This is part of Slate’s ongoing coverage of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network.
Around 3:55 p.m. on Tuesday, right after announcing that an unexpected settlement had been reached in the libel case filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, Judge Eric Davis looked over at the 24 jurors and alternates who had been selected that very morning for what everyone had expected to be a lengthy trial. “If you’re thinking your presence was a waste of time, it wasn’t,” Davis said. “The situation was resolved, and it was resolved because of you.”
I think Davis actually meant it. While looks can certainly be deceiving, and while I do not mean to speculate on any of the jurors’ political orientations, the majority-minority jury that was empaneled at the very least did not appear to be a demographically favorable one for Fox News, whose audience is, basically, old and white. Was the prospect of a jury which featured seven Black members and only one white male enough to push Fox back to the negotiating table? Or was the simple fact of the jury’s swearing-in—and the ensuing realization that the trial was really, finally happening—itself enough to jolt Rupert Murdoch into signing off on a deal?
However the settlement came together, the fact that it did so at all came as a real shock to the many reporters who, after Monday’s unfruitful postponement, had resigned themselves to covering this sure-to-be-revealing, probably comical, and most importantly long defamation trial. While the $787.5 million that Fox will pay to Dominion—for broadcasting blatant lies alleging that the company had somehow manipulated the 2020 election results—is quite a bit less than the $1.6 billion the company had asked for, as far as I can tell it’s still one of the largest settlements in American history. That said, it’s also pocket change compared to the reported $1.7 billion Murdoch is said to have paid his second wife when they divorced in 1999, which perhaps puts the whole thing into dismal perspective. The settlement will be painful for Fox News, but it won’t be a death blow—and, critically, the network will no longer have to subject its executives and presenters to questioning under oath in a public setting. (At least in this trial. There’s a defamation lawsuit from another election-tech company, Smartmatic, that’s still pending.)
The afternoon’s proceedings began in typical fashion: with author-provocateur Michael Wolff causing a minor scene in the courtroom. “Are you media?” Wolff asked Fox News commentator Ted Williams, who was sitting in the seat that Wolff had occupied during the morning session.
“I am,” was Williams’ brusque reply. “Are you?” After another brief exchange, Wolff realized that he could just as easily sit two seats over—but Williams was unwilling to let the confrontation go. “‘Scuse me,” Williams said a few minutes later. “Why did you feel compelled to ask me that? Y’all don’t believe a Black man can sit here and be media? You didn’t ask a single white person that.”
“I just asked the person who was in my seat from this morning. That’s it,” said Wolff.
“A white man walking up to me and asking me if I’m media. I took offense to it. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Well, you might, if you thought I was in your seat.”
“But you must have thought that a Black man sitting here was not media,” said Williams.
“That’s a no-win argument for me,” said Wolff—and for a long time this afternoon, it looked like this entertaining contretemps would be the most dramatic thing to happen inside Judge Davis’ courtroom today.
Davis, who prides himself on being a punctual man, had ended Tuesday morning’s session by announcing that we would reconvene at precisely 1:30 p.m. to hear Dominion attorney Stephen Shackelford and Fox attorney Dan Webb deliver opening statements, which were scheduled to last for 75 minutes and 90 minutes, respectively. But after briefly taking the bench a few minutes after 1:30, Davis then returned to his chambers, declining to explain his departure to the gallery.
When 2 p.m. came around, Davis was still absent, and the assemblage fell into whispered speculation as to the reasons for the delay. The working theory was that there had been jury issues of some sort. Perhaps a juror had unexpectedly begged off the case during the lunch break, following the lead of the alternate juror in the wrestling T-shirt who had raised his hand and announced that “I’ve been up all night, I can’t do this” immediately after having been sworn in Monday morning. Perhaps one or more jurors had gotten sick? Had their catered lunch been tainted? Was the jury room drowning in rivers of puke? By 2:06 p.m., Shackelford had stood up and begun leisurely pacing, with what I (perhaps inaccurately) pegged as a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine look on his face.
But as the minutes ticked by, it became clear that more was going on than just a puking jury. Davis had made clear in the morning that he was intent on ending every day’s session at precisely 4:30 p.m. Once 2 p.m. came and went, it became clear that there wouldn’t be time for both attorneys to make their opening statements today. Once 3 p.m. flew by, I realized that neither attorney would be able to make their opening statement—which would push the opening statements to Wednesday morning, which would further delay the trial. Around 3:15, my seatmate whispered that she’d heard Davis had appointed a special master to investigate whether Fox News had withheld evidence from Dominion in discovery. Could that fact account for the now-almost-two-hour delay?
With no way to use phones or the internet to investigate the special master thing—Davis had banned the use of both in his courtroom—I moved to the back of the room to take the pulse of the court officials and local reporters who were congregating there. “Word is that Murdoch’s approving a settlement and they’ll announce it within the hour,” said a man from the Associated Press. He said it with a smile, though, and nobody else seemed to take the statement seriously, so I discounted it too, and instead fell into conversation with two men named Sean, about the fact that they were both named Sean.
“No one else was named Sean when I was growing up,” said one Sean.
“None of my teachers knew how to pronounce it,” said the other Sean.
“You guys were both at the vanguard of Seandom,” I said. We were all going stir-crazy.
But the ordeal was almost over. At 3:54 p.m., Judge Davis returned to the bench and, wasting few words, announced that the case had been resolved. Twenty minutes later, Dominion and its lawyers had gathered in the plaza outside the Leonard L. Williams Justice Center for an impromptu press conference. “The truth matters,” said Dominion attorney Justin Nelson. “Lies have consequences. Over two years ago, a torrent of lies swept Dominion and election officials across America into an alternative universe of conspiracy theories.”
Tuesday’s settlement doesn’t destroy that universe, though. It just makes it a little bit more expensive for Fox News to live on its farthest-out edges. While the network may now think twice about letting the absolute biggest loons come on the air to tell the absolute stupidest lies, it would be foolhardy to presume that this settlement will catalyze any meaningful crisis of conscience at Fox HQ. The 2024 presidential election is in sight, and it’s a safe bet that Fox News will still spend the next 19 months doing what it does best: building multiday-episode arcs out of isolated anecdotes and unwarranted inference, demonizing liberals and the left while pretending that the right is under constant siege, and working its viewers into crisis states over minor cultural controversies. Fox News might now think twice about definitively crossing the line into actionable defamation, but that’s an outcome that the network can learn to live with.
“I like anticlimax, boys,” said one of the reporters in the media room about an hour after the settlement was announced. “It’s better than six fuckin’ weeks of straight pain.” It’s safe to say that the Murdochs feel the exact same way.
