For 20 Years, Fox News Said It Was ‘Fair And Balanced.’ With Settlement, Fox Paid To Avoid Saying ‘We Lied’

In the end, Fox News agreed to pay—a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems of $787.5 million—but it refused to say “we lied.” And for Fox, that was clearly a better deal than going to trial, when its top-rated prime time hosts and most senior executives—including Rupert Murdoch—would take the stand and be questioned under oath about how Fox operates and if it lies to viewers. For all the leaked emails and text messages that emerged in pre-trial filings, for all the conversation on MSNBC and CNN about Fox News stars being exposed for saying one thing in private and another on the air, it was the idea of those same prime time hosts going on the air and saying “we lied” that was, to Fox News, simply unthinkable.

From its very first day in 1996, Fox News challenged its critics with its tagline: Fair and Balanced. The line was the work of Roger Ailes, who built the network from the ground up and drove it to become the most powerful force in cable news. Combined with a second line, “We Report, You Decide,” Fox was relentless in arguing that while its prime time hours were filled with conservative hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, that was balanced by airing liberal voices—and by the network’s commitment to journalism, with respected journalists covering the news fairly and impartially, just like any other news network.

Ailes surrounded himself with the network’s journalists, and often posed for photos not in his office, but in the Fox newsroom. When Ailes spoke to television critics in 2006, he had Shepard Smith join him via satellite from Israel, a reminder that Fox was committed to news.

In interviews, Fox News star journalists like Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith would always say that Ailes had never told them what to say, what questions to ask, or how to report a story. There was, as Fox defiantly insisted, a wall between opinion and news. But the Dominion lawsuit threatened to destroy all of that with its detailed messages showing that in the days after the 2020 presidential election, the network was unified—not in reporting on Trump’s lies of a “stolen” election, but in working to keep Trump and Fox’s massive audience from abandoning Fox News. Had the wall that Roger Ailes said he built between opinion and news been destroyed after his ouster in 2016? Or had Fox’s commitment to news never been anything but veneer?

Fox quietly dropped “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide” in 2017, with insiders saying at the time that the taglines were too closely tied to Ailes. Wallace left the network, as did Smith. Had news been swallowed up by conservative opinion? “Fox claiming to be ‘Fair and Balanced’ is their original lie,” said Julie Millican, vice president at Media Matters and a longtime observer of Fox News. “They have never been “fair” or “balanced” but for decades were able to hide behind this lie,” she told me. “The truth is that Fox has always been biased, tainting their reporting with a right-wing bent. Their misinformation and outright lies have become more extreme as time has gone by, but make no mistake about it, Fox has never been anything other than a right-wing propaganda outfit.”

Critics have said that and worse about Fox for years. But forcing Fox News to confess to lying to its viewers—and having hosts like Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo do so on their own shows? That was a victory that people like Gretchen Carlson were hoping for. Carlson, the longtime Fox & Friends host who accused Ailes of sexual harassment. In 2016, Carlson and 20th Century Fox settled for a reported $20 million. On Sunday, Carlson said on Twitter “PLEASE Dominion — Do not settle with Fox! You’re about to prove something very big.” After news of the settlement, Carlson said “maybe Dominion is not going to get a public apology. I will hold my public apology close to my vest for the rest of my life.”

On CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront Tuesday night, former Fox News contributor Margaret Hoover said the settlement deal Fox struck with Dominion allows the network to maintain control over one critical thing: the ability to tell the story to its own massive audience in whatever way it wants, without being forced to apologize for, admit to, or acknowledge anything. Instead, Fox was able to tell its viewers it settled its “dispute” with Dominion and that “this settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”

But Hoover says ultimately, without a public admission, the money tells the story. Hoover worked at Fox when Ailes was in power, and she said that he would talk of Fox News as a necessary counterpoint to networks like CNN, whose journalists were biased, even if they didn’t realize it. “They had tendencies toward thinking a certain way, and then shaping and editorializing news,” Hoover said. “And that’s why Fox News was necessary. I mean, how far one has fallen. $787 million is an admission—a legal admission—of lying. This is a cable news organization that became an organization that lied and lied and lied.”