Well, it's official. The Dominion lawsuit against Fox News for defamation is over. and boy oh boy, the settlement is going to hit the Fox News News Corp numbers pretty hard. It's a big big number and I'm going to show you the actual earnings for New Score All their businesses combined and let's just say this is going to take a bite out of the earnings.

Okay, Dominion and Fox agreed to a 787.5 million dollar settlement. That's almost. Actually, that's just slightly over three quarters of one billion dollars. And what's important here is actually looking at the financial.

Now looking at the financials is useful. But First, you have to differentiate a lot of the different companies that Rupert Murdoch owns or has a voting or substantial controlling and voting rights. And for example, there's the Dow Jones company which owns companies like the Wall Street Journal Baron's Market Watch Financial News private Equity News and formally published the Dow Jones Industrial Average not to be confused with the Dow Chemicals Company. Okay, there's that company which is owned by News Corp News Corp is owned in part by Rupert Murdoch And Trades under Tickler or ticker symbol Nwsa and NWS Okay, that's News Corp.

Then you've got separately the Fox Corporation which trades under ticker Fox One's about a seven billion dollar company is about a 17 billion dollar company. This right here is about the 17 billion dollar company. The Fox Corporation These are the financials of the company that lost or should I say settled the lawsuit right here. You could see that.

The net income before taxes, right here. Net income before taxes Because presumably this lawsuit settlement will be a tax write-off It's about 437 million dollars for the three months ended December 31st. That means this settlement, which is about four percent of the company's net worth, works out to a slap of about six months or half of a year where Fox Corporation will basically be broadcasting as a non-profit Now they've done this before see the last three months of 2021. They actually lost money as well.

And that's because they had a pretty large 211 million dollar other write down over here, which is where we expect this: 7 187 million dollars stand up. Now the good news is this company. This Fox Corporation does seem to have the cash available to just write a check for it given they've got about four billion dollars in free cash not considering long-term borrowings and about 2.5 billion dollars in bills. which leaves them enough to go ahead and pay off this uh, lawsuit settlement.

Now do keep in mind as we go through these documents, we're going to go over to the cash flow statement for the company and they do have a negative free cash flow. So it does mean that shareholders might have to start helping prop up Foxcorp and So eventually they'll be paying for this lawsuit in a lower earnings and potential future borrowings. but at least for roughly around six months. Fox Corporation will be broadcasting as a non-profit and if they borrow this 787 million dollars at say, six percent interest and it takes some a year to pay all of this off and they pay a year of Interest, they're paying roughly 47 million dollars on the total.

That works out to about 129.4 thousand dollars per day of Interest just to pay this settlement off. So what happened here to give you kind of a quick and straight scoop as to what broke down? Well, the simple fact of this is Fox News promoted something that they doubted or knew was false and it had to do with election fraud claims. In fact, this lawsuit may not have even gotten anywhere had Fox News actually bluntly believed in the election fraud claims. But the problem is if you know something is wrong and then you air it defamation and that's tough to defend, especially when it damages another company.

Dominion Voting machines were definitely damaged or so it appears through the reputation that was essentially slandered throughout the two years following the election cycle. Now Dominion is cheering suggesting that Fox News is finally admitted to lying about Dominion Now there are still people out there who believe that there was election fraud and I imagine that in every single election there's some degree of election fraud. But the reality was there were plenty of Insider quotes from hosts at Fox News that made this a really difficult case for Fox to defend on top of that, which will go through some of those quotes in just a moment, a special master was appointed to this case to potentially evaluate if Fox News was trying to criminally obstruct the an investigation into what was actually happening via these lawsuit allegations. That's really bad because it kind of suggests that things could have gotten a whole lot worse, not just for Fox but also for Republicans because consider what would have happened if Sean Hannity Laura Ingram Tucker Carlson and everybody at Fox ended up being publicly put on a witness stand during this trial.

This would have been the biggest trial of media history to some degree. I would have loved to see it and would have loved to cover it and now it's all buried in the coffers of a settlement. But folks even Tucker Carlson questioned what were called quote the outlandish voter fraud claims. At one point Tucker Carlson went on to suggest that he couldn't wait to be done or close to ignoring Trump Take a look at this quote here as reported by Wapum The Washington Post Carlson said internally, we are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights I truly can't wait I hate him passionately and then of Trump's four years in office quote, we're all preparing we've got or pretending we've got a lot to show for it because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to digest.

But come on, there really isn't an upside to Trump That was a Tucker Carlson quote in January of 2021 and there were plenty of others such as individuals inside. Fox realizing that Their audience was demanding coverage of voter fraud and so Fox was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Fox is looking going Okay, some of these claims are crazy, but the more we talk about voter fraud, the more views we get. and Newsmax is taking all the views because they're going super hard on voter fraud.

so they're getting a lot of conservative views and Fox News is losing views. There were talks inside Fox by host that you know what the right thing to do is stop talking about voter fraud. Let Newsmax win in the short term, but in the long term Fox would come out ahead. and because of all of this internal dialogue that was revealed through the Dominion lawsuit, unfortunately for Fox Dominion got a pretty good case to show.

Hey, Fox y'all really screwed us here and ultimately Fox decided to saddle now. The judge in this case made it very clear that they believe there is Crystal Clear evidence that there is or was no voter fraud in this case and that there is no fraud that could potentially be alleged that occurred by Dominion voting systems. That was a bad setup for Fox It's potentially a very good setup though for free speech because on one hand it shows that look, you're totally allowed to freak speedly if speak freely and say whatever you want on the internet, as long as it's clear it's your opinion. But if you know something is untrue and then you say something as if it's fact to the contrary, Point you're going to get in trouble and the First Amendment isn't going to protect you about that.

So this, actually, in my opinion, doubles down and affirms how great the First Amendment is. You have the right to whatever opinion you want, as long as you make it clear that it's your opinion. But if you suggest that something is fact or air claims that you believe are false, then you're perpetuating lies and that gets punished in America. Now, of course, in a settlement, usually the sides don't admit guilt although they could, and in this case Dominion is of course cheering that Fox admitted they lie.

Either way, the big convincing fact here for Fox is probably now that they don't have to have a six-month media spectacle of a pub public trial. maybe less maybe a couple months of a public trial and all of their hosts revealing how they thought the election fraud claims were actually BS, but they chose to air them anyway. That would have been a big issue for Fox News and it could have tanked their credibility. Now this will be a headline today and tomorrow, maybe for the next day, but then people forget about it.

but the game isn't over yet. See, Smartmatic has another lawsuit worth potentially up to two and a half billion dollars. But then again, remember, anybody could sue for any amount and that could be yet another lawsuit that Fox News has to deal with so far. The big takeaway from this though is Fox News is going to be working as a charity for the next 15 to 18 months and if their revenues decline anymore, it could take him even longer to recover the money.

Of course, if their views recover and incomes move up and we don't end up going into a recession, maybe they could pay off these dance within the next year and you know what. Move on, learn a lesson. Hope it never happens again Though again, we'll see what happens with Smartmatic. But in the meantime I Think this is a perfect time to remind you to get life insurance.

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