It’s more important than ever to have realistic expectations about these things
Even as so many others have spent so many months endlessly hyping the Fox News v. Dominion case as if it were a magic wand that was going to cause Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdoch to fall through an instant trap door and cause Fox to disappear from everyone’s television dials the next day, I haven’t written a ton about it. That’s because I always expected that, one way or another, it would merely be an incremental blow to Fox News that would end up requiring additional blows in order to have any chance of finishing Fox off.
I had no specific predictions to make about whether it would be settled or go to trial. But the outcome we ended up seeing yesterday was along the lines of what I was expecting all along. Dominion was originally seeking $1.6 billion and ended up getting $0.8 billion. There was never any guarantee that Carlson and Hannity would be ordered to give tearful on-air apologies even if Dominion did win at trial, so that wasn’t an outcome to hang your hat on. For all Dominion knew, it could have gone ahead with the trial and “won” a far smaller amount of money and a far more subtle confession than the one it got.
What matters is that – as I wrote about last night – this has now put some serious new things in motion. Fox News shareholders are now reportedly preparing to bring their own civil suit against the Fox News board of directors and executives. And why wouldn’t they? The people in charge at Fox News acted in bad faith in a way that cost their shareholders the better part of a billion dollars in value. Of course this is also just a civil case, meaning it’s a dispute over money between two parties, meaning you can’t count on it to magically cause Fox News to fall through a trap door either.
But the point is that it’s now open season on Fox News and Rupert Murdoch in a business and financial sense, in the same way that it’s now open season on Donald Trump in a criminal law sense. Can Fox write a check for $0.8 billion without having to go bankrupt? Yes. Will Fox now be a smaller and weaker company as a result of having to write that check? Yes. Can Fox write another one of those checks to Smartmatic, without getting into serious financial trouble? We’ll see. But Fox just gave away 20% of its cash position, totaling 5% of its overall market cap. In terms of the incremental steps that these kinds of things always play out in, that’s a lot. It just doesn’t sound like a lot if you were led to believe that this civil case was somehow going to involve magic wands or trap doors.
This is why I devote so much time to trying to shoot down the magic wand ideas that tend to dominate political discussion on social media. There has been this pervasive belief for the past year that this Dominion trial would somehow magically make Fox News instantly disappear from your televisions, when nothing ever works that simplistically.
There are still clueless social media posts going viral right now, insisting that if this had gone to trial, it could have resulted in Fox News’ broadcast license being revoked. But that’s not even a thing. Cable news networks don’t have “broadcast licenses.” There are also numerous social media posts going viral right now about how we need to “bring back the Fairness Doctrine” so Fox News will go away. But the Fairness Doctrine only ever applied to things that were broadcast on public frequencies, and never would have had any impact on a cable news channel like Fox News.
Yet these simplistic magic wand ideas, that don’t even factually apply to the situation at hand, and wouldn’t have a magically all-powerful impact even if they did apply to the situation, continue to dominate the online discussion. It’s this tendency toward magic wand ideas that misled so many people into believing that a mere civil suit between private parties was going to cause Fox News to instantly disappear from your uncle’s TV channel listing. And it’s a tendency that’s going to continue to mislead a lot of people going forward.
Take, for instance, the next big event on the calendar. If Donald Trump’s motions to try to delay it keep getting denied like they have been, then a week from now, a trial will take place between Trump and his accuser E. Jean Carroll. This is a big deal. It’s a very big deal. But it’s also a civil trial, not a criminal trial. There are no criminal charges pending in this case. If Carroll wins at trial, Trump doesn’t go to prison. If Carroll wins, she just gets Trump’s money, or his DNA, or whatever the judge and jury decide is the appropriate civil remedy.
The good news is that Carroll is not going to settle for mere money. She wants his DNA, which could potentially be used to prove him guilty of rape. Which would be a very big deal, for a lot of important reasons. But even with New York law having changed to extend the statute of limitations for rape, it appears that Trump is well past the window where he could be criminally charged for this alleged rape, which dates back to 1995.
So even if Carroll wins at trial this month and gets everything she’s seeking and more, this civil trial will not put Trump in prison. We have to wait for his criminal trials for that, which will happen in Manhattan, Georgia, and the DOJ’s jurisdiction. If Trump loses in any of those criminal trials, he will be hauled off to prison. There is every reason to expect those criminal trials will safely happen before the election, but they’re still down the road.
Speaking of magic wands, it’s equally important to keep in mind that Trump doesn’t have one either. At this point he and his attorneys keep trying new filings every few days to try to delay the start of the E. Jean Carroll trial, but the judge keeps rejecting it out of hand. Each of these recent filings has delayed the trial by zero days. There’s still theoretically a chance that some last minute filing will convince the judge to delay the trial. But so far, Trump’s recent numerous filings have gotten him literally nowhere.
It’s a good reminder that when we do get to Donald Trump’s criminal trials, he won’t be able to just endlessly delay them until after the election. He can keep making as many nuisance filings as he wants, but as we’re now seeing the Carroll case, at some point the judge has simply had enough and has decided that the trial is going to start when it’s supposed to.
There are very, very few things in the political sphere (or the criminal justice sphere) that can unilaterally cause overnight change across the board. A presidential election can do that, such as the one that removed Donald Trump from the presidency and reduced him to just a guy yelling nonsense on the internet. A criminal trial against a politician can do that, because a guilty verdict puts them in prison. But we know how rare these kinds of things are, and how long it tends to take to build up to them.
Almost everything else that happens, or that’s even within the realm of things that are possible, ends up merely having an incremental impact. Some of those increments are a lot bigger than others. And those increments do add up. The reason Trump lost the 2020 election, and was booted from office as if a magic wand had been waved, was because so many of you spent all that time using your voices and your activism work to chip away at him so that he would lose that election.
When it comes to Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, we just watched them suffer the impact of a major, but still incremental, blow yesterday. We’re also watching the origins of additional major blows emerging against Murdoch and Fox News. This is how evil empires fall. You chip away and chip away and chip away until there’s not enough left of it to stand on its own. A tree doesn’t fall in the forest because of one gust of wind. It falls because it had been becoming weaker for so long, a gust of wind was able to finish it off.
So more than ever, let’s all – me, you, everyone – try to keep ourselves focused on realistic expectations. Let’s try to stick to how things really work, how they don’t work, and what kinds of outcomes are even possible for the things that are playing out in front of us. Neither side ever has a magic wand. Nothing is ever as simplistic as what’s being claimed in any viral tweet. Every action comes with a reaction. Nearly every step, forward or backward, is incremental. The battle is won by the side that manages to land most of those incremental wins. And we can all make an incremental difference in these outcomes, just by continuing to put in the work to try to fight and win political battles on an every day basis. If we’re all going to pay this much attention to politics, then trying to fight and win political battles and make a real difference is what we’re all here for. So let’s make it a good one.
