NPR.

If you happen to be watching Fox News around the time of the 2020 presidential election,

you probably would have heard something like this.

Voting irregularities.

Our Dominion systems prone to human error.

That is where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system,

or adding votes that did not.

Those are Fox News hosts and guests falsely claiming that a company which makes voting machines

somehow rigged their machines to favor then-candidate Joe Biden.

And though it was not true, those statements about this Canadian founded business reached millions of viewers.

That company Dominion Voting Systems later sued Fox News for defamation.

And in a trial starting in a couple of weeks, the company will argue that those statements

so severely damage its reputation that Fox News owes them $1.6 billion.

If Dominion wins, it would be the biggest defamation verdict in US history.

And this got us wondering how the heck did they come up with that number?

This is the indicator for plan of money. I'm Adrian Ma.

And I'm Whalen Wong. For businesses and people,

reputations are economically important.

Our reputations affect how people treat us and the kinds of opportunities we get.

And yet, reputations are these intangible, fuzzy things.

How can you possibly put price on a reputation?

Today on the show, we'll talk with a defamation lawyer who says,

...