Outside its own constituency of loyalists, the revelation that Fox News lies to its audience is probably not much of a revelation at all. Nonetheless, thanks to the recently released text of a defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, there can be absolutely no dispute about the following: in the wake of the 2020 presidential contest, the network not only misled its viewers about the legitimacy of election fraud claims, but did so in full knowledge that they had absolutely no basis in fact.

In both a legal and an ethical sense, the distinction is an important one. Even with vast resources at their disposal, media outlets periodically make factual errors without malintent and just as regularly issue corrections. It is quite something else, on the other hand, to publish or air claims when you know them to be incorrect. Establishing credibility with your audience and then misleading them is bad. Willfully lying to viewers is immeasurably worse.

Throughout the two-week period that followed its own declaration of Joe Biden’s victory, according to one analysis by the liberal website Media Matters, the Fox network and its hosts questioned the integrity of the election results almost eight hundred times — regularly singling out Dominion Voting Systems for the likes of “rigging” and “flipping” votes. Several months later, Dominion itself responded by filing a defamation suit, the contents of which were made publicly available earlier this month. Among other things, the filing offers numerous instances of prominent Fox News anchors and editorial staff privately dismissing election fraud claims as baseless even as the network regularly gave them credence on air.