Why $787,500,000 Isn’t Always Enough

If someone offered to pay me $787,500,000 for damaging my reputation, I would take it.

I still felt a twinge of frustration when Dominion Voting Systems agreed to accept $787,500,000 to settle a lawsuit in which Dominion claimed its reputation had been damaged by Fox News.

It was not unlike the twinge of frustration I felt over the financial outcome of two other recent high-profile lawsuits.

The first was the vaping manufacturer Juul agreeing to pay $462 million to settle lawsuits by several states that claimed Juul had quietly schemed to hook hundreds of thousands or millions of teenagers on nicotine, in circumvention of every public health campaign over the last 60 years.

The second was a jury ruling that popular broadcaster and podcaster Alex Jones should pay $1.4 billion to the families of school pupils killed at Sandy Hook for his repeated claims that the families were perps, not victims. In the Jones version, the families conspired with paid actors to stage all the apparent evidence and no kids really died.

Jones’s authoritative assertions led some of his listeners to harass and threaten the parents of the murdered students.

So those are the three cases, and I should confess upfront that my brain crashes at the amount of money involved in each. When a can of chick peas goes from 89 cents to $1.19, I notice and am appropriately chagrined. The numbers in these lawsuits are Monopoly money. I can’t begin to calculate how they relate to damages.

What I do know is that in each case, there’s something vaguely unsatisfactory about quantifying culpability only as a sum of money when the transgressions seem so clear and so much more troubling.

In the Dominion case, information released from the discovery process showed Fox News concluding that a significant percentage of its large viewership didn’t want to believe Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. So even though many Fox officials and hosts realized the truth — that he had — they went all-in on feeding the fantasy that there had been a widespread conspiracy to rig the vote count for Joe Biden.

Dominion came into play because Dominion supplies many of the nation’s voting machines, and therefore had to have been part of the plot.

Brief personal aside: Working in journalism for 50 years, I made a lot of mistakes. What I didn’t do was deliberately write something I knew was a lie, and when I made those mistakes, I tried to correct them. That doesn’t make me a paragon of journalist virtue. It just seems like basic obligations.

Fox News did neither. After multiple votes were recounted, numerous investigations were conducted and no evidence of even small-scale fraud was found, the election was certified. And Fox News kept pushing the idea that the election was somehow stolen, with the complicity of the company that made the voting machines.

Donald Trump and some of his allies, like former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, maintain to this day that he really won. He didn’t, but since it’s a free country, he’s free to say he did.

Fox News, on the other hand, is in a business where that should not be how it works. Like MSNBC on the other side of the spectrum, Fox often presents news in a way that reinforces the ideological leanings of its viewers. But amidst the interpretations, certain truths must be acknowledged. That did not happen here.

What did happen feels more like having a 5-year-old who insists he hates vegetables and only wants to eat candy. So you feed him Skittles at every meal and in the short term, it works. He says you’re the best parent ever.

But if you don’t eventually feed him the vegetables, even though he still says he hates them, the long-term results will not be good for anyone.

I’m guessing $787,500,000, minus lawyers’ fees, will be useful for Dominion. Fox News will shrug it off, cutting a check being less painful than making its hosts and executives explain themselves on a witness stand.

That frustration twinge comes from one line in Fox’s brief statement on the case: “This settlement reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”

Whatever else has been on display through this whole uncomfortable episode, it was not those.

The Juul settlement was frustrating for one of the same reasons. As robust as $462 million may sound, it’s pocket change compared to what tobacco companies like Altria — whose brands include Marlboro and which had a 35% stake in Juul — will make from hooking a new generation of smokers.

Vaping, which has been basically unregulated despite using nicotine as its delivery system, was first sold as an alternative to smoking tobacco. Juul pitched it as a way to wean adult smokers off cigarettes with a less lethal alternative that offered the same fix.

That would have been marginally noble if Juul marketing hadn’t so openly targeted young non-smokers, that is, a new generation of potential nicotine consumers. So what if those kids had grown up being told nicotine was bad for you? Juul made vaping look cool, with ads featuring beautiful young people and flavored offerings like mango.

It worked. A whole lot of teenagers, who aren’t always known for making the best decisions, tried vaping. And once vaping had been around long enough so we got some studies, the unsurprising data told us that teens who vaped were twice as likely to graduate to cigarettes, and the nicotine consumption rate among high school students had gone up.

In announcing the settlement agreement, Juul said it was really sorry and blamed everything on misguided previous management. Now under new management, Juul said, it wanted to help its customers quit cigarettes again.

Buy Juul and let us help you kick the addiction we helped you acquire.

The Alex Jones case is a little different. Fox News and Juul were both chasing what every business wants: money and success. Jones is after his own version of those things, too, but with the added element of vicious cruelty.

Jones’s product is conspiracy theories, an extreme extension of the notion that shadowy dark forces, mostly in government, manipulate and distort seemingly routine news events with the cynical complicity of the mainstream media.

Samples: The Bush administration was behind the September 11 terror attacks. The FBI was behind the Boston marathon bombing. The shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords was a government mind control operation.

And then, of course, Sandy Hook, where all those seemingly grieving parents were only pretending to bury their 6–year-olds.

Psychologists might be able to explain why Jones has built a modest but highly profitable audience for this sort of nonsense. I can’t.

It would be harmless enough if he were just rattling on about alien invaders or microchips in your fillings. But when he brands the parents of murdered children as lying villains, so aggressively that listeners send some of those parents death threats, it’s a reminder of how cruel our species can become when it abandons all regard for others.

Jones has to know how his words resonate with his followers. Does he not care? Does he relish it?

And does he believe what he’s saying? Does he think that the fact a gullible audience enables him to monetize his fairy tales accomplishes the only mission that matters and renders any consequences irrelevant?

Since the awards verdict, Jones has reportedly been trying to make as much of his money as possible inaccessible the families who won the damages suit. He presumably sees this as another victory.

But in the end, he can’t escape the one verdict his own words deliver daily: He’s a bully who lives an ugly life.