After Dominion Voting Systems and Fox News reached a settlement in their $1.6 billion defamation battle on Tuesday, the hosts of “The View” were pretty unimpressed. According to the women at ABC’s table, the outcome “just didn’t sting enough” for Fox.
Dominion settled the suit against Fox News for $787.5 million, almost exactly half of what they were suing for. In the end, Fox didn’t apologize for the claims, and didn’t actually admit to knowingly lying to their viewers, but said, “We acknowledge the Court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”
But, no one on the network was made to acknowledge these things on-air, and for host Sunny Hostin, “that’s my biggest problem with it.” Meanwhile, Whoopi Golderg asked “What was the point of all of this then?”
“They need to be able to get on air and tell their viewers, ‘You can’t trust us. We lied to you. We affected our very democracy. Some of our anchors can’t be trusted,’” Hostin said. “They needed to say that.”
Hostin also pointed out that, in the grand scheme of things, the money that Fox has to pay may be a big number to normal people, but is just a few drops in the bucket for Rupert Murdoch.
“Anything under a billion dollars I don’t think sends the right message, because Rupert Murdoch still has — every year, I think, it’s $2.9 billion in pro forma earnings that Fox News makes — and he still has $4 billion in cash as of February,” Hostin explained. “So, in my view, it just didn’t sting enough.”
You can watch the full segment from “The View” in the video above.
