3 ms·

For a company that's worth less than $17.5B, a $787.5M settlement means giving away 4.5% of your company's value. Unlike big tech companies or whatnot, Fox Corp

by mdasen 4y ago

For a company that's worth less than $17.5B, a $787.5M settlement means giving away 4.5% of your company's value. Unlike big tech companies or whatnot, Fox Corporation isn't that big. Even after its huge fall, Meta is still 32x larger. Apple is 150x larger, Microsoft 123x larger, Alphabet 77x larger. A $787.5M settlement would only be 0.03% of Apple's value rather than 4.5% so I could see it being a meaningless penalty on Apple, but it's a large enough penalty that Fox is going to think twice before allowing their talent to do similar things in the future. A few more of these and they could be signing away a quarter of their company's value. > just buy their way out of legal humiliation Except they basically didn't buy their way out of the humiliation. Most of the damming stuff has already been made public. Most of the embarrassing laundry has been aired. At this point, the only real question is whether Dominion would get the $1.6B they had asked for. Instead, they settled for a guaranteed half. Plus, Fox is still facing a lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting system. Smartmatic issued a statement, "Dominion’s litigation exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest." It also likely means Fox losing more money. > Settlements and plea bargains are a cancer on the judicial process I definitely understand the sentiment and plea bargains can be really bad pushing low-income people to plead guilty to lesser crimes even if they're innocent and letting rich people off easy when they're definitely guilty. Likewise, a company might reach a settlement with someone they've wronged who doesn't know their rights and who isn't on equal footing with such a giant corporation. In a civil case between two companies with basically unlimited legal funds, it seems quite reasonable. It's important to note that this case isn't about Fox doing you harm. It's about Fox doing Dominion harm. Between Fox and Dominion, this seems like quite a reasonable outcome. Dominion won big against Fox and it will likely encourage other litigants to continue pursuing Fox. What is bad about this settlement other than things like you wanting to know potentially more details that might be exposed? If your answer is that Fox has caused more harm than just the harm to Dominion, that's a different trial. I would agree that Fox has created incredible harm to our society. I don't know how we could pursue that in a legal sense which is a shame. Still, this isn't a plea bargain or settlement that seems bad. It seems like a reasonable outcome where the complainant received half of what they were hoping to get without the uncertainty of the trial outcome. Even if Dominion won the case, they might have been awarded less damages than they asked for (or less than the settlement).

anigbrowl 4y ago
You make a good point about the relatively small size of Fox News, but I'd argue that they can still afford it and their relatively low financial capitalization is outweighed by the enormous political capital they are able to leverage. Except they basically didn't buy their way out of the humiliation. Yes they did. The embarrassment of having text messages quoted in legal documents (and subsequently in the media) is nothing compared o the having Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson etc. being subjected to cross-examination under oath and having to make admissions (probably on camera) in a forum they don't control from top to bottom. Bear in mind that the target audience for Fox News watches a lot of TV because they don't enjoy reading. Words don't have the same kind of emotional force as personal testimony. If your answer is that Fox has caused more harm than just the harm to Dominion, that's a different trial. It is, and the fact that it's a different trial is part of the problem. The anglo-American legal system is full of procedural arguments which are generally gamed for the advantage of powerful incumbents, and even a large-ish company like dominion has to balance their desire for full accountability and transparency with the fiscal reality of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush. It's extraordinarily difficult to mount class actions and meet the procedural threshold for establishing harm, so all the incentives run towards a transactional approach. This is a bad thing my view, on the basis that 'justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.' As it is Fox writes a painfully large check to Dominion but gets to issue an anodyne statement expressing its commitment to the highest standards of journalism [puke emoji] while continuing to pursue the lowest common denominator in its audience's imaginary. As you're probably aware, Fox has barely covered the fact of this litigation. Unless its audience sees someone like Tucker Carlson sweating it out on the witness stand, this whole thing may as well not have happened for them.

by mdasen 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

You make a good point about the relatively small size of Fox News, but I'd argue that they can still afford it and their relatively low financial capitalization is outweighed by the enormous political capital they are able to leverage. Except they basically didn't buy their way out of the humiliation. Yes they did. The embarrassment of having text messages quoted in legal documents (and subsequently in the media) is nothing compared o the having Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson etc. being subjected to cross-examination under oath and having to make admissions (probably on camera) in a forum they don't control from top to bottom. Bear in mind that the target audience for Fox News watches a lot of TV because they don't enjoy reading. Words don't have the same kind of emotional force as personal testimony. If your answer is that Fox has caused more harm than just the harm to Dominion, that's a different trial. It is, and the fact that it's a different trial is part of the problem. The anglo-American legal system is full of procedural arguments which are generally gamed for the advantage of powerful incumbents, and even a large-ish company like dominion has to balance their desire for full accountability and transparency with the fiscal reality of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush. It's extraordinarily difficult to mount class actions and meet the procedural threshold for establishing harm, so all the incentives run towards a transactional approach. This is a bad thing my view, on the basis that 'justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.' As it is Fox writes a painfully large check to Dominion but gets to issue an anodyne statement expressing its commitment to the highest standards of journalism [puke emoji] while continuing to pursue the lowest common denominator in its audience's imaginary. As you're probably aware, Fox has barely covered the fact of this litigation. Unless its audience sees someone like Tucker Carlson sweating it out on the witness stand, this whole thing may as well not have happened for them.