Everybody Knows What Fox News Is Now

On Tuesday, Fox News reached a settlement in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit over the spread of election disinformation. For $787.5 million, Fox bought its way out of the embarrassing — or, depending where you sit, satisfying — prospect of its anchors, its executives and its founding chief, Rupert Murdoch, taking the stand.

That won’t happen now. (At least not in this case.) But we’ve already seen plenty. The lawsuit has revealed what Fox thinks of its viewers and, more important, how much it fears the very audience that it created.

That fear is the running theme of the voluminous body of texts, emails and depositions that showed the network freaking out over how its audience would react if it did not indulge the fraudulent belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald J. Trump.

The evidence revealed that the people who run Fox, already anxious about viewer blowback over its election-night call of Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr., were worried about losing its audience for good. “Getting creamed by CNN!” Mr. Murdoch wrote in an email. “Guess our viewers don’t want to watch it. Hard enough for me!”

As the days went on, Fox was placed in the nightmare situation of having to pierce the bubble and report the news: That Mr. Biden had been legally elected. Fox leaders watched the gains of conservative rivals like Newsmax and saw the audience’s interest in election-theft fantasies building. There was talk of showing “respect” for an audience that, as one producer put it, “doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition. They still have hope.”

But the quote that I’ll remember best — the one that summed up the relationship between Fox and its audience better than I ever have as a TV critic — came from Fox’s star host Tucker Carlson. Referring to the election conspiracy theories of the Trump adviser Sidney Powell, which he called “insane,” he added: “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”

Say this for Carlson, he can pack a lot into a few words. There’s an implicit agreement here: Whether or not you, the viewer, are correct in the technical sense, you are right in the larger sense. You are the authentic voice of this country. So you deserve to feel right about your beliefs, about your enemies, about how you have been cheated. You deserve — through whatever combination of insinuation or hypotheticals or myths — to have the space to keep believing it, without us making that harder.

All this, trial or no trial, makes clear what Fox News really is. It’s a service provider. That service is the maintenance of a reality bubble and the deference to beliefs that Fox’s hosts helped shape.

Seen this way, the Dominion case wasn’t so much about Fox telling its audience what to believe. It was about the audience telling Fox what Fox needed to believe — or at least, what it needed to give the appearance of not not believing.

That may seem like a devastating admission for an outlet with “News” in its name. But viewed from another perspective — the good people who want to believe perspective — it is essentially advertising. Fox’s private communications and its on-air actions said: The customer is always right. In fact, the customer is boss. Please don’t fire us.

Message received. The case cost Fox a lot of money, but it didn’t cost it in the ratings. (The lies, of course, on Fox and elsewhere, cost American democracy immensely.)

We don’t know what would have happened had the case gone to trial. But I don’t believe that a dramatic moment on the witness stand, à la “A Few Good Men,” would have made Fox viewers turn away from the channel’s hosts in disgust for leading them on. For one thing, that bubble-maintenance machine works. (As it is, Fox got off with no requirement to make any admission on the air, and its coverage of the case was, shall we say, sparing.)

But for another, it might not have had the effect on the Fox audience that it would on people who don’t trust Fox in the first place. Much of politics as practiced on Fox — and make no mistake, Fox’s relationship with its conservative audience is political — is about proving one’s affinities and bona fides. There’s the thing our side says and the thing the other side says. So if somebody gets sued for defending the thing that our side says, maybe that’s simply, as the Fox testimony put it, respect.

Granted, $787.5 million is not nothing. Maybe when it comes to the next conspiracy theory that its audience wants to believe, Fox and its hosts will be more responsible, or more aware of where the lines are. We don’t know that either.

What we do know is what the texts and emails told us that Fox knows: The one thing that can definitely cost them is telling the uncomfortable truth.