Angelo Carusone explains Fox News’ rush to settle the Dominion lawsuit on Democracy Now
Angelo Carusone: “So for them it was worth paying it just to get it over with so that they could focus on these contract renewals”
Published
Citation From the April 20, 2023, edition of Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN (HOST): Angelo, The Lever is reporting that Fox's massive settlement with Dominion Voting Systems could also mean a tax break as large as $213 million for Fox, almost a third of what they're paying out.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): I know what a world. I think the thing to me -- and that's partly why I said earlier -- that's not to dismiss the significance of this. This is a really big settlement. But one of the things that Fox did pretty promptly to make sure that everybody knew it was going to be OK for them, specifically their investors and their shareholders and the markets, is to get two pieces of information out there. One is, don't worry, we're going to be able to deduct, you know, 200 plus million dollars of this from our taxes and that will help us. And the other thing they pointed out was that we're actually in the middle of contract renegotiations and we're trying to get all the -- everybody that has cable in this country to pay us a dollar more, which means that in one year alone, Fox News will make about 980 million more dollars in profit if they're successful, and they're supposed to be renegotiating the very same time that the trial was happening.
So for them it was worth paying it just to get it over with so that they could focus on these contract renewals because, honestly, the contract renewals are worth more to them in profit than than you know this particularly significant settlement.
So they made, Fox make sure everybody knew that yesterday so that the markets could be reassured that, that they're going to be just fine.