Fox News thrives two years after court settlement, but 2020 election coverage fight goes on

Key Points

• After a significant $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, Fox News has seen a substantial increase in its viewership, averaging 2.63 million viewers in weekday prime-time, which is a 56% rise compared to the previous year.
• Fox News has maintained its dominance in the cable news landscape, capturing 62% of the viewer share among the top three networks, while rivals MSNBC and CNN have experienced declines.
• Despite facing legal challenges and backlash over its 2020 election coverage, Fox News appears unrepentant and continues to operate under the belief that its audience supports its controversial narratives.
• Newsmax has shifted from expressing regrets about its coverage to aggressively defending it, highlighting the impact of market dynamics and audience preferences on its editorial stance.

NEW YORK (AP) — Twice recently, the people who run Fox News were reminded of their biggest nightmare.

The conservative network Newsmax's $67 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems over false claims after the 2020 election recalled Fox's own $787.5 million deal with the same company more than two years ago. New legal papers filed last month by a second company suing Fox, Smartmatic, also put an episode they would like to forget back in the news.

Between the staggering payment to bypass a defamation trial and revelations about the lengths to which Fox went to avoid telling its audience what it didn't want to hear about Donald Trump's defeat, many wondered if its actions in November 2020 would damage Fox News or compel it to change directions.

Not so much, it turns out.

Fox News Channel has defied gravity with its ratings, and is more popular with viewers this summer than ABC, CBS or NBC. Its top personalities resolutely support Trump, who has filled his second administration with former Fox stars like Pete Hegseth and Jeanine Pirro. Time after time, the White House turns to Fox to make news; shortly after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump was sitting with Sean Hannity.

Reached by The Associated Press, Fox declined to make anyone available to speak for this story.

No regrets, no surrender

An ethos many at Fox share with the president — no expressed regrets, no apologies — has also shown signs of spreading, given Newsmax's swagger following the Aug. 11 settlement announcement.

Fox News averaged 2.63 million viewers in weekday prime-time for the second quarter of 2025, up 56% from the same period in 2023, the Nielsen company said. While the increase is somewhat inflated since Fox took a hit in the ratings two years ago following the firing of Tucker Carlson, the advance of cord-cutting means that any network gaining viewers now is unusual.

MSNBC's prime-time audience of 1 million this spring was down 21% in two years, and CNN's viewership of 538,000 was down 6%, Nielsen said. Forty-five percent of people watching one of the top three cable news networks at any given time two years ago were tuned to Fox. This year, that audience share jumped to 62%.

Clearly, Fox's audience is more interested in following a Trump administration than it was for a Joe Biden administration. Just as clearly, the Dominion case had little appreciable impact on viewership.

“Fox's audience didn't really look at that verdict and say, ‘Oh, I can’t watch them anymore,'” said Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the conservative Media Research Center. “I think Fox's audience looked at that and said, ‘oh, the left is coming after them.’”

Absorbing some hits and moving on

Financially, the Dominion settlement was stiff enough that Newsmax is spreading its payments out over three years. The much larger Fox had a greater ability to absorb its hit. Fox confirmed at the time that it could deduct the settlement from its income taxes, and insurance could make the payment lower. Meanwhile, Fox News is a profit engine and becoming even more so; Axios reported earlier this year that the company expected to make half a billion dollars on non-TV products like books, podcasts and streaming.

Carlson was the face of the network before he was fired shortly after the settlement was announced, but Fox has always been able to generate new stars. Carlson took over from Bill O'Reilly when he was fired in 2017. Fox started “The Five,” arguably its centerpiece show, when Glenn Beck was shown the door in 2011. Jesse Watters now owns Carlson and O'Reilly's old time slot.

Yet, it's hard to understate the worry many at Fox had about losing audience immediately following the 2020 election. Trump, and many of his fans, were angry that the network declared Biden the winner in Arizona before most news outlets, a pivotal moment in the vote-counting.

Internal messages and deposition interviews revealed in court papers tied to Smartmatic's lawsuit reveal much of that drama. Management criticized anchor Neil Cavuto for ordering his show to cut away from Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany when she began talking about election fraud. News reporters were disciplined for fact-checking some of Trump's claims. Many in Fox's audience expressed anger at hearing Trump corrected and wanted to hear conspiracy theories.

Cavuto left Fox after 28 years last December. McEnany is now a co-host of Fox's midday show, “Outnumbered.” Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, hosts a weekend show at Fox.

Former Fox politics editor Chris Stirewalt, who was fired by Fox shortly after the network's correct call in Arizona, identified in a Smartmatic deposition a programming strategy that Fox excels at. “The best way to capture an audience is to make them afraid, make them fearful of something — to make them hate or resent other people to try to keep them with your telecast and that they're afraid to change the channel,” he said.

Fox has also maintained its dominance by playing a form of hardball that Newsmax alleged, in a lawsuit filed this week, violates antitrust laws. Newsmax said Fox has tried to block television distributors from carrying its rival, hired private detectives to investigate Newsmax executives and pressured guests not to appear on the network.

In response, Fox said, “Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can't attract viewers.”

Newsmax once expressed regret about coverage. Not anymore

Smartmatic said Fox has never retracted, or apologized for, programs that falsely suggested the company was involved in changing votes in 2020. Fox, which would not make an executive available for this story, said fraud charges made by a president or his representatives were newsworthy, and the network is defending itself on free speech grounds.

Newsmax has twice publicly expressed some regrets about its postelection coverage. The network settled a lawsuit with Smartmatic in 2024.

In a statement aired on Newsmax in December 2020, the network said that “no evidence has been offered that Dominion or Smartmatic used software or reprogrammed software that manipulated votes in the 2020 election.” The following April, Newsmax apologized for airing false allegations that a Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, manipulated voting machines or tallies to the detriment of Trump in 2020. Coomer, in turn, dropped Newsmax from a defamation lawsuit.

According to court papers in the case, Newsmax executive Gary Kanofsky wrote about conspiracy theorists to a colleague shortly after the election: “Simply giving them a microphone to spew more anti-election rhetoric and advance their claims without being properly equipped to question the legitimacy or factual accuracy of their assertions may be fun, but it’s terrible journalism.”

But Newsmax offered no apology in making the Dominion settlement, announced Aug. 11. The network's CEO, Chris Ruddy, attacked the judge, saying he “effectively entered a confiscation of our property because our reporting was not always sympathetic to Joe Biden.”

The network said on the air: “Newsmax believed it was critically important for the American people to hear both sides of the election disputes that arose in 2020. We stand by our coverage as fair, balanced and conducted within professional standards of journalism.”

What has changed? Newsmax has grown, and two months after Trump took office again, it went public. It invites members of its audience — dominated by Trump fans — to invest in the network.

“If you're paying attention to your audience at Newsmax,” Graham said, “you don't want to give the impression that you're knuckling under.”

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.