Rupert Wins Again

If it seems fairly daft to congratulate Rupert Murdoch on settling the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case at a cost of $787.5 million, you probably need to be brought up to speed on how the tycoon excises malignancies when they threaten his core businesses.

Murdoch’s company paid $100 million to celebrities and crime victims in his tabloid phone-hacking scandal in Britain, according to the Washington Post. Another $50 million went one year 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 wage discrimination. A “seven-figure payment” went to the parents of Seth Rich, who sued Fox for trafficking a false conspiracy theory about his death. And in 2010, Fox dropped a mammoth $500 million to settle a supermarket-coupon trade secret lawsuit. In 2011, Murdoch completely shuttered his News of the World tabloid to limit exposure in the phone-hacking scandal.

A hundred million here, a hundred million there, might crimp your finances. But in the Murdoch universe, paying such settlements is just the cost of doing business Murdoch-style. The alternative to settling with Dominion for telling a series of lies about voting fraud would have been a painful and long courtroom drama. A stream of ugly would have been on the Fox image, day after day, as Dominion made its case. Even after the case concluded and went to appeals, the Fox brand would have been further stigmatized, and shame and disparagement would have been leveled at Murdoch, Fox executives and Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham and Bret Baier, all of whom Dominion planned to put on the witness stand. Getting out from under all of that hurt for $787.5 million is a kind of bargain for a company with a market cap of $17.3 billion. Fox has $4.1 billion in cash and warrants on hand, says the New York Times.

According to early press reports, Fox won’t have to apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing in any fashion. 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. When Murdoch was shamed over the phone-hacking scandal and closed the News of the World, observers hoped that maybe he or one of his children would amend the company’s manner. But here we are a decade-plus later, and the Murdoch enterprise is just as contaminated as it ever was.

There have already been whisperings that the settlement will tame the Murdoch beast. That Fox News will tread more carefully. That Fox’s shame will bleed into the media diets of their most faithful viewers and they’ll start looking at Fox News with new eyes as the enlightenment burns into their consciousness. Don’t kid yourself. If you had a machine that tossed off the sort of money Fox does, you wouldn’t tamper with it.

Sure, Fox might throttle back for a few months as it fills the big sack with the settlement cash for Dominion. But you can already imagine Murdoch, after a decent interval, mounting a copy-paper pedestal and giving a "Succession"-like speech to the Fox team about it being time to put the bad news behind them and urging them to gear up for the 2024 presidential election as it reverts to its tainted formula of lies and distortions. How can we so confidently predict this turn? Because ever since Rupert Murdoch busted out of Adelaide, Australia, ever since he conquered the newspaper market in England, ever since he came to dominate cable news with Fox, he’s paid his way out of jams. The Dominion case and the similar Smartmatic case that awaits its place in the defamation docket, are not aberrations for Fox. It’s all a part of Murdoch’s way of doing business.

Fox will remain an indispensably valuable part of the Murdoch enterprises. Most, if not all, of the Fox hosts that helped push Donald Trump’s stolen election lies on a gullible viewership will continue to anchor their shows. Fox will continue to air its swill. The Fox viewers who lost faith in the network over the election lies will forget the interval the way 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 once again.

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Is Murdoch immortal? Send speculations to [email protected]. No new email alert subscriptions are being honored at this time. My Twitter feed watches the NFL on Fox. My Mastodon and Post accounts owe me $787.5 million. Substack Notes are saying I owe it $787.5 million. My RSS feed was not surprised at the settlement.