[bradleybuda]

This kind of comment comes up a lot On The Internet and it tells me that the commenter has never worked at a company that has lost a massive lawsuit. As someone who has worked at one of those companies, I can tell you that losing a suit like this will absolutely lead to huge operational changes to avoid it happening again.

Whether or not those changes actually change the "character" of the company is a different question (IMHO Newsmax is morally defunct and cannot be saved) but no company anywhere would just shrug something like this off as "the cost of doing business".

[notatoad]

i think it's unclear whether newsmax is a "real" company or not. is there any indication that they're trying to make money, or are they trying to push their agenda? because they pretty clearly do have an agenda to push.

if they're a real company designed to make a profit, then sure, 1/3 of their annual revenue is plenty of incentive to make a real change, and could even be a company-ending event. If they're just a rich person's tool to influence public opinion, then whether or not $67m is a big enough number to make a dent depends on the pockets of their funders, not on the company's finances.

[bradleybuda]

It's a publicly-traded company (and was private for 16 years prior to going public) so it seems likely that actually making money is at least somewhere on their list of priorities...

[unrealhoang]

> no company anywhere would just shrug something like this off as "the cost of doing business".

Fox News did, they lost 10 times as much money and is more successful than ever BECAUSE they did it, so for them it's just "the cost of doing business" or even an "investment".

[felixgallo]

This would be true if the source of funding were the standard kind of corporate funding. But there’s reason to believe that the backing money behind this corporation does not care in the slightest and regards this sort of poultry fine as merely the cost of doing its particular business, which is also not a standard type of corporate business.

[loeg]

It's "paltry."

[litoE]

"What's $1,000? Mere chicken-feed. A poultry matter." (Groucho Marx)

[yibg]

Taken in isolation this might be true, but these types of relatively small monetary damage don't seem to provide a good deterrent in general. Newsmax (as well as fox etc) is still airing provably false or at best misleading information and classifying it as "opinion". e.g. the other country pays the tariffs.

On a more society scale, if the damage from outright lies about an election costs on the order of 67m, what's to deter any of the billionaires from funding orgs like Newsmax to help win elections by spreading lies? It's a fraction of what Musk spent for 2024.

I don't have a good answer though that doesn't also have abuse potential the other way.

[alistairSH]

Yeah, that’s fair. Settlements like this should include a complete change out of executive teams and BoD. Or something to try and fix the moral bankruptcy.