I can think of, oh, 787.5 million reasons for allowing an apology to slide off the settlement table. That price tag made the Fox-Dominion deal perhaps the largest penalty ever paid in a defamation case by orders of magnitude, and it didn’t even require a trial — or the survival of an endless series of appeals. Dominion gets to cash the check and move on to other defamation actions with all of the discovery in place from this lawsuit.

The lack of apology sure seems to bother Fox’s competitors more than it does the company that should want it most, though. Both CNN and ABC pressed Dominion about letting Fox off the hook, so to speak, in the wake of their dramatic (and remarkably public) deal yesterday. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos tells CEO John Poulos that he may have gotten the money, but “what you didn’t get was an apology,” via Mediaite:

“At the end of the day, the court system really is about accountability. We feel we got it,” he said. “All of the facts we had discovered during the case had already come to light.”

“But they just acknowledged the judge said they were falsehoods. They didn’t admit to falsehoods or apologize for them,” Stephanopoulos countered. “Is that enough?”

Clearly it was enough for Poulos — along with the money. The exhibits released already show that Fox was aware that the “stop the steal” claims about Dominion were false, or at least very likely to be false, and still aired and promoted them despite multiple internal warnings about them. Fox had to admit that it accepted the falsity of those claims as ruled by a judge in the case.  That and $787.5 million feels like a win to Poulos, and for good reason.

Stephanopoulos didn’t spend all that much time on the issue, but CNN seemed much more focused on a lack of apology. Pamela Brown buttonholed Dominion lead counsel Justin Nelson about the settlement, and pushed the point not once but multiple times. Nelson explains that defamation cases don’t end in apologies — they end in damages — but Brown can’t seem to let it go:

On @CNN Primetime tonight, Anchor and Chief Investigative Correspondent @PamelaBrownCNN spoke with Dominion Voting attorney Justin Nelson about today's settlement with Fox News. pic.twitter.com/6wPlFc3fWM

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) April 19, 2023

BROWN: Yes, yes. I mean, let’s talk about this, because it was not necessarily a full-throated admission, here, when you look at the statement. The statement is acknowledging “The court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.” You’re a lawyer. You know those words are very carefully chosen. And the reality is millions of people, in the United States, won’t necessarily know about this. I mean, do, the viewers of Fox, are they owed an apology, or a retraction, here? I mean, if they don’t know about this, where is the accountability that you speak of?

NELSON: Well, it’s a really good question. And, I think, part of what really is going on here is that we are sometimes, we’re in these bubbles. And what happened to Dominion was that it just got caught, in this torrent of lies, and it got brought into this alternative universe, where conspiracy theories dominated.

This is a civil litigation case. And what we think happened here was we took the civil litigation, as far as we can take it. We could have gone all the way to verdict. And under defamation law, you don’t get an apology. You get money.

And so, what we achieved here with the statement that Fox made, with the certainty of money, and again, from our damages, we had a base case damages model, and then we had a growth damages model. And the settlement today was above our base case damages model. So, we see today’s settlement as complete vindication, and really a message that, as your opening said, lies do have consequences. And it’s about having coming back, to these shared facts, because ultimately, we can agree or disagree on issues, even to the most profound importance. But we have to have shared facts, in this society, to have a functioning democracy. And I think today’s settlement was a real step, in that direction.

BROWN: And so, what I hear from you is that there was this acknowledgment, in the statement, plus the money from the settlement. There was no apology, in this statement, from our — from what I am gathering from you. And I’m going to open this up, for my colleagues, to ask questions. But just one final point on that. How much of a sticking point, to reach the settlement, was an apology, or a retraction? How much of a role did that play, in the settlement negotiations? Because I know that was something Dominion was asking for early on.

NELSON: Well, I don’t really want to get into that. I think, at the end of the day, this goes back to what our goals really were, at this entire settlement, and this entire litigation, which was number one, accountability, and number two, to have some type of monetary settlement. And look, this is really the first time, in these 2020 election lies, that someone has been held accountable, and held accountable, in a big way. And so, that’s why we see today is a real victory.

The panel then comes back around to it later as well:

BROWN: But then, why then did Fox not settle this earlier, right? This has been going on for two and a half years, right? And I think that was another point Gretchen Carlson made. And they had to pay out all this money. And they did not have to do the on-air apology, according to the statement, from The New York Times reporting. But they did release this statement, this weak-sauce statement, as Alisyn rightly points out.

CAMEROTA: Yes.

BROWN: So, why didn’t they do this earlier?

FISCHER: Well, legal experts, I’ve been talking to, say they absolutely should have, because they would have avoided so much embarrassment, leading up to the trial, and all of these pre-trial hearings, and in the discovery. One other thing I wanted to know? I asked some of my sources. In addition to an apology, should they be required to issue a retraction, or any corrections? Because it’s one thing to not want to apologize, for doing things wrong. But as journalists, when we get things wrong, we have to issue a correction.

MSNBC also was unhappy with Dominion over this omission, and CNN’s still chewing over it this morning, wondering if Dominion cared more about money than truth. This question is absurd, however, since Dominion ended up getting both. Fox had to admit that they aired false claims about Dominion and now has to transfer more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to Dominion to compensate for the damage they admitted doing. That certainly looks like both money and truth to me, and it does to Power Line’s Scott Johnson too:

The sum of $787.5 million is about half of what Dominion sought. The outcome looks like a compromise, but I think that appearances are deceiving. In fact, the settlement is suggestive of capitulation by Fox News. …

The amount of the settlement must be well beyond any reasonable assessment of Dominion’s actual damages, if any. It either includes a component of punitive damages exposure — an exposure that I have seen mentioned nowhere and may or may not have been in the case — or reflects Fox’s desire to avoid the embarrassment of trial. Absent any authoritative analysis of the settlement — the terms of which remain private as I write — that is my best guess is that $787.5 million was the price of avoiding embarrassment.

Indeed. Fox threw in the towel and paid through the nose for its defamatory conduct. It’s a complete vindication for Dominion.

So why are Fox’s competitors so obsessed with apologies? They seem not to be dispassionate analysts in this case, but partisans who wanted Dominion to provide them with vindication and a complete humiliation of their main competitor. They seem more interested in getting Fox on-air apologies on endless loops to play for their smaller audiences, which may be understandable as a market strategy but is hardly realistic. This leaves the distinct impression that they feel somewhat betrayed by Dominion and expected that company to act in the best interests of mainstream media rather than of its ownership and employees (Dominion is privately owned). Their unhappiness at this betrayal is coloring their coverage and dishonestly painting one of the most successful large-scale defamation actions to make it look like some sort of failure.

That’s not to say that Fox doesn’t owe some apologies. They owe them to their viewers and to Dominion, however, not their competitors. If Fox doesn’t offer any, that will speak to their integrity and credibility. But that’s not Dominion’s responsibility and it’s silly to whine about a lack of apologies while Dominion laughs all the way to the bank.