Rupert Murdoch and his family have had a very bad week.
They settled the claim by payment of $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems which, given Dominion is worth maybe as much as $226 million is a pretty hefty pay out. Dominions owners and lawyers will be grinning all the way to the bank.
Fox has reserves of about $4 billion so it has the ability to write a cheque. But this will clearly hurt it.
Lachlan Murdoch then surrendered in the claim against Cricky, a small Australian news company which produces extraordinarily good articles but is nevertheless a minnow when comparted to the Murdoch stable of companies.
The capitulation is not surprising given that Crikey had in its defence raised evidence released from depositions in the Doinion case and that evidence would be subject to analysis and cross examination. Crikey can now ask for costs. I hope they go to town.
The Guardian explans what happened in these terms:
On Friday, just days after Fox News reached a $US787.5m settlement with Dominion in the US defamation lawsuit, Murdoch’s lawyers filed one line in Australia’s federal court to discontinue “the whole of the proceedings”.
The whole of the proceedings was a defamation case Murdoch had brought against an Australian publication last August for daring to link him to the 6 January Capitol riots.
After hundreds of hours spent in preliminary court battles and thousands of pages of discovery, he simply dropped his case against the Australian media company Private Media, the publisher of news website Crikey.
This was the second time in a week Murdoch had walked away from a legal challenge, with this bill certain to be significantly less but still likely in the millions.
It was quite the backflip by the 50-year-old media mogul whose legal case has played out in lurid media headlines for eight months. He launched the proceedings after Crikey named the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the US Capitol riot.
Written by Crikey’s political editor, Bernard Keane, the article did not name Lachlan Murdoch but was headlined “Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator”.
The background to these cases is well known. Fox News was burned by declaring Biden the winner of Arizona. This was the actual result. But it did not fit the false narrative that Trumpo and co were trying to create.
To prevent sagging viewere numbers Fox then began pushing the Trump marrative of a stolen election heavily and defamed Dominion Voting Systems on the way. Crikey went out on a limb and bravely yet accurately described the effect that Fox was having on democracy and the second case ensued.
The two back downs are very good news for democracy. But there is still the problem that a significant part of America’s population have their extreme views baked in. The exposure of reality do not appear to be having an effect on those views.
The forces of evil also came up with a really cooked conspiracy over another company, Smartmatic, which is also involved in voting machines.
Its case also rely on a series of whoppers told by Fox hosts, who alleged amongst other things that Smartmatic was involved in 2020 election counts in six battleground states, and that it was founded in Venezuela at the behest of corrupt dictators. It was involved in the count in Los Angeles County only and was formed in Florida. That gives you a sense of the level of fact checking that happened before Fox launched into its attack on Smartmatic.
That trial is ongoing. Bring popcorn.
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