Strong as Dominion’s case may have been I doubt it was watertight. There was a legally high bar for them to jump, and Fox were not without any form of defence - Fox argued that they could honestly report that the Trump camp was making allegations of election fraud involving Dominion, and that was newsworthy in itself, even if what the Trump camp were saying was false.
I’m not saying that is right or that it is a defence that would have been successful - but it created a risk that Dominion probably quite properly took into account in deciding to settle.
Anyone here sneering at Dominion for accepting the money is being unfair and unrealistic. Why are they under some sort of societal obligation to litigate to save the USA by taking on Fox any more than anyone else? They’ve done at least their fair share.
You have made a category error here. Fox and its workers are in no sense journalists.
I’m not a doctor. Although I benefit from doctors who do follow the Hippocratic Oath, I’m under no legal or moral obligation to follow it myself. My car mechanic also has no legal or moral obligation to follow it. Fox are not journalists, and any thoughts that they are just lead to confusion.
With Fox, we are seeing the logical endpoint of the legal fiction of corporate personhood and freedom of expression: Huge power, worldwide reach, zero morals, zero ethics, purely psychopathic motivations, and complete immunity for any/all acts of “speech” however loosely defined.
Sadly, I don’t think we’ve seen the end point yet. Even if Rupert himself went on air to admit the voting machine stories were all fake, his viewers would just shrug it off and hope the editorial would end soon so they can get back to the regular programming. Even if Fox went away, the market for ignorance is just too big to ignore.
Agree we certainly haven’t seen the end of the phenomenon. This settlement, or even the case had it gone to trail, will be a non-event.
What I meant was that its progress to full-on naked can’t get conceptually worse.
Even though it certainly can, and almost certainly will, get far worse in terms of quantity, intensity, number of competing outlets, and sheer insanity of the material on offer.
One thing we know about humans and addiction: once addicted, it requires an ever-increasing dose to achieve the same effect. One thing we know about business is that when a profitable opportunity is uncovered, there will be a land rush to fill, and in fact over-fill, it. Put those two rules in juxtaposition and you have a positive feedback loop that will envelop the entire society it runs in.
I think there’s a lot of validity to the idea that Dominion sued because Fox’s lies directly damaged their reputation as an impartial and fair builder of voting systems. Same for all the other people who they’re sueing.
I mean, when you’re in the business of building voting machines/systems, your reputation as being fair, unbiased, and not crooked is paramount. Just a valid hint of that sort of thing is going to prevent you from being chosen by many governments.
It’s no different really than if Fox went around saying loudly that Mountain Dew shrinks testicles. PepsiCo would sue the pants off them for the exact same reason- that statement by Fox would of course be false, and would directly impact their business due to it damaging the reputation of their product and company.
I suspect the size of the damages were probably some specific number for some specific reason. Something like the future value of Dominion over 20 years, or the total ad revenue Fox got during that period, or something like that. Those numbers are rarely just pulled out of thin air.
They are almost always a compromise. They keep offering more and more until Dominion stops saying no and says yes. So, in a sense, the numbers are just pulled out of thin air.
Dominion was obviously ready for trial and thought they had a strong case. Fox was definitely scared of a verdict much higher, and other collateral damage. The settlement is the intersection of how badly Fox wanted out and what Dominion was willing to take to let them out. The problem for Dominion (and a lot of plaintiffs with strong cases) is the prospect of winning, but not getting a verdict as large as you expect and wish. As I understand it, the number a jury would put on their “damage to reputation” claim would have been a wildcard. You can imagine one jury thinking $100 million would cover it, and another might say $1 billion or more.
I’m not disputing you, just clarifying that I was talking about the initial damages claimed by Dominion in the suit. The settlement is absolutely negotiated based on what Fox was willing to offer, and Dominion was willing to take.
Sorry, I misunderstood. I’m sure they had a economist who was going to offer an opinion about how much the defamation hurt their reputation. But it’s a squishy number.
Ahh, but I never called them journalists. I only referred to their (lack of) “journalistic standards”. I don’t think you need to be a journalist to have (or lack) journalistic standards.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but Fox’s use of the word acrimony here really pisses me off. Of course, the text is going to be carefully worded to make them sound good. I’d even defend their right to do that. I dunno, something about this really bothers me. Hypocritical, Machiavellian maggots is what they are.
I think it’s a bit of both. Dominion genuinely saw this defamation as an existential threat, and in turn, Fox News saw the kinds of disclosures that might come out in court as a potential existential thread to their business. The result of which was that Fox was willing to offer $787.5 million to a company whose annual revenues are estimated at somewhere between less than $20 million to as much as $40 million on average – so equal to maybe 20 years of average gross revenue! As much as Dominion would have loved to rake Fox over the coals in court and force their lying anchors to acknowledge their lies on the air, this kind of money would be foolish to turn down, especially as they have morally and factually made their case to everyone but the MAGAts.
But I think it’s wrong to say that Dominion was “only” after the money. They had been defamed and their business threatened by a huge enterprise built on lies, they had the facts on their side, and they were simply going after justice in whatever way they could get it.
As David A. Graham from The Atlantic puts it, and I agree, “Fox News Lost the Lawsuit but Won the War”. But Dominion, IMO, has won the lawsuit and had no beef in this war, so I understand. A war against America should not be delegated to a private company.
Absolutely they could. Especially if the lawyers were working on a contingency fee. Small companies and individuals routinely sue the largest companies in the world, like Ford, Monsanto, and 3M.
Just for comparison, when St. Louis sued the NFL for violating its own relocation guidelines and then lying about it so the Rams could move to L.A., the NFL settled for $790 million. Dominion should have hired the St. Louis legal team.
The fundamental problem, if you want to call it that, is that there’s no provision in the 1st Amendment or subsequent decisions that allows for curtailment of free speech just because it’s factually untrue.
So instead, you have to go after them in the situations where those lies have direct impact in some real-world way. Dominion going after them for defamation is a classic example.
The problem is that most of those situations are pretty murky; the Dominion one was much more clear-cut, because it happened in the days when the Trump administration and GOP were going off the rails right after the elections.
Just one day later Fox tweets "“There is nothing more newsworthy than covering the president of the United States and his lawyers making allegations of voter fraud,” Fox said in a preview of its defense against Smartmatic’s allegations that it defamed them with segments suggesting they stole the 2020 election from former President Donald Trump. “Freedom of the press is foundational to our democracy and must be protected, in addition to the damages claims being outrageous, unsupported, and not rooted in sound financial analysis.”
In-crudding-feckible.
It is easy to show a loss due to speech, but if you can collect on this loss depends on the criteria in Sullivan. In any case, the judge had already ruled that Fox could not use a First Amendment defense.
I suspect that Fox wasn’t scared of the verdict and the payout, but scared of what was going to be shown in open court, and scared of the Murdochs and the on-air “talent” being cut to pieces by the Dominion attorneys. How do you think Tucker would handle his insults to Trump and Trump supporters being read to him?