox News hosts lied and seeing Tucker Carlson, as Ruth just mentioned, Texas' hatred of Donald Trump is, of course, juicy, or, as Ruth said, delicious. But it's hard to overstate how influential Fox News is in American politics. A national poll conducted by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland assessed where people get their news about politics and government. Among Republicans, only two, only there are only two sources, local television and Fox News. And so, David, how do you think this lawsuit plays out for Fox outside of the texting behavior of a few hosts? Will anything at Fox really change, do you think? I think, yes, it'll change around the edges. There'll be a lot more lawyers in a lot more conversations going forward. The only way I see this ending is with a large settlement, very expensive for Fox, but they can afford it because they are an extremely profitable company.

I assume their insurance is very significant. If you want to know, are they aware of their problem, all you have to do is look at what happened the minute Dominion started talking about a lawsuit, all the talk about the rigged voting machines immediately shut down at Fox. It ended, a couple of hosts lost their contracts relationships with Fox. They knew they were in trouble from minute one. And whenever you see lawyers start throwing around fancy language like black letter law and so on and so forth, you can tell they don't have a case. At some point, Dominion is going to announce its number and Fox is going to pay it. And will Fox be dead then or become a less entertainment, quote unquote entertainment oriented programmer? No, they're going to keep following that business model, but a lot more carefully.