Fox Paid $787M to Hold on To Their Viewers – 6% of It’s Yearly Income

(Top cartoon by David Horsey – Seattle Times)

If you have not been watching Faux News itself you know that the Big Lie Broadcasting network had had quite enough of discovery thank you by yesterday afternoon and meekly settled the $1.6B defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for a not insubstantial sum of $787M.

Not insubstantial by any means, but not exactly a death blow either, as that amount represents approximately 6% of its yearly income.

That amount in comparable to the expense a person making $50,000 a year incurs when force to replace an expensive appliance such as a nice electric range or refrigerator.

A pain in the posterior, sure, but manageable.

Mark Peterson at The Atlantic has the rundown.

“For Fox, the result is costly but bearable. Documents produced in discovery in the case show that Fox saw the aftermath of the election as an existential threat, as members of its audience defected to competitors. Today, Fox’s primacy within right-wing media has been restored and those competitors have faded. The network lost the lawsuit, but it survived and won the war.

Dominion’s choice to settle comes as a great disappointment to many critics of Fox, and is also probably a smart financial decision. For the critics, this case was about democracy and disinformation and provided an opportunity to hold Fox accountable for years of broadcasting hogwash. For Dominion, it was primarily about business. No matter how lofty the language its spokespeople used, the company didn’t sue to fix the American media landscape.

Imagine if the case had gone to trial, Dominion had won the full $1.6 billion, and then the matter had been caught up in years of costly appeals and wrangling. At best, Dominion would have been able to recover the money years from now; at worst, the award might have been reduced or thrown out altogether. Wiser to take the cash on offer. Whether or not Fox has to make some public apology, the network will presumably be very careful not to defame Dominion again.

None of this is to dismiss the cost to Fox. The settlement is one of the largest defamation payouts in history, and amounts to nearly 6 percent of Fox’s total 2022 revenue. The last-minute sprint to settlement suggests that the company really did not want to put its stars or its executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, on a witness stand in court. But for Fox, the nine-figure payout has turned out to be the cost of doing business and guaranteeing the network’s existence.”

Fox will pay 3/4 of a billion dollars to keep Murdoch off the stand and continue lying to it’s viewers, which they continue to insist upon.

One has to wonder tho, what they will do if drumpf winds up the big lie machine again in 2024.

Jimmy Kimmel provides some perspective:

Fox will increase the price they charge cable service providers to cover this loss. Those cable service providers will then increase their prices onto their customers (us).
Dominion extracted that wealth from the American people, not Fox.

— Mitchell Go Jack go!!🇺🇦 (@ballas_mitchell) April 19, 2023

As per usual…

all @FoxNews did was pay for a very expensive parking ticket, a bad day would be admitting there's no journalistic integrity / fact checking actual news reporting (their programmes are lies & opinions!)

— ~(^)~ (@darkamor) April 19, 2023

Yup

https://t.co/vqKIq3EgVg

— Rochelimit2772 🇺🇦 (@rochelimit2772) April 19, 2023

Rupert might have to have an Estate sell.

https://t.co/vNBZD3RQzb

— Rochelimit2772 🇺🇦 (@rochelimit2772) April 19, 2023

Yup.

https://t.co/vNBZD3RQzb

— Rochelimit2772 🇺🇦 (@rochelimit2772) April 19, 2023

As admissions of guilt go, 787 millions of dollars is pretty convincing.

But they are free to continue screwing this country.