Newsmax to Pay $67 Million to Settle Dominion Defamation Lawsuit
The conservative network avoids trial but faces mounting financial strain after back-to-back settlements over 2020 election falsehoods.
August 18 EST: The long shadow of the 2020 election continues to stretch across America’s media landscape. On Monday, Newsmax, a conservative cable outlet that built its post-Trump identity on amplifying baseless claims of election fraud, agreed to pay $67 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. The deal spares Newsmax from a trial that could have laid bare its editorial decision-making and the degree to which it knowingly fed its audience lies.
A Judge’s Ruling Left Little Wiggle Room
This was not a case headed for a courtroom toss-out. Judge Eric M. Davis, who oversaw both the Fox News and Newsmax cases in Delaware Superior Court, had already determined that Newsmax’s broadcasts did in fact defame Dominion. The only unresolved question was whether the network acted with “actual malice” the constitutional threshold for defamation and, if so, how much it would owe in damages.
By choosing to settle, Newsmax avoided a public trial in which internal communications, private admissions, and possibly testimony from top executives would have been aired. Given what the Dominion-Fox case revealed anchors privately mocking fraud claims even as they repeated them on-air the calculation is obvious.
A Smaller Number, A Larger Pattern
At first glance, the $67 million figure looks small next to Fox’s $787.5 million payout to Dominion in 2023. But scale can mislead. Fox is a corporate juggernaut with billions in revenue. Newsmax is a niche network whose survival depends on a smaller, more ideologically concentrated base of viewers. For a company of its size, two consecutive settlements $40 million with Smartmatic last year and now $67 million with Dominion amount to a staggering financial hit.
The through line is unmistakable the post-election disinformation strategy that once seemed like a ratings goldmine is exacting a serious cost. In the short term, these networks profited from fueling doubt about Donald Trump’s loss. In the long run, they are paying for it in dollars, in credibility, and in legal exposure.
Power, Profits, And The Audience Problem
The story here is not simply legal liability; it’s about power and audience capture. Newsmax, like others on the right, leaned into election conspiracies to compete with Fox for pro-Trump viewers who were furious that mainstream outlets had called the race for Joe Biden. Court filings suggest executives knew full well that the claims against Dominion were false but feared losing market share if they corrected course.
That tension between telling the truth and keeping the audience is the central dilemma of modern partisan media. Newsmax’s decision to settle acknowledges the legal limits of that gamble. But it also underscores something deeper the cost of building a business model on grievance and misinformation is ultimately unsustainable, even if it takes years for accountability to arrive.
Dominion’s Broader Legal Offensive
For Dominion, this marks another victory in a legal campaign that has become a proxy war over truth in American politics. Having forced Fox to pay nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars, and now extracting tens of millions from Newsmax, Dominion is demonstrating that corporations maligned in the election conspiracy ecosystem can, in fact, strike back.
It is worth remembering lawsuits of this magnitude are exceedingly rare in U.S. history. The last comparable defamation payouts involve decades-old cases against tabloid newspapers. Yet Dominion’s litigation spree reflects a uniquely American collision of free speech protections and the willingness of some media outlets to knowingly spread damaging falsehoods.
The Road Ahead For Newsmax
The financial consequences are real, but the political consequences may prove just as significant. Newsmax is not Fox; it lacks the institutional depth to weather repeated settlements. Paying out over $100 million in less than two years puts the company on uncertain footing.
And yet, paradoxically, settlements also shield Newsmax from the full glare of a jury trial avoiding weeks of public testimony that could further erode its credibility. In this way, the network has contained the damage, at least for now. The question is whether the audience it courted with disinformation will even care, or if the payouts will be shrugged off as the cost of doing business in an era of media tribalism.
The Larger Lesson
The deeper takeaway is about how fragile truth becomes when media outlets mistake their audience’s demands for a mandate to lie. The short-term calculus feed the grievance, hold the viewers has now collided with the longer-term reality of legal accountability. Dominion’s lawsuits have drawn a bright red line the First Amendment may protect the press from honest mistakes, but it does not protect deliberate falsehoods packaged as news.
The 2020 election may feel like history to many Americans, but for the media companies that gambled on amplifying its falsehoods, the reckoning is ongoing. Newsmax’s settlement is not just another payout it is another reminder that democracy pays a price when institutions meant to inform instead choose to deceive.
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A political science PhD who jumped the academic ship to cover real-time governance, Olivia is the East Coast's sharpest watchdog. She dissects power plays in Trenton and D.C. without bias or apology.
