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Is there an investor out there with shares in the Fox Corporation—the publicly traded holding company that owns Fox News and is headed by Rupert Murdoch—who might want to sue (kiện) the company for losing $787.5 million of the shareholders’ money in its agreement with Dominion Voting Systems? An agreement that it entered into for fear that further exposure of its deliberate falsehoods (cố tình lừa gạt) would damage the company and its value even more than the pretrial disclosures (vạch trần, phơi bày) already had? A forfeiture (tước, mất) of the shareholders’ money prompted in part by CEO Rupert Murdoch’s fear that his having to appear in public, on the stand, under oath, testifying that he knew the claims of Dominion chicanery and Trump’s victory were completely false and yet let them go out over the air might make him the subject of ridicule (lố bịch) and contempt (khinh thị)? And would surely make him look less the master of the universe that he wishes to be seen as? Was that the proximate cause of Fox reducing its assets by nearly a billion dollars? Was preserving Murdoch’s ego really worth that big a hit to Fox investors?

Or was it the fear that Fox News’s falsehoods were so egregious and harmful that a trial would result in the jury upholding Dominion’s claim for $1.6 billion, or perhaps, given the magnitude (tầm cỡ) of Fox’s falsehoods, even more in punitive (nhằm trừng phạt/trừng trị) damages?

Such a suit could contend that by deliberately choosing to disregard the truth so egregiously, Fox had made itself vulnerable to lawsuits that would reduce the value of the shareholder’s investment, and had in fact reduced it by nearly $800 million. And that telling lies so big and corrosive that it seemed that Fox had made a careful study of the career of Joseph Goebbels was a virtual invitation for some aggrieved party to take it into court.

Fox could, of course, counter that it was only by indulging in its post-election lies that it could maintain its audience and, thus, its share value—that simple fiduciary responsibility required it to bathe its viewers in preposterous fabrications. (In fact, Tucker Carlson emailed as much, as the pretrial disclosures revealed.) That the network’s assessment (đánh giá) of its audience (độc giả) was that Jack Nicholson line in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth!” And that therefore, it was obligated to cocoon (tổ kén) its viewers in a net of lies.