NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Days after Fox News agreed to pay\u00a0nearly $800 million\u00a0to settle a lawsuit over its airing of 2020 election lies, you\u2019d be hard-pressed to notice anything had changed there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham led their shows Thursday talking about Hunter Biden, the president\u2019s son. Ingraham\u2019s show warned, \u201cThe left wants the government to be your only family.\u201d Hannity targeted familiar villains \u2014 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Vice President Kamala Harris. Carlson mocked a speech on racial equity, saying it meant \u201cthat straight white men are bad.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Experts doubt the settlement will lead to much of a course correction in conservative media, save for a little less specificity to avoid future lawsuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So far, that\u2019s been the chief result of a\u00a0Connecticut jury\u2019s verdict\u00a0last year that Alex Jones must pay $965 million to parents of Sandy Hook school shooting victims, after claiming the 2012 massacre was a hoax and that grieving parents were actors. Now Jones is more likely to keep names out of it, said Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University professor and author of \u201cPartisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt hasn\u2019t changed his conspiracy theories,\u201d Hemmer said. \u201cHe\u2019s just a little more careful about not saying legally actionable things.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Heading into the 2024 election, radio host Erick Erickson predicted more hesitancy in conservative media to embrace claims by\u00a0former President Donald Trump\u00a0or anybody in politics preaching\u00a0election denialism. Fox\u2019s response will be most watched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If anything, Fox is just as dominant among conservatives today as it was in the aftermath of the 2020 election, the period addressed by the Dominion lawsuit. That\u2019s when Fox aired false claims that\u00a0Dominion Voting Systems\u00a0helped rig the election against Trump, despite many at the network\u00a0knowing the allegations were bogus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Documents in the case exposed the\u00a0fear within Fox\u00a0that it would lose viewers if the network didn\u2019t tell Trump fans what they wanted to hear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A former Fox personality, Bill O\u2019Reilly,\u00a0wrote after the settlement: \u201cThis is what happens when money becomes more important than honest information.\u201d His own experience, though, shows there was reason to be afraid. O\u2019Reilly said he lost more than 1,000 premium subscribers to his website after telling them the election results wouldn\u2019t be overturned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fox\u2019s followers, it seems, were more upset with the\u00a0election reporting\u00a0than with revelations in the lawsuit about those at the network who didn\u2019t believe the fraud charges and\u00a0expressed private disdain\u00a0for Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s been little noticeable change in Fox\u2019s television ratings in the past few months, certainly none attributable to the lawsuit. In March, Fox\u2019s website had 88.7 million unique visitors, marking its fourth straight month of double-digit gains, said Howard Polskin, whose website The Righting monitors conservative media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most conservative websites either ignored the Dominion lawsuit or gave it cursory coverage, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe coverage on the right would not support at all that some landmark settlement had been reached,\u201d Polskin said. \u201cIt was completely misaligned with the magnitude of the news event itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Fox acknowledged in the settlement\u00a0the judge\u2019s conclusion\u00a0that the network had spread false material about Dominion, Fox offered no apology. That likely would have meant more to Fox\u2019s critics than its fans, anyway, said Megan Duncan, a Virginia Tech communications professor who studies news audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To Fox\u2019s followers, criticism of the network wouldn\u2019t matter much unless it was made by someone who shared their ideology. For the bulk of Fox\u2019s audience, the settlement will be quickly forgotten \u2014 if it was followed at all, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Fox, that\u2019s all an argument for the importance of keeping its audience happy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That audience is what has made Fox the leading cable television network for several years, so profitable that it is able to absorb the $787 million Dominion settlement as a cost of doing business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fox still has legal challenges, with a\u00a0pending defamation lawsuit\u00a0by Smartmatic, another elections technology company. But Dominion also has a case against Newsmax, Fox\u2019s chief television rival for a conservative audience. Newsmax insists its case is different and that it has better protections against defamation than Fox did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But as a smaller company, if Newsmax is wrong, a financial judgment could cripple or kill it, to Fox\u2019s benefit, Hemmer said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFox would absolutely go after that audience,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fox soon faces crucial negotiations with three large cable companies \u2014 Comcast, Spectrum and Cox \u2014 over carriage fees, the amount they will pay to Fox for the right to offer the network on their systems, said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media watchdog group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ever since an\u00a0advertiser boycott\u00a0against former Fox personality Glenn Beck, largely orchestrated by Media Matters, Fox has concentrated on boosting carriage fees. It has succeeded to the point where Fox would have a 35% profit margin even if it had no advertising revenue, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That makes it important for Fox to illustrate to these companies that it has a large, valuable audience that can be counted on to be loyal at a time people are cutting cable service.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fox could use the conclusion of the lawsuit to build up its news operation, which has lost personalities such as Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith in recent years, said Chris Stirewalt, an executive\u00a0fired by Fox\u00a0after the quick, although ultimately correct, decision on election night 2020 to call Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fox said that it is doing just that, saying this past week that it has increased its investment in journalism by more than 50%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cBeing a news organization is expensive and dangerous,\u201d said Stirewalt, now political editor at NewsNation. \u201cNot just expensive because you have to pay to get news but also, expensive because you can lose your audience because sometimes you have to tell them what they don\u2019t want to hear.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It could be easier, and good business, to double down on programming that appeals to the attitudes and emotions of viewers, he said. Fox wouldn\u2019t be alone in following that direction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t envy their choices,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Erickson, the radio host, said he would expect to see greater management control of Fox\u2019s personalities, although this wouldn\u2019t necessarily be something that viewers would notice. That would revert back to the days of the late Fox leader Roger Ailes,\u00a0drummed out\u00a0of the network in a sexual misconduct scandal in 2016.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhether you liked Roger Ailes or not, he did understand that you should not lie to your audience,\u201d Erickson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ovations delivered on Thursday night by an audience crowded into Hannity\u2019s studio \u2014 for him and for Carlson and Ingraham at the beginning and end of their shows \u2014 illustrated an enduring point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fox has several solid journalists on its payroll but its stars, the chief reason viewers tune in, are those that offer tough talk and opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think they\u2019ve backed themselves into a corner, and that corner is full of Trump supporters,\u201d said Hemmer, the Vanderbilt professor. \u201cThat is the business model.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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