Kevin Drum

The following post was written entirely by ChatGPT. I ran it multiple times with different prompts, and regenerated each prompt at least once. It kept finding more stuff! Then I put it all together and added a single sentence about the recent Dominion payout.

---

Rupert Murdoch and his media companies have paid out millions of dollars in legal settlements over the years. The exact amount is difficult to determine, as settlements are often confidential and not publicly disclosed.

However, some notable cases where Murdoch's companies have paid out large settlements include:

In 1987, News of the World, a British tabloid owned by Murdoch's News Corp, published a story alleging that politician Jeffrey Archer had paid a prostitute for sex. Archer denied the allegations and sued the newspaper for libel. In 1994, the newspaper settled with Archer, paying him a significant sum in damages. (Archer later paid back the money after he was convicted of committing perjury during the libel trial.)

In 1996, Murdoch settled a libel lawsuit brought by Elton John over an article in The Sun newspaper that suggested the singer had behaved in a sexually inappropriate manner towards a young man.

In 2011, News Corporation (one of Murdoch's companies) paid out around $580 million to settle phone-hacking claims in the UK. As of 2021, it is estimated that News Corp has paid out over £1 billion (approximately $1.4 billion USD) in settlements and legal fees related to the scandal.

In addition to the phone hacking scandal, News Corp has made several other legal payouts over the years. For example, in 2013, Murdoch's UK newspaper The Sun published a story alleging that Tom Cruise had "abandoned" his daughter, Suri, after his divorce from Katie Holmes. Cruise denied the allegations and sued the newspaper for libel. The lawsuit was settled, with the newspaper paying Cruise an undisclosed sum in damages.

In 2015, News Corp settled a lawsuit filed by real estate website Zillow, which accused News Corp-owned Move, Inc. of engaging in anti-competitive behavior. News Corp paid out $130 million in compensation to Zillow as part of the settlement.

In 2016, the company settled a lawsuit filed by former News of the World editor Colin Myler and ex-legal manager Tom Crone, who alleged that they were unfairly dismissed in relation to the phone hacking scandal.

The same year, News Corp settled a lawsuit filed by shareholders who accused the company of securities fraud related to the phone hacking scandal. The company paid out $139 million in compensation to the shareholders.

In 2017, the company settled a defamation lawsuit filed by a former British intelligence officer who was named in a report by News Corp-owned The Times newspaper. The company paid out a significant sum in compensation to the officer.

In 2017, the network paid $20 million to settle a lawsuit brought by former host Gretchen Carlson, who alleged that she had been sexually harassed by former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Other related claims brought the total to $45 million.

In addition, there have been other legal settlements involving Fox News, including a $20 million settlement in a racial discrimination lawsuit brought by former anchor Kelly Wright, and a $1 million settlement in a lawsuit brought by contributor Tamara Holder alleging sexual assault by a Fox News executive.

In 2020, Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit brought by the parents of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered in 2016. The settlement amount was reportedly $250,000. In the same year the network paid $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought by former host Ed Henry, who was accused of sexual misconduct.

In 2021, Fox was sued for defamation by the Dominion Voting Systems company, which accused Murdoch and his media outlets of spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2020 US presidential election. The lawsuit seeks $1.6 billion in damages. In 2023 the suit was settled for $787 million.

There have been many other legal cases involving Murdoch and his companies, and the total amount paid out in settlements is likely much higher than the examples listed above.

UPDATE: This was truly a ChatGPT story, complete with hallucinations! The original version included a paragraph about Jeffrey Wigand that was completely invented. I've removed it. It also failed to note that Jeffrey Archer had to pay back his libel award after he was convicted of perjury.

Oh come on:

For nearly two years beginning in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch sought a buyer for a 40-acre tract of property he co-owned in rural Granby, Colo.

Nine days after he was confirmed by the Senate for a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, the then-circuit court judge got one: The chief executive of Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s biggest law firms with a robust practice before the high court.

....Gorsuch did not disclose the identity of the purchaser. That box was left blank. Since then, Greenberg Traurig has been involved in at least 22 cases before or presented to the court, according to a POLITICO review of the court’s docket.

I hardly need to add that Gorsuch hasn't recused himself from cases involving Greenberg Traurig. Why would he? Republican Supreme Court justices appear to consider themselves above the law, and in practice it turns out that they are.

I've heard a bunch of theories about why Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News:

• He was the biggest name in the Dominion lawsuit, so now he's taking the fall.
• Some of his text messages, which were made public during discovery, were critical of Fox. Rupert Murdoch didn't like that.
• Tucker had started to think he was bigger than Fox, and Rupert decided it was time to nip that in the bud.
• Tucker was opposed to US support of Ukraine, something the Deep State couldn't tolerate. So they engineered his departure.
• A former booking producer has sued both Tucker and his senior executive producer, who was also fired, of sexism and harassment. The case was likely to be embarrassing, so Fox decided to bite the bullet and cut him loose.
• He was a pain in the ass and everyone was tired of him.

