In settling the $1.6 billion lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News essentially admitted guilt in lying to its audience about Trump winning the 2020 election. Yet, many Fox News viewers have been reluctant to admit the truth that Fox News lied to them.
There is irrefutable evidence that top Fox News executives, managers, lawyers, producers and on-air talent all admitted privately that Trump had lost fair and square - but the network refused to tell that truth to their audience out of fear of backlash from the audience.
Speaking under oath, Rupert Murdoch admitted to Dominion’s lawyers that Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity and others endorsed the false narrative of a stolen election - all because they knew that’s what their audience wanted to hear.
Whataboutism quickly became part of the conversation, with claims that CNN and MSNBC also lie, so nobody should care about Fox. That may be a popular way to defend Fox News, but CNN and MSNBC have not taken a story and directly lied while off the air admitting that they were lying to the audience.
Half-baked opinions and sloppy journalism are not the same thing as defamatory lies, and there are no known coordinated efforts by CNN or MSNBC to lie for the purpose of manipulating a news story and an audience in the same way Fox News did with their claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Fox News demonstrated that "news is entertainment" and the lie was promoted for the sole purpose of entertaining the audience. That's entertainment - not news.