Rupert Murdoch’’s mega Fox payout shows there’s one thing you can’t afford to mess with…

The victory is hardly going to transform our devalued political culture

“The truth matters. Lies have consequences”. The lawyer for Dominion Voting Systems put it better than any of Rupert Murdoch’s mercenary army of journalists ever would; or, indeed ever be permitted to attempt to do so (the sensational story doesn’t figure much on his channels or in his titles). And it is about time that someone, somewhere, decided “enough already with the fake news”.

Without wishing to come over as sanctimonious – we journalists are all of us flawed – the humiliation of Fox News at the hands of Dominion, a hitherto obscure election machinery company, is a victory for truth.

It’s not as simple as that – because no defamation case of this magnitude can be – but the world is now just a little better off, a little safer, a little more protected from the abuse of media power than it was before Murdoch’s Fox News decided to cave in to Dominion.

It is $787.5m (£733m) worse off, and Fox News has had to “acknowledge” its failures, and the most basic deceptions a “news” organisation can perpetrate on its audience. OK, the audience were gagging to be fed such distortions, to be confined in their belief that Donald Trump was right, and that the 2020 election was being stolen. Yet we know that, as the anti-Fox billboards had it, “Fox Knew” that Trump was spouting lies, and they related them all the same.

This wasn’t a case of a reliable source getting something wrong, or an error in a detail of some investigative documentary. It was a self-conscious and deliberate deception, as evidenced by documents disclosed as part of the case. And they were caught out, for a change, and punished. Just rejoice at that news, as someone once said.

Indeed, there may be some more jubilation to follow. Dominion isn’t the only voting systems company to claim to have had its reputation traduced by the casual peddling of knowingly false claims on Fox News. Dear me, no. The media company also faces a $2.7bn defamation lawsuit filed by another voting technology company, Smartmatic, that alleges Fox broadcast lies that “decimated” its business.

Smartmatic alleges that Fox News knowingly – note that, “knowingly” – made “over 100 false statements and implications” about the company, repeating and amplifying false information from Trump and his allies that Smartmatic played a role in his election loss. Indeed, one may add, one brave American judge has stated that disclosed emails show that “President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public.”

It’s worth pausing a moment to reflect on how it is that Fox was forced to confront what it had done in 2020. It wasn’t because Democrats had won the argument against them. It wasn’t because not a single one of Trump’s claims, as repeated and reported as true by Fox, were supported by evidence, or that not a single court allows them to proceed very far.

It wasn’t because they made no logical sense – because why didn’t this grand shadowy conspiracy steal the election Trump won in 2016? And, for that matter, why is Trump bothering to run now if the Dems and Antifa and the Rinos can just blatantly steal the 2024 election?

No, the lies are having consequences because they cost two corporations a great deal of money, and they are pursuing their right to restitution. The far greater, indeed incalculable, cost to the health of American democracy goes entirely without penalty, as if some unscrupulous water company was dumping raw sewage into the river with impunity.

Had Dominion and Smartmatic just decided to let it slide, or quietly settled entirely in private, none of the Trump-Fox lies would have been exposed.

So it’s just as well that, for all the attacks on “activist” “lefty lawyers”, in most places in the West we still have a free and independent judicial system (albeit one under sustained assault). We see it too in Britain, when the Leveson Inquiry exposed the extent of illegal phone hacking and the industrial-scale theft of private data with no public interest justification whatsoever. The current legal case being conducted by Baroness (Doreen) Lawrence, Prince Harry, Sir Simon Hughes and others is another example of the media being made to answer claims.

Yet the Dominion victory over Fox is hardly going to transform our devalued political culture. Fox News seems unlikely to alter its modus operandi. It will just steer a bit clearer of Trump’s ridiculous claims of election theft (as will Trump, probably).

Not that much will change. Journalists, and before them chroniclers, playwrights and hack historians have published knowingly distorted versions of the facts for as long as humans have communicated with one another. Politicians, too (obviously). We need not be too starry-eyed about that: there has never been a golden age of clean journalism, and never will be.

Yet the modern 24/7 news culture, social media and, frankly, a new wave of neo-fascistic populists do pose a severe and unprecedented threat to these grand but precious ideals of truth, trust and democracy.

Trump and Fox still haven’t gone away. Far from it, for it still seems all too true that they know full well that lies don’t always have consequences.