Fox News, the most popular conservative TV news channel in the United States, reached a last-minute settlement with voting machines manufacturer Dominion over the latter’s defamation lawsuit. Fox News will pay the company $787.5 million (€718.6 million) to avoid going through a trial, which was due to begin this week.

The sum is the largest publicly disclosed financial settlement in the history of US defamation action. The lawsuit was based on Fox News allowing to air false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against the then-president Donald Trump, who lost to Joe Biden.

Suing a media organisation for its coverage is difficult in the US, but the accusations against Fox News have been strong. Pretrial discovery already indicated that Fox News’ hosts and executives understood well that Trump’s accusations of election sabotage were false but kept allowing coverage indicating the opposite, allegedly to keep the channel’s core audience happy.

As The Washington Post notes, “[Fox News founder and chairman Rupert] Murdoch evidently calculated that settling with Dominion would be far less expensive, from both a reputational and a monetary perspective, than taking the gamble of a trial and an adverse jury verdict, which could have exceeded Dominion’s own damage claim [initially set at $1.6 billion]”.

Such a huge settlement would be crushing for most media companies, but Fox News generates a sizable profit and has around $4 billion in cash reserves. However, this is not the end of the channel’s legal troubles; it still faces a similar lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting technology firm.

Swedish Radio, Sweden’s public radio service, announced it would quit Twitter, becoming the first big European media organisation to do so recently. While individual journalists are still free to use the platform, organisational accounts will either shut down or cease publication. 

Unlike American NPR, Swedish Radio didn’t cite any particular decision by Twitter’s leadership as a cause for its decision; however, the organisation said it had been de-prioritising the platform for some time now and is particularly worried about its general lack of capacity to fight problems like misinformation and hate speech under new leadership.

More broadly, though, Twitter has lost its relevance for Swedes, the broadcaster’s head of social media Christian Gillinger explained in a blog post announcing the decision. A recent report cited by Gillinger shows that only 7% of Swedes are active on Twitter daily, and the broadcaster saw a decrease in Twitter engagement over the years.

Gillinger also said that Twitter isn’t unique – the organisation also previously left Snapchat and Twitch, and one of its stations quit Facebook.

Bonus — Three more stories you might want to check out:

The Fix Newsletter

Everything you need to know about European media market every week in your inbox