I always assumed that Rupert Murdoch founded Fox News, put Roger Ailes in charge, and then pretty much ignored it after it was up and running. He had black-tie fundraisers to attend, wives to divorce, and all the other accoutrements of the modern billionaire. Why waste time overseeing the daily ops of a cable news station?
But no. One of the surprising things (to me) about the documents released in the Dominion lawsuit is that Murdoch was very intensely interested in FNC, attended editorial meetings regularly, and talked to the CEO and others on nearly a daily basis:
Murdoch emerges in the documents as an extraordinarily engaged and active figure at the network in the weeks after the 2020 election, not to mention a political junkie and pundit of daily news developments, large and small.
....“Horrible,” he declared in early December 2020, after Axios reported that Trump was considering a grand finale rally to be held in Florida on Inauguration Day, to take attention away from Biden as he took the oath. Trump’s behavior, Murdoch wrote, was making it more difficult for Fox to “straddle the issue” of the election.
The most frequent recipients of Murdoch’s steady stream of missives included his son Lachlan, the CEO of Fox Corp., as well as Scott. But other emails went to a wide array of Murdoch friends, from the New York Post’s former editor to the Australian owner of television stations in Afghanistan.
What this means is that Murdoch can't pretend he was a hands-off guy who never really knew how Fox was covering the post-election news in 2020. He knew precisely what they were saying; he repeatedly acknowledges that he thinks Trump lost fairly; and that all the Big Lie reporting coming from Fox was, at the very least, over the top.
He also made it clear that, yes, he could have influenced this but didn't. That's because he was mostly worried about losing his audience, and thus some money, not about whether his network treated people and news topics fairly.
This is no surprise, but it's a bit of a surprise that he's so open about it. I guess he puts a lot of faith in American libel laws being strict enough to save his ass. We'll see.
The UK playwright Dennis Potter died of cancer in 1994. He had a tv interview just before he died in which he called the cancer that was killing him "Rupert" because he could see what Murdoch was doing to society. And that was *before* Fox News was a thing.
But before there was Fox here, there were the Sun, News Corp, the Times, Sky TV and BSkyB in Britain, and there was Murdoch's consolidating newspaper production across his titles and moving it out of Fleet Street in 1986, which had the effect of destroying his print unions for his and Thatcher's gain. He saved the Sun by turning it into the tabloid with the page 3 nudes, basically the sex-and-sports-and-sensationalism and sealed-epistemic-world formula that he's been refining since.
And there was his really unprecedented burrowing into the UK government, very much as is showing up in these depositions, through constant contact with the pm and having pms and parties hire his editors for PR and comms positions. Even in the UK, where politicized presslords were a tradition, this was way overboard in its extent and extremely controversial.
Murdoch has always been a loose cannon. He thinks he's sly (hence "fox," likely) to put most of his energy into scratching politicians' backs for business favor and using his business model to gain political influence. A pioneer in the attention economy, whose political gamesmanship has been about as malign as it could be.
Potter's wit was incisive and mordant there, to say the least.
Yes, that's why it is relevant - Potter saw what Murdoch had already done to the UK press (and, indeed, the Australian press) and what he was starting to do to the US press by the mid90s, except that Murdoch pivoted to tv in the US because it was largely unregulated compared to other national markets.
I mean, I guess we should be grateful that he didn't glom onto social media early enough (I think it was his son James who recognised it but wasn't anywhere near as competent or ruthless as his father to take advantage.)
Cable tv in particular, which really had no restrictions that would have been meaningful to him and where he must have immediately seen exactly how to build up market penetration and income even independent of advertisers, which must have seemed like getting the keys to Smaug's horde for him. Maybe that's a reason for him to be still so directly involved with it.
As I think about it there is an underlying unity to his properties, their stance as perpetually aggrieved outsider. Not so easy to pull off at the WSJ or the Times, for sure, but very much in his personal background, terrifically monetizable, taps into a very deep well of feeling in the Anglophone world, and leaves him free to drift to the political current of his choosing at the moment. That may be where he's most different from Beaverbrook and Northcliffe, say.
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At the end of the movie A Face In The Crowd the Andy Griffith populist character is undone when he is caught on a hot microphone saying what he really thinks about his audience and the people he endorses (he thinks they are suckers and charlatans). In the movie his supporters are appalled and turn on him. He immediately loses everything.
What we have now is a similar real life moment with Tucker Carlson. And we are about to see what a fantasy the ending of that movie was.
I honestly think people were smarter in the 1950's. Carlson will kiss up to Trump and flatter him in some public way and we'll get 2016 all over again.
only to the extent that they need each other. trump and carlson are two leaches.
$1.6 billion isn't that much money to Fox.
But they still didn't settle, and preferred to continue fighting, getting all the bad publicity.
It's a year's income, no?
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FOX/financials?p=FOX
Plus, Dominion is asking for punitive penalties on top of the $1.6B.
depends on your point of view. if you're a shareholder not named murdoch you can't be happy with the prospect of the company shelling out $1.6 billion, plus punies, plus legal costs, plus the negative publicity. don't be surprised to see shareholder lawsuits filed in the coming weeks, seeking to have the murdochs stripped of any management responsibilities.
Libel laws... they are useless in the face of this enemy. Does Ukraine use the law to defend itself from Russia? No, they kill their enemy. Is Fox corporation an enemy like the Russian government? I think it is. But, of course, we don't have any capability to defend ourselves. Oh well.
