That is not what the settlement reflects. The settlement reflects Fox’s abandonment of even the most minimal journalistic standards.

Fox’s “news” story about the settlement was perhaps even worse. The headline stated that “Fox News Media, Dominion Voting Systems reach agreement over defamation lawsuit,” but it didn’t state the amount of the settlement and instead mainly focused on the judge’s compliments of Fox’s legal team. No, really:

Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis, who was overseeing the defamation lawsuit, praised both parties for their handling of the case.

“I have been on the bench since 2010. … I think this is the best lawyering I’ve had, ever,” Davis said, adding, “I would be proud to be your judge in the future.”

No mention, of course, that less than a week before, the same judge rebuked Fox’s lawyers, said he was concerned about “misrepresentations to the court” and lamented, “What do I do with attorneys that aren’t straightforward with me?” And then the Fox story ends with this howler of a paragraph:

Then-President Donald Trump and his allies fiercely challenged Joe Biden’s victory in the weeks following the election. Some of them, including members of his legal team, made false and unsubstantiated claims against Dominion Voting Systems and are the subject of separate defamation lawsuits.

Note the deflection of responsibility. It was Trump’s legal team that made “false and unsubstantiated claims.” That’s unquestionably true, but those same lawyers were enthusiastically put on the air by Fox for the purpose of spreading their “false and unsubstantiated claims.” And as the court’s summary judgment ruling made clear, Fox employees also made what they knew to be false and unsubstantiated claims.

The end result is that Fox has paid an immense price for its lies, but it recognizes that its true vulnerability isn’t in its bank account but in its audience. It can absorb huge financial losses so long as those losses are fleeting. It cannot prosper if it loses its audience. Shielding its audience from the truth is easily worth almost $800 million to a company that made $1.2 billion in net income last year and is sitting on $4 billion in cash reserves.

In the meantime, many of the viewers who keep the company so very profitable won’t know anything meaningful about the Dominion settlement or Fox’s lies — because Fox won’t tell them. I can think of any number of friends, relatives and neighbors who regularly consume conservative media and know nothing about the case. They know nothing about Fox’s falsehoods. Their ignorance is of incalculable worth to Fox.

While this newsletter is admittedly rather bleak even in the face of Fox’s decisive court defeat, the story is far from over. Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox is pending in New York State court in Manhattan, and the larger right-wing media world is facing a series of reckonings in cases across the country. My friends at Protect Democracy have filed cases against Project Veritas, Gateway Pundit, Rudy Giuliani, Dinesh D’Souza and several additional defendants related to some of the most grotesque lies in the entire Stop the Steal effort.