Fox News faces another potential lawsuit after settling with Dominion for $787 million
The Yahoo Finance Live team discusses the possible fallout from Fox News' settlement with Dominion.
Video Transcript
- Fox News parent company Fox Corporation ending the day down about 0.5% after the news organization settled its legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems for a whopping $787 million. Fox has over $4 billion in cash according to the latest release, but the media company not out of the woods yet. Another voting technology company-- that's Smartmatic-- is suing Fox for defamation for $2.7 billion in damages.
- Yeah, certainly a historic settlement here when we're talking about Dominion. Now all eyes on what exactly this next suit is going to look like when we take a look at Smartmatic. Now, they released a statement following this settlement with Dominion. Smartmatic said that they were going to, quote, "expose the rest of Fox's misconduct." And then, of course, Dave, as I know you were following Fox, the shareholders are demanding some of the records here from the company here in terms of the directors and executives, whether or not they properly oversaw the coverage of Fox News. Because then, of course, that begs the question of whether or not we could see potentially shareholder lawsuits down the line.
- Yeah, Reuters reported that. And that leads you to believe there will be shareholder lawsuits at some point. We know, based on some of the emails and some of the testimony, that they're-- not in the testimony because we had day one-- that there was some overseeing-- there was some knowledge all the way up. Perhaps some heads roll. Brian Stelter, the media reporter, joined us yesterday from "Vanity Fair," suggesting that perhaps the leadership at Fox News could be in trouble.
But isn't it interesting, just on the surface, Seana? $787 million-- that is historic in terms of defamation, and the stock drops 0.5%. It tells you that is nothing.
- Nothing. And that was actually a little bit--
- Just shake it off.
- Yeah, which caught me off guard a little bit. I thought that it was going to be a much bigger impact to Fox when you take into account the size of this settlement, what that means here for earnings down the line, what it means for a profit, potentially, here at Fox, at least for the coming quarters.
- Yeah. And if you expand on that, perhaps they settle for $1 billion. Maybe the stock only drops a point. But the suggestion is maybe that Smartmatic case isn't until 2025, at least according to some Fox officials.
