It’s disappointing.  We wanted Rupert Murdoch on the stand.  “Yeah, we lied about Dominion, mate,” he’d yell in a geriatric Australian accent as he broke under the demand to put his hand on the Bible.  “We needed to get our viewers back, crikey!”  “And we’d do it again to protect President Trump!” Hannity screams from the gallery. Tucker Carlson giggles maniacally as attendants tighten the sleeves of his jacket.  Judge Jeanine, splayed on the courtroom floor in a pool of merlot, gives a reactive thumbs up like a Pavlovian dog.  Maria Bartiromo puffs on a Benson & Hedges.

But that didn’t happen.  Instead, Dominion Voting Systems will get more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, likely in cash.  The money is reportedly more than ten times the amount paid by the investment fund that owns Dominion paid for the company in 2018.  And when it comes down to it, the company was in the business of making money, not defending democracy.  (Yay, Citizens United, right?)

What it does, however, is it hurts Fox.  It hurts Fox a lot, and it may end up hurting the key people at Fox even more if a shareholders’ lawsuit against the directors and board members succeeds and they are held personally responsible for the financial losses.  It’s one thing one your company’s cash reserve goes down by three-quarters of a billion on paper; it’s another when you’re writing the check for $787 million. 

But what would Fox or creature of the night Rupert Murdoch learn from the lawsuit and settlement?  Not what they should, that’s for sure.  Don’t expect fewer conspiracy theories; they’ll just be less defined, with fewer specific parties’ names.  And don’t expect so see Fox broadcasting (shiver) reality.

Fox has been embarrassed publicly and professionally.  The judge found that Fox lied and knowingly misled its audience.  And then, right on brand, Fox released a statement citing the network’s “commitment to the high journalistic standards.”  But shockingly, Fox isn’t covering the top political story of the day at all.  Either by terms of the settlement or for Fox’s traditional ostrich-like method of ignoring things to make them go away, Fox’s primetime lineup isn’t saying peep about the settlement.  Maybe that means Fox migrates away from election conspiracies for a while, or maybe it means the writers at Fox haven’t been told the language to use.  We’ll find out later this week.

There are a number of things that need to shift themselves out because of the settlement, even if it was the billion-dollar buster we had hoped.  How will the settlement impact Fox’s ability to host presidential debates–particularly the GOP primary debates?  Because any settlement would likely mean they cannot endorse or sponsor claims of election fraud involving Dominion, they would have to take all those questions off the slate–a major issue to the far-right Trump-supporting Fox viewer who had been fed the conspiracy for years.

And speaking of Trump, given that Fox has admitted to the fact that the judge in the case determined it knowingly aired false information about Dominion, will Fox and other networks pause at showing Trump rallies unfiltered given his penchant for spewing libelous falsehoods daily.

The short-term pain of the settlement for popcorn-eaters like us will be abated in the background in the coming months.  Fox will not go after companies; they’ll go after concepts and groups as they do in their culture wars.  They’ll go after the public figures they want to “lock up” who brush off rhetoric.  But they will not do anything that could put Murdoch or Hannity or Carlson on the record again.