Today's settlement of $787,500,000
represents vindication and accountability.
Lies have consequences.
The truth does not know red or blue.
>> You just heard from the lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems
in its lawsuit against Fox News Corp.
And the update to this story is that on the first day the trial was supposed
to hear opening or oral arguments, the two parties decided to settle for
a whopping $787 point million dollars.
Now, Dominion Voting Systems was suing Fox News over its claims
that Fox had defamed the company and spread lies about the 2020 election.
They were seeking 1.6 billion, but
clearly they are happy with this settlement of $787.5 million.
Now, that is eight times more than what Dominion Voting Systems is
currently worth.
So this is obviously a big deal for Dominion, financially speaking.
And when you consider its ties to private equity,
I'm sure there was a little bit of pressure to take the settlement as well
without having to go through an entire trial.
Now, we have a statement from Fox.
And while it would have been nice to see Fox outright admit to lying to its
audience, it would have been nice to see an apology from Fox News for
lying to its audience.
We didn't quite get that from their statement.
The story is still developing, so there might be some more details and
facts coming out in coming days about this settlement.
But this is what we know so far.
I'm gonna get to the Fox News statement in just a moment.
But Cenk, what are your thoughts?
>> So this is kind of a big deal, and I'm gonna give you context for
it that's super important.
First, fun note.
But Lauren, what was that line?
The truth isn't red or blue.
I'm sure he thought that he was nailing it with that line, but
it didn't make any sense, okay?
>> It was deep, Cenk.
>> Yeah, super deep.
All right, anyways, now, look, guys, most cases are settled.
And I don't know why the media never tells you this, but
the size of the settlement is what matters, okay?
And I don't mean it like, Fox News has to pay a lot of money,
I mean as to who's right and who's wrong.
So the amount that Dominion sued for
was extreme and absurd, okay?
Now, their case is excellent, that's why they sued for so much.
And so their case is not absurd at all, but they asked for
16 times what they're worth in a lot.
Well, you have to understand why that makes no sense,
cuz you have to have damages, and you have to be able to win damages.
So let's say your company is worth $10 million, and you sue for $100 million.
Well, how could you have $100 million in damages?
Your company's only worth 10 million.
I guess the maximum damages would be 10 million, right?
But they're suing for way beyond, way beyond.
So there's no way that Fox can settle.
That's an absurd amount, right?
And they settled, holy cow.
They settled for not a little bit, for $787,000,000.
That's unprecedented.
So look, companies settle all the time to make lawsuits go away.
Tiny little amounts means they didn't do it, okay?
Giant amounts like this that are unprecedented in size compared to
the company that's doing the suing, that means they definitely did it.
And we all know, cuz we saw it on air, we see their behind the scenes text saying,
we know we're lying.
That's the actual malice standard, which is near impossible to prove, but
in this case, was a slam dunk.
And most important, for the MAGA guys out there still holding on to 2,000 or
8,000 mules or whatever you guys are dreaming about,
Fox News could have avoided $787,000,000 of settlement.
All they had to do was show any evidence at all that the election was stolen,
cuz truth is a defense to defamation.
They win automatically.
But they had no evidence, zero.
It cost them nearly $800 million because they didn't have a shred of evidence,
because there is no evidence that the election was stolen.
>> And remember what drove Fox to engage in these lies based on the internal
discussions that we are now privy to, thanks to the discovery process.
And thanks to these messages being shared with the press,
is that the hosts and the management over at Fox News were concerned
about their stock value plummeting.
If they reported the truth about the 2020 election,
if they countered the big election lies coming from the Trump camp.
And in the end, the lies ended up hurting them financially anyway.
So if you're worried about the audience backlash by just simply doing
your job accurately and telling the truth, get you a new audience.
Build a new audience.
But that's not what they were willing to do, because at the end of the day,
what their number one concern was were the shareholders.
>> Yeah, of course.
And guys, look, it's a business.
And so Fox News doesn't give a damn about news.
In a sense, the news is the McGuffin for your film fans out there.
It's the thing that moves the plot along, but
isn't what the movie is actually about.
>> You fancy.
>> Please, I'm here all week.
All right, [LAUGH] so what Fox is doing is they set up a media
empire to give an audience that exists in America what they want.
You want a nice bag?
Gucci's gonna sell you a nice bag, right?
You want a nice watch?
Rolex is gonna sell you a nice watch.
You want lies telling you that the right wing's right about everything?
Fox News built that for you, and people love it.
>> You heard it here first, okay?
Fox News, the Rolex of news companies.
>> No- >> I know, joking around with you.
>> But to be fair to them, they're a very profitable, smart,
strategic business that says the news is covered like Gucci is a cover story.
What is Gucci?
Gucci doesn't mean anything, right?
It's just a brand.
So they built a brand around what do the right wingers want to hear?
By the way, there's a lot of people on the left now building tiny little brands
online of, what does my audience want to hear?
I'll just give it to them.
Who cares what's true or not true?
The right wing has industrialized that almost every one of their shows does.
That's why there's a profit motive to it.
So they're not gonna tell you the truth.
You have to build a company based on truth to get truth, and
you have to deliver to an audience that actually wants the truth.
That's what we try to do here.
And it is a bold attempt in news cuz there aren't a lot of us out here.