Don't spit on the graves of murdered Ukrainians, you miserable jerk. Fox is awful, but don't compare mean and misleading things on the teevee to hospitals and schools getting bombed in a blood-soaked war of conquest.
I will compare fox to the russian government and it is no disrespect to Ukraine to do so. A few years ago, they might have thought peaceful coexistence with russia was possible. Today, you think peaceful coexistence with fox is possible. In a few years you will, perhaps, be in a grave after fox and its army wages war on you.
Recognizing in real time that a moral threat is building is a good thing. Denial and appeasement, not so much.
"Today, you think peaceful coexistence with fox is possible. In a few years you will, perhaps, be in a grave after fox and its army wages war on you."
Let's have a gentleman's wager, you and I. If, in a few years (let's say, five years) the Fox corporation is still churning out propaganda and lies to distort public debate and sell gold coins and reverse mortgages to the gullible, you'll concede that you are wrong, and apologize to the people of Ukraine for comparing your armchair gripes to their life-and-death struggle.
If, on the other hand, Fox corporation soldiers are raping civilians, firing rockets into elementary schools, and looting houses with the prisoner-conscripts, I'll buy you a coke.
Dude, is Rupert lobbing missiles at your home? Sending waves of conscripts with weapons at your town? Has he leveled your state's infrastructure? Kidnapped your children?
Then maybe learn a little rhetorical control. Trust me, it will pay a lot of dividends.
Murdoch has turned half of the oldest constitutional democracy on Earth against democracy.
If it were up to Murdoch, Zelenskyy would be dead, along with NATO.
With all the material that has already been presented by Dominion showing multiple Fox hosts and Murdock privately acknowledging they know the 2020 election MAGA claims were lies, and then still presenting them as truth in their shows, I can't see any rational judge not ruling against them.
But they apparently do. MAybe they know something you (and I) don't.
Probably counting on a 6-3 conservative SCOTUS that they can appeal to on 1st ammendment grounds. Or maybe they've made settlement offers and Dominion has refused.
Unfox My Cable Box,
https://unfoxmycablebox.com/
Can't hurt, can it?
I vaguely recall that in the phone hacking scandal he took a "this was all below my pay grade attitude" and passed responsibility off on Rebecca something-or-other, who was fired but then later given some fancy job that was generally viewed as payback for taking the rap... right?
My guess is that Murdoch thinks he's invulnerable against any criticism or detrimental consequences of his actions, and he's probably correct in this.
Very similar to Trump.
Bad actors only suffer the consequences of their actions if they don't have any support from key segments of society, and money buys a lot of support.
"Law cannot reach where enforcement will not follow." - Jack Vance
Murdoch will turn 92 this week. I imagine that part his sense of invulnerability is his awareness that even a determined and just legal system cannot at this point outrun the reaper.
A quote from the Demon Princes cycle, good one!
I'm not surprised by Murdock's answers. He always came across as an ornery old rich bugger who wanted everything to go his way, like all ornery old rich buggers.
"This is no surprise, but it's a bit of a surprise that he's so open about it."
With the vast amount of emails spelling out exactly how he (and others) felt, there was little point to disputing it on the stand. I don't know this, but I hope the Alex Jones verdict had a sobering effect on how far he could rely on libel laws bailing him out.
What this means is that Murdoch can't pretend he was a hands-off guy who never really knew how Fox was covering the post-election news in 2020.
True. But what does any of that matter in the big picture, once they've made a payout or two (which naturally would constitute evidence of how much the Deep State hates them)? They can afford it. Is there a law against yellow journalism? Is there a law against employing unethical, lying sacks of shit as your prime time anchors and encouraging them to engage in any and all manner of untruthfulness in pursuit of ratings and advertising profits?
And (most) depressingly of all, there's almost zero chance that Fox News watchers in their millions give a damn. They're perfectly happy to be lied to. Indeed, they'd be angry (and would stop watching) if they were told the truth.
But sure, some people are going to Tweet some mean things about Murdoch. I'm sure he's devastated.
He also made it clear that "We must help Republicans."
That, to me, should remove all the special First Amendment protections for journalists from anyone at Fox. It makes abundantly clear that the directive from the top is for propaganda, not news. That is constitutionally protected, but no more so than anything I might say. The borderline between journalism and not-journalism is pretty fuzzy, but propaganda for a particular point of view is clearly way off on the wrong side of that boundary.
This is a guy who's testified countless times before different parliamentary committees and commissions, always has a sacrificial lamb or two ready when needed (as many have mentioned), has politicians in his pocket, can afford tippy-top legal talent to wring what they can out of our libel protections. And even if direct and punitive damages could come to as much as 5 billion, what's it to him? He's got more, and there's always more coming in all the time.
Not really clear to me though which of the parties doesn't want to settle, though I haven't seen anything from anyone who's in a position to know. If I were Fox I would want to, the sooner the better, unless maybe Dominion's terms amounted to taking over programming for an extended period (which is what I'd hold out for if I were Dominion).
If I'm in Dominion's shoes, though, my case gets better with every deposition and evidence dump and I'd probably want to go to trial if I had the money to wait out the years of appeals. My business is in the toilet anyway and will take a decade or two to build back, if it's even possible at this point. Any settlement before trial would realistically end with dissolution of the company, no?
Murdoch, like most billionaires, raised losers who can’t run a business, and so never retired.
As poor a businessman as Trump is (far worse than his father), his children are worse.