Then, on Tuesday afternoon, a settlement. Fox News would pay Dominion $787,500,000, more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. But Fox News did avoid paying the most costly possible punishment: admitting to its viewers that it had spoon-fed them what they wanted to hear, rather than the truth.
Which isn’t to say that a $787-million-plus fine is small potatoes. It is a staggering sum, one that is hard to conceptualize in the abstract. The human brain, conditioned for environments in which we might need to count up to a few hundred, finds it hard to differentiate quickly between $1 million and $10 million, much less $100 million.
We can consider it as a function of physical scale. A dollar bill is 6.14 inches long, 2.61 inches tall and 0.0043 inches thick. A stack of 100 one-dollar bills, then, is about 0.43 inches tall — if the bills are crisp and new and tightly packed. Let’s make it half an inch, just to accommodate for some imprecision.
Here’s how big a million dollars is. (Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch is shown for scale; he’s reportedly 5-foot-10.)
Here’s how big $100 million is.
And here’s how big $787,500,000 is.
The volume of $787,500,000 in one-dollar bills is just about equal to the amount of steel used to build the Eiffel Tower. So imagine melting down the Eiffel Tower, filling the equivalent volume with ones and having to hand that over to someone.
Last year, as Fox News host Sean Hannity was spending hour after hour promoting Republican candidates for the House and Senate, I calculated the value of that airtime by comparing it to the going ad rate for his show. In the third quarter of that election year, those prime-time spots were running about $76,000. If we assume, inaccurately, that those spots are always that expensive, Fox News would need to run 10,362 ads for, say, MyPillow to make up the difference.
That’s three days, 14 hours and 20 minutes of Mike Lindell hawking pillows and sheets. Or, assuming that each Hannity program includes 15 minutes of ads, nothing but MyPillow ads during Hannity for 345 straight nights.
Of course, Fox and its affiliated corporate entities are not operating on the same economic level as (presumably) you or me. For a large American corporation, three-quarters of a billion dollars is a lot but hardly incapacitating. It is, in some sense, just a cost of doing business.
If that’s how one chooses to do business, anyway.
