Global Courant 2023-04-19 05:46:02
If it seems kinda stupid to congratulate Rupert Murdoch settling the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit at a cost of $787.5 million, you should probably be apprised of how the tycoon is weeding out malignancies when they threaten his core business.
Murdoch’s company paid $100 million to celebrities and crime victims in his tabloid phone hacking scandal in Britainaccording to the Washington Post. Another $50 million a year went to women at Fox News who alleged sexual harassment at the conservative network. In another case, $15 million went to a former host who complained about pay discrimination. A “seven-figure payment” went to Seth Rich’s parents, who sued Fox for trading a false conspiracy theory about his death. And in 2010, Fox released a mammoth $500 million to settle a trade secret case over supermarket coupons. In 2011, Murdoch in full closed his shutters News of the world tabloid to limit exposure to the phone hacking scandal.
A hundred million here, a hundred million there, could mean a drain on your finances. But in the Murdoch universe, paying for such settlements is just the price of doing business Murdoch-style. The alternative to settling with Dominion for telling a series of votes fraud lies would have been a painful and lengthy courtroom drama. A stream of ugliness would have showered Fox’s image day after day, as Dominion advocated. Even after the case was finalized and appealed, the Fox brand would have been further stigmatized, and shame and contempt would have been leveled against Murdoch, Fox executives and Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham and Bret Baier, all of whom Dominion intended to put on the witness stand. Getting out from under all that pain for $787.5 million is kind of a bargain for a company with a market capitalization of $17.3 billion. Fox has $4.1 billion in cash and warrants at hand, says the New York Times.
According to early press reports, Fox is not required to apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing in any way. Like the phone hacking scandal, like the sexual harassment cases, like the Seth Rich case, like the coupon case, this settlement will allow the Fox media machine to return to cruising speed and even continue its sleazy ways. to make. When Murdoch was shamed for the phone hacking scandal and shut down the News of the World, observers hoped that he or one of his children might change the way the company works. But here we are more than a decade later, and the Murdoch enterprise is as tainted as ever.
There have already been rumors that the settlement will tame the Murdoch beast. That Fox News will be more careful. That the shame of Fox will bleed into the media diet of their most loyal viewers and they will begin to see Fox News with new eyes as the enlightenment burns in their consciousness. Don’t kid yourself. If you had a machine that threw away the kind of money Fox does, you wouldn’t mess with it.
Sure, Fox can flinch for a few months as it fills the big bag with the settlement money for Dominion. But you can already imagine Murdoch, after quite a pause, mounting a copy paper pedestal and giving a “follow up” style speech to the Fox team that it’s time to put the bad news behind them and urge them to gear up for the 2024 presidential election as it returns to its tainted formula of lies and twists. How can we predict this turn with such confidence? Because ever since Rupert Murdoch escaped from Adelaide, Australia, since he conquered the newspaper market in England, since he came to dominate cable news with Fox, he’s paid his way out of traffic. The Dominion case and the comparable Smartmatic housing waiting to take its place in the libel roll are no aberrations to Fox. It’s all part of Murdoch’s way of doing business.
Fox remains an indispensable valuable part of the Murdoch businesses. Most, if not all, of the Fox hosts who helped push Donald Trump’s stolen election lies onto a gullible viewership will continue to anchor their shows. Fox will continue to air its rinse. The Fox viewers who lost faith in the network about the election, lies will forget the pause like mothers forget the trauma of childbirth and return to the network because it so brilliantly stimulates their fears and grievances.
And Rupert Murdoch, the indestructible Rupert Murdoch, will carry on as he always has. He will have won again.
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Is Murdoch immortal? Send speculations to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are currently being honored. Mine Twitter feed watches the NFL on Fox. Mine Mastodon And After accounts owe me $787.5 million. Substack Notes says I owe it $787.5 million. Mine RSS feed was not surprised by the settlement.
