The price of ‘fake news’: 787.5 million dollars. In other words, 719 million euros. That is what Rupert Murdoch’s company Fox News is going to pay to the software company Dominion Systems to avoid the defamation trial in response to the complaint that it had imposed on it for affirming that there had been fraud in the 2020 US elections, which Joe Biden won, and that Dominion had been key in it, in a crazy conspiracy theory that implicated the Bolivarian government of Venezuela and internet servers in Italy.
For Dominion, which is owned by several investment funds, the compensation is a godsend, since the company had been valued at just 80 million dollars (73 million euros) five years ago. It is also the first episode in what could be an even bigger rain of millions, given that it has sued, among others, Donald Trump himself, the online news company Newsmax – a competitor of Fox News and a rival – over everything, at the time of seeing who said the biggest nonsense- and the lawyers of the ex-president Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
For Fox News it is a financial setback that may eat up a third of its profits this year and, furthermore, a bad sign, given that another company, Smartmatic, has also filed another complaint against the company, which has been accepted by the judge , for a value of 2,700 million dollars (almost 2,500 million euros). Fox News recently closed another settlement with Venezuelan businessman Majed Khalil, accusing him of participating in the fraud that did not exist. In 2020, it also paid compensation to the parents of Seth Rich, a Democratic Party worker who was killed in what police considered a Washington mugging, but the news network made it a political crime ordered by Hillary Clinton, to prevent , supposedly, that Rich publicized the alleged crimes of the then candidate for the presidential elections. The figures for the settlements with Rich’s family and with Khalil have not been made public. Nor was Dominion’s, although the amount of 787.5 million dollars has not been disputed by the parties.
The crux of Dominion’s complaint is that Fox News deliberately and systematically lied when accusing Dominion’s software, which is used in electronic voting in the United States, of perpetrating fraud. But what has been decisive in avoiding the trial have been the emails and SMS messages from different Fox News figures. It’s exactly the same thing that happened when Twitter forced Elon Musk to buy the company in September, just as he had promised to do in March. It seems that the richest and most influential people in the world of communications do not know that everything that is put on the Internet remains there forever and ever.
And in the case of the lawsuit against Fox News, the messages were devastating. In fact, they had to be, because in the US the freedom of expression legislation establishes very strict conditions for it to be possible to prove that there has been libel, since the plaintiff must prove without any doubt that the defendant has intended to cause damage. But the lines from the Fox News stars and Murdoch himself were devastating. “I passionately hate” Trump, wrote Tucker Carlson, the huge Fox News star who is also one of the former president’s biggest supporters and a leading supporter of Hungarian President Viktor Orban, whose father, former ambassador Richard Warner Carlson, is a lobbyist in the US. “The software bullshit [referring to Dominion and Smartmatic products] is insane,” Carlson wrote the same day he went on television, saying “we should know what’s going on” with voting systems.
Murdoch himself entered the fray, intervening, as usual for him, in the chain’s editorial decisions. But that did not prevent him from considering Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s official spokesman and adviser, “silly”, and from saying that the former mayor of New York and the still president “are a little crazier every day.” Murdoch agreed with the idea that Biden had won the election, but like the other senior Fox News officials he feared that saying so would lose audiences to Newsmax and OANN, two other even more ultra-ultra networks. The owner and president of Fox News described the position of the still president as “criminal”, but made his company support it. Perhaps because, thus, “we saved ourselves from Trump’s wrath”, which would have benefited his competitors. It’s a phrase shared by Carlson, who wrote that “the only thing Trump knows how to do well is destroy.”
All in all, the sentence does not seem to change the policy of Fox News, which in recent weeks has defended Donald Trump after his prosecution by the New York State Court. The Murdoch family controls Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch, despite the infirmities of his 92 years, rules the clan. And he still has rope left for a while. After divorcing his fourth wife, former model Jerry Hall, who was married to Mick Jagger, by email, Murdoch has just called off his fifth wedding to radio commentator Ann-Lesley Smith, because, according to Vanity Fair, he can’t stand the evangelical faith. this.
His empire is also run by his eldest son, Lachlan, while little James, who lost the succession race, has broken with the family and in October held a fundraising event for Democratic candidates for the elections of Congress at his home in New York and which, in a true political earthquake, was attended by Joe Biden himself, who traveled from Washington to certify his party’s alliance with the ‘critical sector’ of the Murdochs. Murdoch has always controlled his companies since they, like many other media and internet companies in the US -from Meta to Alphabet, passing through Berkshire Hathaway- have two types of shares: some (class B) with hardly any rights voting (or, in Murdoch’s case, without any voting rights) and others (Class A) with voting rights. This is how Murdoch, with only 15% of the capital of the companies, controls 39% of the votes of the council. In one of his companies, News Corporation, José María Aznar has been a director for a decade and a half.
Murdoch’s media were grouped in the News Corporation company until in 2013 he split it in two: Twenty-First Century Fox and News Corporation. The reason for the division was the scandal over the illegal wiretapping of the British tabloid ‘News of the World’, which affected the royal family itself and relatives of murder victims, which pushed the share price down, although Murdoch has always insisted that what he wanted was to separate the print media, which are priced at a discount, from the audiovisual media, then more favored by investors. To get an idea of the scale of Murdoch’s enterprises, suffice it to say that Twenty-First Century Fox was, by itself, the fourth largest media company in the United States.
In 2019, Murdoch sold most of Twenty-First Century Fox (among whose biggest blockbusters are Avatar or Titanic) to Disney for 71.3 billion dollars (65 billion euros) and the British television network Sky News to Comcast (owner of Universal and NBC studios, the largest television in the US, as well as the owner of the largest cable network in the US) for 30,000 million pounds (23,000 million euros).
The sale marked Murdoch’s practical withdrawal from the audiovisual world. Twenty-First Century Fox ceased to exist and became the Fox Corporation, which groups news television, its economics division, its web, and its radio. It is an extraordinarily profitable company, with a net profit margin – that is, after taxes – of almost 25%.
Following the sale, Murdoch’s other company, News Corporation, has gained in relative importance. The businessman has an unquestionable affection for the so-called ‘legacy media’, or the traditional press, and to date he is pampering that company, whose assets are concentrated in the United States, Great Britain and Australia. In the latter country, News Corporation has 45 television channels, most of them specialized, as well as more than 150 regional and local newspapers. But the crown jewels are in Great Britain and, above all, in the US. In the first of these markets, the News Corporation’s titles include the Times -and its Sunday edition, the Sunday Times- and the sensationalist tabloid The Sun.
This same pattern of quality, tabloid press is repeated in the US, where its influence in the economic information market is considerable, with The Wall Street Journal -the second most widely distributed newspaper in the country-, the financial magazine Barron’s, the economic website MarketWatch, the Dow Jones Newswires news agency and the Factiva database. At the same time, News Corporation owns Investors Business Daily, also cheap, but more popular -and ideological- and the New York Post, which is more or less the equivalent of the Sun in the United States. In 2022, Murdoch tried to get Jeff Bezos to sell him the Washington Post, in order to have a generalist newspaper – the thorn in his formidable business career – but the Amazon founder refused. And then there’s HarperCollins, the second-biggest English-language book publisher, behind only Penguin Random House, which in turn is owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project