By reconciling with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has avoided a torturous and protracted legal battle in which its founding chief Rupert Murdoch, its top executives and its biggest stars would have to face hostile scrutiny of the embarrassing question of why they allowed a dangerous and slanderous conspiracy theory about the 2020 election to spread across the net when so many of them knew it was a lie?

But the $787.5 million settlement – one of the largest defamation lawsuits in history – and Fox’s statement in court admitting that the court found “certain claims about Dominion” made in its programming to be “false” – at the very least, they represent a rare, high-profile admission to the wrongdoings of the influential conservative media and America’s most popular cable network.

“Money is a responsibility,” Dominion attorney Stephen Shackelford said in front of the courthouse, “and we got that from Fox today.”

The terms of the agreement, which was abruptly announced just before the lawyers were due to make opening statements, did not require Fox to apologize for any infractions in its own programming, a point Dominion is said to have insisted on.

Shortly after the agreement was reached, Fox said that he “hopes that our decision to resolve this dispute with the Dominion peacefully, rather than through hostile litigation, will allow the country to get away from these problems.”

The settlement contains an implicit statement of “no contestation” of several preliminary findings by presiding judge Eric M. Davis that cast Fox programming in an exceptionally harsh light.

In one of those findings, the judge sided with Dominion in his contention that Fox could not argue that its conspiracy theory broadcast — typically involving the false claim that its machines “switched” Trump’s votes to Biden’s — fell under operation of the law. A “news gathering” status that can protect news organizations when the facts are in dispute. The judge wrote, “the evidence does not support that FNN reported in good faith and disinterestedly.”

In another opinion, the judge wrote that “the evidence presented in this civil suit demonstrates CRYSTALLY that none of the allegations regarding the Dominion about the 2020 elections are true.”

Through these findings, the judge severely curtailed Fox’s ability to claim that it was acting as a news network pursuing the claims of a newsmaker, in this case the President of the United States, who was the main proponent of the false Dominion narrative.

In those tumultuous days leading up to the first day of the trial, Fox made it clear that if it lost in court, it would prepare an appeal that would, at least in part, contradict those judgments. Now they are undeniable.

By late afternoon on Tuesday, it was clear that Fox’s lawyers were busy making quick calculations to take the financial hit rather than risk losing in court.

Dominion was able to gather an unusually large amount of internal documentation from Fox showing that many inside the company knew that the Dominion conspiracy theory in the election was pure fantasy, as many lawyers argued before the trial. This extended to the highest ranks of the network – up to Mr. Murdoch himself.

This evidence appears to have brought the Dominion closer to the legal threshold in defamation cases known as “actual malice” – established when defamatory statements are “made with the knowledge of being false or with reckless disregard for whether it was true or not” . (However, this bar is not always easy to meet, and there are no guarantees to the jury.)

“The vote for Dominion revealed a lot of critical evidence that Fox acted with malice or recklessly disregarded the truth that could have been proven by a jury, so the only question left would be damages,” said Karl Tobias, professor of law. University of Richmond. “The trial in the case could also damage Fox’s reputation when the evidence was presented in open court.”

It was less surprising that Fox took the plunge than that he did it so late on Tuesday. During the trial, Fox News employees and Mr. Murdoch argued with lawyers about what they knew about the lies and why they didn’t take action to stop them. The answers would further expose the internal modus operandi of an organization that has long guarded its internal operations.

The only question that only time will answer is whether the settlement was enough for Fox News to change the way it handles such inflammatory and defamatory conspiracy content. The sum is a hefty $787.5 million. Fox News certainly doesn’t want to see such a settlement anytime soon as other court cases looming, notably a $2.7 billion lawsuit from another election technology company, Smartmatic.

But Fox managed to avoid Dominion’s goal of an on-air confession or apology, meaning he didn’t have to force either on his audience, who had heard little of the affair on Fox’s show to begin with.

“It’s hard to say how devastating a decision against Fox would be for the company, apart from the financial cost of the verdict, because their audience is very loyal and believes in the polarized point of view that their hosts represent,” Michel Simpson Tugel, Trial Attorney. says in the statement. “But the reputational damage from executives, including chairman Rupert Murdoch, and the hosts taking the stand seems to have spurred the parties to a decision.”