Fox News spent months pushing Trump's election fraud claims after 2020, and we all know how that ended. Dominion sued them into a settlement worth nearly $800 million. But here's what bothers me: Fox admitted internally that the whole thing was false. Their own emails showed they knew the claims were debunked. Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, all the rest - they knew.
Yet millions of Americans still believe the election was stolen. The settlement didn't undo that. Dominion got paid. Fox moved on. The people who built their entire political worldview on election fraud claims? They just dug in deeper, found new outlets - OANN, Truth Social, Telegram channels - and kept going.
Maybe that's what pisses me off most. The accountability happened in a courtroom. Settlements and admissions don't fix the thing that matters: a huge chunk of the country stopped trusting elections themselves. Fox's correction got buried. The original lie got everywhere.
So yeah, Dominion "won." But what did democracy win? We're still living in the aftermath of this. January 6 happened. People are still claiming elections are rigged. And I'm supposed to feel satisfied because Fox paid a fine?
OP frustrates that Fox's $800M settlement and internal admissions didn't stop election denial or migration to alternative outlets, questioning what democracy actually won. Responses converge on a causal problem: institutional accountability arrived too late (years after 2020-2021 when narratives calcified), and even when it did come (depositions, convictions, settlements), the misinformation had already propagated through fractured informational ecosystems. The debate has shifted from 'was Fox accountable?' to 'could accountability ever matter once the damage spreads?' and 'who bears responsibility - media, Trump, or voters themselves?'
7 responses
Mar 2, 2026
You keep talking about Fox like they created this problem, but let's trace the actual timeline. Trump lost the election. He called Georgia's Secretary of State (a Republican, by the way) and asked him to 'find' votes. His own Attorney General, his own campaign lawyers, his own judges - all told him there was no fraud. He then gathered a mob on January 6. That's not Fox's fault. Yes, Fox amplified it, and yes they deserve criticism for that. But the root cause was Trump's refusal to accept losing. The media ecosystem just exploited a preexisting willingness in certain voters to believe what they wanted to believe. Fixing this requires addressing why so many people were primed to accept election denial in the first place, not just blaming cable news.
Mar 2, 2026
The real problem isn't Fox or Trump - it's that we've completely fractured into separate informational universes. My parents literally cannot see the same news I see. They're not dumb people. They're trapped in an ecosystem that algorithmically feeds them one narrative. Dominion suing Fox doesn't fix the underlying infrastructure that makes this possible. We need actual regulation of social media platforms, not just settlements that become tax write-offs.
Mar 2, 2026
I think you're missing something important here. Yes, Fox pushed bad claims. But Trump himself was the one making these claims publicly. He lost 60+ court cases including ones he appointed judges presided over. At some point people have to take responsibility for believing something despite mountains of evidence against it. Fox didn't make people stupid - people chose to stay in the bubble.
Mar 2, 2026
This is actually a much bigger story than just the Dominion case. We're watching institutional failure across the board. Congress couldn't convict him twice. DOJ took years to indict. The Supreme Court wouldn't touch cases because 'standing.' State courts kept dismissing suits. Meanwhile the misinformation spread during all that inaction. By the time accountability mechanisms finally kicked in - indictments in Manhattan, Georgia, DC - the narrative was already calcified for tens of millions of people. The legal system moved too slowly and too late. Fox's settlement in 2023 doesn't matter when the damage was done in 2020-2021 while everyone was still processing what happened. We needed swift, coordinated, visible accountability in real time. Instead we got theater stretched over years.
Mar 2, 2026
You're right that Fox knew better and chose profit over truth. But let's be honest - they learned that there's zero consequence for lying to half the country. They paid less in settlement than they make in a year. Until media outlets actually face consequences that hurt, this happens again.
Mar 2, 2026
The settlement proves what we knew: rich people can lie with impunity as long as they can afford the check. An $800 million fine to a company printing billions in revenue per year is a rounding error. Meanwhile, ordinary people's lives got destroyed - lost jobs, destroyed families, bankrupted by legal fees fighting these claims. If actual justice mattered, we'd see executives in prison, not boardrooms. Instead we get a press release and everyone moves on.
Mar 2, 2026
Look, I get the frustration, but this framing ignores what actually happened legally. Fox settled because they faced discovery that would've exposed their hosts' deposition testimony - meaning they got caught red-handed in depositions admitting on record they didn't believe the claims. That's not nothing. And multiple Trump allies have been convicted or face convictions for January 6 and the fake elector scheme. The accountability isn't complete, but saying it didn't happen is just wrong.