This past Tuesday morning in a Delaware court, Murdochs’ Fox Corp was just minutes away from offering up the post-fact reality TV show we’ve been eagerly awaiting. Instead, it opted to vote itself — and its star presenters — off the show, all for a cool US$787.5 million (A$1.2 billion).
It can afford it. But it’s not about the money; that’s just how we keep score. It’s about the long-term damage done to the Murdoch brands, and to journalism. The legal processes in the defamation action by Dominion Voting Systems have lifted the lid, showing the ugly truth of just how the Fox News sausage gets made.
The Fox Corp response to the high-stakes defamation action was Looney Tunes star Wile E Coyote at his best: racing ahead full bore until, suddenly, they’re over the cliff looking down, finding their legs pumping up and down in thin air. Realising their long-looming predicament too late, they turn to the camera, whipping out the “Help!” sign — and immediately the screen goes black.
Off-air, we know what happened. The network’s high-priced lawyers helicoptered to the rescue with the best Acme Dispute Resolution kit money could buy. Inside? A cheque priced just high enough to get the Murdochs out of publicly conceding any wrongdoing — in court or out.
Even for the battling billionaire Murdochs, it was a lot of money. But it turned out to be just enough to cover the cost of blacking out their sickening crash to earth, cushioning the fall with some of that old falling-tree-in-the-forest comfort: if nobody saw it, maybe we can all pretend it didn’t happen.
Across the dead air came the deafening boos from the crowd, denied the end they yearned for — the hoped-for evidence from both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, as well as Fox network stars like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. It was the most disappointing end of this Succession spin-off since the Foxtel broadcast of Game of Thrones.
Dusting themselves down, Murdoch apologists and critics alike were eager to dismiss the payout, echoing Monty Python’s dismembered Black Knight: “It’s just a flesh wound!” The sharemarket agreed, giving the company’s shares a “priced-in” shrug.
It’s less than the $2 billion-odd dollars the UK hacking scandal has cost the News-Fox corporations so far (paid by News Corp, but underwritten by Fox Corp).
It’s more than the company anticipated in the contingencies notes to its most recent (end of 2022) accounts where the company assured its regulator and shareholders it believed the lawsuits are “without merit” and “does not currently anticipate that the ultimate resolution of any such pending matters will have a material adverse effect on its business, financial condition, results of operations or cash flows”.
It’s certainly a lot more than the “seven-figure” settlement Fox agreed to pay in 2020 (again, immediately before hearings were due to start) after its presenters amplified the bogus Seth Rich conspiracy (reported in the journalistically devastating book A Death on W Street by ProPublica’s Andy Kroll). And it’s more than the millions paid out in sexual harassment claims, with the highest thought to be US$20 million paid to presenter Gretchen Carlson.
It’s about the same level as News Corp’s payments for various actions involving its News America marketing segment between 2009 and 2016. It’s probably less than the likely settlement in the still-to-be heard US$2.7 billion defamation claim by election technology company Smartmatic.
Payouts are the price of the Fox News outrage business model targeted at a declining, aging and angry demographic. Network survival depends on holding that demo tight — giving them what they want to hear — so that the cable operators (who have their own problems with cord-cutting) remain prepared to enforce, collect and pay-on Fox’s relatively high per-subscriber fee.
But payout by payout, the settlements have eroded the status and credibility of Fox News. And now something has broken — for good. The legal processes of discovery in the Dominion case shocked the rest of the US media into understanding that Fox is more propaganda than news — and plenty of people inside the network think that’s just fine.
It’s exposed the “lots of good journalists in the newsroom” schtick. It’s forcing the rest of the media to distance themselves. This week, CNN’s Jake Tapper captured the new journalistic sensibility, saying he found it “difficult to report with a straight face” Fox’s post-settlement statement that it “reflects Fox’s continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards”.
In the UK, The Sun never recovered the standing it lost in the hacking scandal. Circulation dwindled, its power waned. Fox may be confident it can get through these latest rounds of record payouts financially. But the veneer of journalistic credibility once lost can never be regained.
