'Legal admission of lying': Former Fox contributor says settlement is damning for network
Following the $787 million legal settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems in the election conspiracy case, conservative analyst Margaret Hoover — herself a former Fox contributor — slammed the network for trying to conceal from its viewers that it had just made an admission of lying to them.
"For the Fox News viewership, they're not gonna hear about it," said Hoover on CNN's "OutFront" Tuesday evening. "They're going to continue to have, to the extent that it's discussed, Fox talk about it in their terms, and Fox is going to talk about how Dominion lied too."
"That's right," said anchor Erin Burnett. "And really, the only thing you had today was Howie Kurtz, who, of course, used to work with The Washington Post and who now works for Fox News, came on and said this on air, I'll play what people saw today."
"I do have a statement from Fox," said Kurtz in the clip, reading off, "We're pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with Dominion Voting Systems. We acknowledge the court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects Fox's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards."
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"So there's the line," said Burnett. "That's that's the spin on it. And that's actually in the settlement!"
"You know, it's outrageous," said Hoover. "Here's the thing that I think it's important to keep in mind ... they put him up there to read the statement. He didn't even opine about it. But I think it's important to keep in mind, and at the time that I worked in Fox News was when Roger Ailes ran the ship, and Roger Ailes ran the ship for a good 20 years, he created an enormously marketable, profitable media entity through positive polarization. You pit Americans against each other, and then you profit off of it. The reason that he sold that Fox News was needed in the beginning was because the mainstream media and cable news networks like CNN were full of people with unconscious bias. They were lying to their viewers. Maybe they weren't meaning to, but they just had their premise towards thinking a certain way and then shaping and editorializing news. And that's why Fox News was necessary."
"I mean, how far one has fallen," added Hoover. "$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, so that's a dramatic irony."
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