Cost Of Doing Business Soars At Fox

Cost Of Doing Business Soars At Fox

– By Ed Kociela –

The cost of doing business at Fox News just went exponentially higher.

The network announced that it has settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which it had falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election in favor of President Joe Biden. The settlement cost the network $787.5 million.

Now, even though I am sure that the tab will not all come out of the Fox coffers – big operations like that usually have insurance against such claims, and a portion of lawsuit payouts is a legal tax write-off – it is still going cost the network more than $500 million.

Even if you have Rupert Murdoch’s money, that is a lot of dinero.

Add to it the hefty salaries Fox dishes to freakish right-wing mouthpieces like Laura Ingraham ($15 million), Sean Hannity ($40 million for his on-air prattle and podcast), and the puckish Tucker Carlson (who was the highest-paid TV presenter in the world pegging $41 million for his daily screed until he and the network parted company on Monday) and the pennies stack up rather quickly. It is not known if Carlson was let go as a result of the settlement if he quit, or what the circumstances of his departure centered upon, but he loomed large in the ultra-conservative babble spouted by the Fox talking heads and a primary spinner of outlandish right-wing ideology.

Whatever the case, it is not over for the network either as a similar defamation lawsuit filed by Smartmatic against Fox awaits in the on-deck circle and could double the network’s losses.

The rules are simple. To win a defamation suit the injured party must prove that the defendant made a false statement purporting to be fact; published or communicated that statement to a third person; that there be fault amounting to at least negligence; and that the statement caused some harm to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of that statement.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

And, yep.

This settlement, however, will not interfere with the modus operandi of the network, which has a history of misleading the public and that in another lawsuit persuasively argued in court that “no reasonable viewer takes Tucker Carlson seriously,” something we have argued here for years, by the way.

No, Fox will continue to be delusional in its broadcasts, it will continue to underscore the comments of a former carpenter, a shrew, and whoever fills Carlson’s wingtips.

These meat puppets got a taste for money and how to generate more, which means give people what they want, not what they need, which in the instance of Fox means stack the deck with lies and toss truth out the window.

Bill O’Reilly, once the most shining star at Fox before crashing among sex scandals, revealed just how important that is to the far right crowd by stating recently that after mentioning on his website that there was no evidence of vote rigging he lost 1,000 subscriptions.

“This is what happens when money becomes more important than honest information,” he wrote. “And millions of Trump voters, to this day, want to believe the 2020 election was rigged.”

In this age when anybody with a couple hundred dollars can set up their own website and become a “news aggregator” that also punches in a fair dose of conspiracy theories and outright lies, that audience has little difficulty dialing in sites friendly to their particular point of view no matter how unfounded they may be.

That’s why you can look to Fox to hold the line on misinformation. There is more money in lies and the sensational than in reality. Fact does not turn as much money as fantasy when it comes to viewership, plain and simple.

What this also means is that in the realm of broadcast media, the networks are tripping over the line into a gray area. We all knew before this settlement where Fox stood as well as MSNBC, which is the defiant anti-Fox. And, we are watching CNN, which is taking on a whole new posture that is mostly cosmetic – at least or now – with reporters and anchors doing stand-up in front of video boards that are intended to broaden the story or at least punctuate it. So far, quite honestly, it looks like the old Batman TV series on steroids leaving me totally unimpressed. But, the jury is still out on that one.

What the Fox settlement should do is serve as a reminder that the media is charged with the most precious job of protecting you and me. It is supposed to be the watchdog, the guardian of our liberties and tax dollars, not some propaganda machine pimping for whoever dangles the most money, power, or influence.

It all comes down to a matter of trust, but who should we trust when we have three very divergent types of reporting?

Naturally we are all narcissistic enough to believe we have the inside track on truth, so we tend to follow what coincides with our beliefs and reject that which we does not as a matter of course and pride. Surely, we cannot be wrong. Surely we know better than Carlson, Blitzer, and Maddow, right? So we follow those who suit our fancy because to do otherwise would be to admit we are wrong. And, as the stalwarts start turning against our populist views then we simply find another to replace them and elevate the new talking muppet to Godlike status.

This settlement and the one that will follow – Fox will not go to court for the Smartmatic lawsuit and risk an even higher court judgment – are meaningless other than underscoring the fact that the rich can do whatever they wish and the poor can go pound sand.

Honesty, integrity, and ethics all fly out the window at this point.

Don’t believe me?

Go ask a Fox fan and I would bet big money that the response you get is: “They are just trying to silence Fox from telling the truth. It is the liberals, government, and mainstream media trying to censor them.”

The thing is that truth almost always has a way of coming to the forefront, no matter how outrageous the lies, no matter how egregious the omissions, no matter how many hounds bark against it.

We saw it with Dominion Voting Systems and should see it with Smartmatic.

And Fox?

Well, it will continue to settle these cases with its deep pockets because the payment for its lies is just a cost of doing business.

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