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One point six billion dollars.
Ridiculous, thinks Rupert Murdoch. Those bastards at Dominion are asking for a ridiculous sum and they will never win. I may be Australian, but I hear that they believe in freedom of the press in this country. They’ve got a Bill of Rights here, which includes the right to tell it as we see it. The truth, you say–who the hell knows what the truth is these days? We are Fox. We will stand up for free speech and walk away unscathed. Tell them where they can go. We are innocent. We will prevail.
One point six billion dollars.
That’s a lot of money, even for me, thinks Rupert Murdoch. It’s kind of risky to insist that we believed that these allegations actually were true. Or even that we were simply stating that these things might be true. It’s impossible that a judge and jury could be stupid enough to accept our position when those other guys have so much hard evidence—tapes, texts, real stuff that’s nearly impossible to deny–that we’d be branded as liars in court as well as on TV.
One point six billion dollars.
And then there’s the spectacle of my so-called news reporters forced to actually play by the rules in court. On TV, they make their own rules. They rage. They bully. They lie when it’s convenient. But in a courtroom they can’t get away with that crap. And you know, for all their bluster, my little celebrities, people like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, aren’t that smart in the first place. They’re good at reading from a teleprompter, they’re good at acting high and mighty. But on the stand they’d be forced to live by their wits, and that’s the kiss of death for these guys. Besides, they’re not so stupid that they don’t understand what perjury means.
Seven hundred eighty-seven million, five hundred thousand dollars.
That’s what Dominion Voting got. They took it because they had already gotten their side of the story in front of every news outlet in the nation—well, with the exception of Fox. They took it because the laws in this country concerning defamation are so bizarre that there was no open-and-shut guarantee that—in spite of all the evidence they had–they would actually win.
Seven hundred eighty-seven million, five hundred thousand dollars.
In short, they followed the lesson that my mother always taught me: A 787.5 million dollar bird in the hand is worth two 1.6 billion dollar birds in the bush.
Three things that we missed because of this last-second settlement:
Number one. The spectacle of a trial would have been so much fun. Watching all those faux reporters trying to squirm out from under their deceit and lies while under oath would have been must-see TV.
Number 2. Apparently Fox was able to avoid making a direct apology. They never actually acknowledged that they had intentionally misled their viewers. My guess is that the offer was originally more like $600 million, and for a mere extra $100 million or so, Dominion agreed not to require an explicit statement of lying by Fox.
Number 3. That creep Tucker Carlson is so full of himself that I’m certain he would have made mistakes on the stand, lying directly on his own behalf, leading to severe penalties for perjury. What a great place prison would be for him. He could interview Trump from their adjoining cells, and besides, he’d be a prison fashion icon–I’ll miss seeing him in one of those cute orange jump suits.