It is a testament to Fox's reputation that no one thinks Tucker was fired because of his endless appeals to racism, bigotry, and demented conspiracy theories. And why would they? That's why Fox kept him around so long in the first place.

A day at the carwash. Or, more accurately, a day in the carwash.

In news that should surprise no one who's ever worked in an office, new research suggests that remote work is fine for experienced workers but bad for new workers. The reason is pretty obvious: Senior workers already know how to do their jobs and are slowed down by fielding annoying questions from junior workers. For them, being remote is great. Conversely, junior workers know squat and need to get guidance from senior workers to learn their jobs. They can't do that when senior workers are at home hiding in their basements.

This particular bit of research was done at a large software company, and one of the metrics the authors collected was the number of comments offered during code reviews. They found that after the start of the pandemic the number of comments received by younger engineers plummeted:

Among young engineers, the number of comments dropped by nearly half within six months of everyone going remote. The decline was especially pronounced among women:

The number of comments received by female engineers dropped nearly in half within two months of the start of remote work. This finding might or might not generalize to professions that are less male dominated.

The bottom line is that remote work might provide a short-term benefit by increasing the output of senior coders but a longer-term loss because junior coders don't get the training and mentoring they need. This causes more junior coders to quit in search of firms where there's less remote work.

This overall finding needs to be confirmed in other settings, but I have zero doubt that it will be. Remote work should be carefully deployed, not rolled out company-wide. Some jobs benefit from it while others suffer. Tread carefully.

Today Tucker Carlson got fired and tomorrow I get cured of cancer.¹ The week is shaping up nicely. What's on tap for Wednesday?

¹Sort of.

I'm not pretending to be obtuse here, but what's up with this headline in the Washington Post?

I know it's traditional to assume that the president is the one "responsible" for the debt ceiling, but why? It's a problem for the country, not the presidency. The leaders of Congress are running out of time at least as much as Biden is.

More, in fact, since Congress is the body actually charged with setting the debt ceiling. If it doesn't get raised, it's on them as much or more than it's on the president.

And because this should be said every time the debt ceiling is mentioned, we really need to get rid of it. The time to argue about spending is when you buy stuff, not when the bills come due. Unless you're a deadbeat, you pay up if you've promised to, and you don't make your payment subject to random, changing demands. You said you'd pay. You pay.

Today was potentially a milestone: my last chemotherapy session ever. I've now finished the three days of chemo prep required for the CAR-T procedure, which is followed by a rest day on Sunday and then a few final tests on Monday. Assuming everything checks out, Tuesday is Day 0, when the CAR-T starts. If it works—which we won't know for several months—I will be close enough to cured that I'll be free of chemo treatments for at least the next few years.

Today the Washington Post tells the story of Joe Moss, a Republican and conservative Christian who engineered a takeover of the Ottowa County board of commissioners in Michigan. It all started in church:

They settled into the pews and listened as their pastor warned of the “many people” in the country who were “trying to destroy everything that is righteous and good and pure and holy.” They were the sort, he said, who were demanding free condoms at school, “gender fluidity books” in the public library and drag queen story hours.

By his own admission, Moss had not paid much attention to local politics. He ran a small technology business and was focused on raising his children. Then, in the fall of 2020, the Ottawa County health department learned of a coronavirus outbreak at his daughter’s Christian school and ordered the school’s leaders to comply with the governor’s mask mandate. When they refused, state and county officials chained shut the school’s doors for more than a week and warned parents that continued resistance could bring fines and imprisonment.

Suddenly, Moss realized that those dangerous people that his pastor had been talking about on Sundays were not just in Washington and Lansing, the state capital. They were in West Olive, where the county government was headquartered. “In 2020, I became a threatened parent,” Moss said on the campaign trail. “I was threatened specifically … by Ottawa County.”

"Hey grampa, did you really have a big pandemic back when you were a kid?"

"I wasn't a kid, but we sure did, Johnny."

"Were you scared?"

"Everyone was scared, Johnny. But some people were more scared than others."

"What were you scared of, grampa?"

"Well, most of us were scared of dying. But some of us were more afraid of masks."

"Masks don't seem very scary."

"Well, Johnny, fear is a funny thing. The masks were designed to protect other people in case you were sick, but some people refused to wear them because they were a little uncomfortable."

"It sounds like they were just assholes."

"Language, Johnny! But yes, they were assholes."

Bud Light has fired its VP of marketing. NRO's Jim Geraghty comments:

When the Bud Light controversy blew up, some of us contended the company had made a serious error, that alienated and repelled a certain portion of existing customers while not attracting significant numbers of new customers. We were assured that we were old and out of touch, and that sending a can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with Mulvaney’s face on it was a brilliant move that demonstrated that Bud Light was now the preferred taste of the young and sophisticated.