southwest air, we ruined you vacation norfolk southern, yes we r sorry about what happened with the train. and people often say the apology means nothing, we want accountability but this time is different people are furious that fox is not we believe - being compelled to apologize what would that apology on air have meant why is this one different? it would have been differen because you would ve had thi sort of grand recanting from all these fox primetim personalities, who for years have push this lie that donald trump was somehow legall illegally ejected from offic on the premise that he actuall won the 2020 election, whe they were saying in privat they knew that to be false and so, one of the things yo heard from the dominion lawyer this evening was that money is accountability money is the apology and in much the same way tha dominion had a busines interest in settling, the fox, as we ve described before, which is really a business
sydney powell, the my pillow guy mike lindell what kind of precedent doe today settlement mean for al the other once on the horizon? so, steph, the most immediate case is th smartmatic case, which there are many of the same types o false allegations that fox and its hosts about dominion they may have about smartmatic i consider it to be an entirel reasonable possibility tha they will try to settle th smartmatic case. smartmatic is also asking for much higher amount of money, i believe north of two billion almost three billion dollars you know, fox has not given up that kind of money so far. but it s i think a ver realistic thing to believe tha
of that to be in public view and on the public record first before this company settled. katie, i want to go bac that dollar amount, $787. million. for those who are saying, well that s less than half of the 1 6 they were asking for, can yo explain to our audience if the had gone to trial, if there wa a verdict, how it may have taken years and years afte appeals for dominion to get anybody, and now they re getting this cash asap yeah, you, know there has t be a gut check that always happens when you re dealin with this type of high stake litigation and i cannot begin to emphasize, when i try these types of cases, it ends up being a cost-benefi analysis i kind of joked when i was inside that courtroom, and jeremy can talk about it too the amount of billable hours that was going on in that on our, along the sheer number of lawyers that were on both side were going to be stupendous. i don t think people reall understood the amount of money that was at play here. so, assuming - that
dominion s legal team, their number one priority and only priority was making dominion whole. and we heard from one of the lawyers this evening, who said in her view, that dollar figur was fair, both to dominion employees in the company s reputation, she the summar judgment where the judge sai the jury didn t even have to make a determination about weather what fox about dominio is true, because in his words, it is was crystal clear that what fox put out there in term of false propaganda abou dominion voting systems wa false. and she also said that it wa important for dominion not t settle until this point, havin all of that discovery, all o it, the documents, the tex messages, the emails, wher tucker carlson is saying tha he thinks in private donal trump is a demonic force and a destroyer and rupert murdoch i basically saying, oh, yeah, had the power to stop fox news from spreading these lies an conspiracy theories but chos not to the lawyer said this evening that it was important for
admission of guilt by fox, there s no admission that they lied about all the stuff, it s hard to overstate just how significant this is. because there s never been a settlement this big. words are just words. they paid the price in massive dollars. i mean, according to your paper, $98 million was the projecte revenue in 2022 for dominion they just got paid out almos eight times that katie, could they have gotte this money sooner though this is what blew my min today. fox basically paid $800 millio today to avoid going on th stand. could they have agreed to this number months ago, befor rupert and others were deposed but for the damaging texts and emails were ever made public so, the short answer is yes i mean, that is what everybody has always been speculating.