The Runback: Telling the Truth Is Both Easy and Free
Fox News and Mike Lindell both have to pay up. The sums are vastly different, but the fact that they could have saved a lot of money by telling the truth is exactly the same.
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The Monday Thought
Fox News reached a last-second settlement with Dominion Voting Systems on Tuesday as the case raced toward opening statements, paying more than $787 million to end a colossal two-year legal battle that publicly shredded the right-wing network’s credibility.
Fox News’ $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is the largest publicly known defamation settlement in US history involving a media company.
Fox was smart to settle the case, mainly because they knew they couldn’t win the court case. And while there are questions about how much Fox will end up actually paying, what we do know is that it’s a helluva lot of money. Dominion, after all, has roughly $20 million in revenue a year. This settlement multiplied that by almost forty times.
It was a lot of money that need not have been spent.
Mike Lindell didn’t blink. And yet, he will also pay:
An arbitration panel has ordered MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell to pay $5 million to a software engineer for breach of contract in a dispute over data that Lindell claims proves that China interfered in the U.S. 2020 elections and tipped the outcome to Joe Biden.
But Lindell told The Associated Press on Thursday that he has no intention of paying and that he expects the dispute to land in court.
Lindell, a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the 2020 presidential election, launched his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge,” as part of the “Cyber Symposium” he staged in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in August 2021, to further his theories. Lindell offered through one of his companies a $5 million reward for anyone who could prove that “packet captures” and other data he released there were not valid data “from the November 2020 election.”
Robert Zeidman entered the challenge with a 15-page report that concluded the data from Lindell did not “contain packet data of any kind and do not contain any information related to the November 2020 election.” A panel of contest judges that included a Lindell attorney declined to declare Zeidman a winner. So Zeidman filed for arbitration under the contest rules.
After conducting an evidentiary hearing in Minneapolis in January, the three arbitrators on Wednesday ordered Lindell to pay Zeidman $5 million.
“He proved the data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data,” the arbitrators wrote. “Failure to pay Mr. Zeidman the $5 million prize was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”
Lindell dared somebody to prove his claims about a stolen election wrong and receive $5 million for the privilege, then reneged on that claim when it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was making it up as he went along.
It was a lot of money that need not have been spent.
In both instances, people are paying out a sum of money because they continued to peddle a web of conspiracies and lies around an election they maintain to this day is stolen despite literally no evidence suggesting that it was. All they had to do was tell the truth. All they had to do, in Fox’s case, was make sure that their on-air talent and employees told the truth; a truth, which the Fox employees and Fox management knew was the actual legitimate truth.
But instead, Fox allowed their employees to lie to the people and lie to their audience. They decided it was more practical to tell the audience what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear. And they have paid a steep financial penalty to do so. And may do so again.
Lindell, on the other hand, may not actually be aware that the election was stolen. The man seems like so much of an idiot that for him the Costanza Defense might be real.
Ultimately, Lindell owing somebody $5 million may be the least of his worries seeing as a $1.3 billion dollar suit against him from Dominion is still pending.
All they had to do was tell the truth. All they had to do was be honest with the public and with themselves. And instead, they chose to lie and broadcast fanciful and farcical claims about stolen elections. They have paid dearly for their stubbornness and stupidity. The question remains; will it happen again next year and how much worse will things get in the days after the 2024 Election?