>> Yeah, but at the same time, listen, there are limitations to
the First Amendment, limitations to freedom of the press.
You are not allowed to defame people.
You're not allowed to smear people.
And in this case, the evidence was strong.
It was not difficult to prove actual malice in regard to the defamation claims.
And so Fox News knew that it was backed into a corner.
And either they could settle for the amount they settled for or go through with
this trial where it's likely Fox would have been found guilty anyway.
And on top of that, we would have had to or not had to.
I would have loved to hear testimony from people like Rupert Murdoch,
from Tucker Carlson, but I'm sure they are elated over the fact that they
no longer have to testify in trial over this defamation suit.
I got more details.
I'll go to you in a second, Cenk.
So Cenk mentioned how profitable Fox is.
They've agreed to this $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.
Just how profitable is Fox?
Is this a drop in the bucket, or is it a significant chunk of their cash on hand?
Well, according to The New York Times, a recent corporate filing showed that
the Fox Corporation had about 4.1 billion of cash and
cash equivalents on hand at the end of last year.
So it is a significant portion of the cash on hand that Fox News has.
This isn't just a drop in the bucket, so I wanna be fair in that regard.
Also, here's the statement from Fox.
There isn't an apology here.
There is legalese, admitting guilt, essentially,
when it comes to the defamation claims.
But see if you could figure out where it is.
They say, quote, we are pleased to have reached a settlement of our dispute with
Dominion Voting Systems.
We acknowledge the court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.
That's it. That's as far as they go to admitting that
they lied.
This settlement reflects Fox's continued commitment to the highest
journalistic standard.
We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with
Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial,
allows the country to move forward from these issues.
I should also note that while they have agreed to settle the Dominion lawsuit,
they have another lawsuit coming up, another defamation lawsuit,
this time by Smartmatic.
Which is another company with voting systems and
stuff like that, that is claiming that Fox News lied about.
>> Yeah, so look, the number is a giant number, and
it is a big chunk of the 4.1 billion they have in cash at the same time.
They can afford it.
Apparently what they cannot afford, and so
this is the very literal calculation that Fox made as a company.
So the damages they would have had to pay at the end of the trial probably were much
lower, not because they were correct.
They would have lost the case, almost certainly.
And obviously the settlement, especially with the giant number, indicates that.
But the amount they would have lost probably would have been a lot less,
because it would have been hard to prove that level of damages for Dominion, okay?
But you take that number and the probability of that number, and
then you add PR damage to it, and apparently Fox thought that those
two numbers were larger than $787,000,000.
That means they thought if we do this six week trial,
because we think the damages would have been most around $100 million,
if they went all the way to the end of the trial.
That means they thought the PR damage was gonna be worth over $700 million,
because Murdoch himself, and Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity,
and all those guys would have to take the stand.
And go, yeah, I think our audience is a bunch of dupes, idiots,
morons that we take advantage by stuffing their faces full of lies.
So our texts show you clearly, we hate Trump.
We don't believe in Trump.
We don't believe in anything we're saying on air.
We didn't think the election was stolen.
We thought that was insane, nuts.
These are their literal words, right?
But we just didn't wanna deal with our audience cuz they're nuts,
they're totally nuts.
And our product isn't news.
Our product is making right wing placating them, placating them, placating them and
telling them exactly what they want to hear.
So that could have ended them.
So I think that at the end of the day, they probably made a smart business
decision, but they probably should have made this a lot earlier.
They really screwed up by extending it this much till we found out what they
actually think internally.
Now, having said all that, [LAUGH] the audience isn't gonna care at all.
They're barely gonna see this.
They're gonna think it's a BS injustice.
The right wing audience, they're not gonna think Fox News lied to us.
They're not gonna think the election wasn't stolen.
But I will say this, for the rest of the news, come on, guys.
Stop calling Fox News a news organization or journalist.
And I know you have some friends who work there, like my God,
I knew Bret Baier from an earlier job.
I worked with McCullum in Cincinnati when we were both coming up as local anchors.
Nobody cares.
They do propaganda.
They just admitted they lie for a goddamn living.
So no other journalist should ever take them seriously as a news organization.
>> To be fair, I mean, based on what I saw from CNN, and
Alisyn Camerota used to work at Fox.
She did not hold back at all.
And she was actually not happy that Dominion agreed to the settlement.
She felt that it would have been far better for
Fox to have to stand trial on this.
>> That's right. >> And I tend to agree with her on that.
I would have liked to hear the testimony of the various players.
That would have been ideal.
Of course, I would much rather have the truth.
What do I care that Dominion got paid, right?
So we all wanted the trial.
It is what it is.
That's why they settled, because this trial was gonna be so damaging.
And Ana's right, Jake Tapper halfway laughed out loud, as I did,
when he read journalistic standards on CNN.
So the reaction so far has been pretty good.
I'm worried, though, that as people think about their next move on cable news,
that it's gonna soften.
And by the way, it still happens to this day.
I mean, the White House press room, a Democratic spokesperson
is letting Fox News ask a question every single day.
We now at Young Turks now has a White House correspondent, in three months,
we've gotten to ask one question.
But meanwhile, hey, the liars at Fox News the liars at Fox News, but
they don't say the liars.
Fox News reporter, ask your legitimate question.
They should get their ass thrown out of there.
They're not a legitimate news organization.