Tag Archives: Murdoch

Tucker Cost Fox More Than He Was Worth

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Comic: Claytoonz: Tucker Carlson canceled

I concede up front that what follows may well be a classic of the, “No duh” genre of punditry. But here goes, anyway.

Regarding Fox firing Tucker Carlson: Some way, some how this is mainly about money. We are after all talking Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp, a media empire that for 40-plus years has demonstrated no — as in zero — concern about reputational damage from spewing reckless sleaze, bigotry and flagrant disinformation. Carlson wasn’t fired because he embarrassed Fox.

His deep dives and happy wallows in all of his trademark racist and sexist ugliness could hardly have concerned Fox to the point that it would fire … it’s most profitable prime time host. He was, after all, following the implicit direction of the company’s business strategy.

Now, that said, the other edge of the sword with a “star” who has trafficked in gross transgressions against common social decency is that the bills for such behavior really do start to add up. As you may have followed in the wake of Fox’s $787.5 million payout to Dominion Voting Services, NewsCorp will be able to deduct a fat chunk of those damages on it’s taxes. (I know, I know. Like me, you’re wondering how Rupert Murdoch hasn’t long ago reduced his U.S. tax obligations to nothing.) But then — after the damages — there’s the premiums Fox will have to pay for the production insurance that covers some if not all of the Dominion settlement.

I haven’t been able to find anyone estimating what kind of increases we might be talking about here. But if I were the CFO of whatever company covers Fox, and I were forced to write a check for … hundreds of millions … to cover damages that should have been mitigated if not avoided entirely if the customer had effective management, I know my next move would be to hand them a premium increase worth five or ten times Carlson’s $20 million annual salary. Especially when you consider Smartmatic and all the other lawsuits queued up for pretty much the same corporate behavior.

Based on reporting from last night and this morning, there are suggestions that Carlson’s snarky shots at Fox managers like CEO Suzanne Scott, (who is, excuse me, fully culpable in everything that has gone on), is a factor in Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch souring on Carlson. But please, the guy was a major profit center. Who really cares if he slags his boss-in-name-only once in a while?

Personally, I’m more inclined to suspect that the Carlson redacted in those … hilarious … Fox internal e-mails/texts is more damaging than we can currently imagine. (See link above.) So damaging that Fox knows Smartmatic’s lawyers, who can use the Dominion depositions as a starting point, already have them boxed into a corner for a settlement larger than Dominion’s … with another thud of insurance premium increases to follow. Not to mention shareholder lawsuits.

Tucker Carlson leaving FOX News

There seems to be little doubt that Carlson had few fans within Fox corporate or its newsroom. The guy was out free ranging thanks to the cash he was bringing in from the audience of 3 million he guaranteed D-list advertisers night after night. But, as with Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly before him, at some point all the impunity big ratings buys you isn’t enough.

I never cease to love reminding people that Bill O’Reilly, once thought as untouchable as Carlson, paid one woman … $32 million out of his own pocket to settle her claims against him, claims that included, “repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her.” And she, for the record, was one of six women Fox and O’Reilly paid off.

Point being that a sense of titanic impunity quite often leads to deeply squalid misbehavior, of a kind that creates very large bills for both aggressors and their employers.

With that in mind, I give you this from the suit Carlson’s former producer Abby Grossberg has filed against Fox.

Who replaces Carlson is a topic for another rant. But Fox’ business dilemma is clear and fascinating. Those three million loyal viewers, hungry for anything Fox tells them will not be satisfied with some old school Republican nattering on about capital gains and marginal tax rates. That crowd tunes in for the hysterical hellfire … a shtick that appears to be costing Fox/NewsCorp more and more money with every passing year and superstar host.

“Succession”, A GOAT of the Modern Zeitgeist

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Modern media, valued most for holding eyeballs and generating clicks, loves quick-hit lists. Ten Best this and Greatest of All Time that. Never anything too serious you know, the crowds want to be entertained, not made to feel all gloomy and what not.

So bear that in mind as I suggest that HBO’s “Succession”, which returns for its final season tomorrow night, should be ranked among TV’s finest achievements, up there with “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad” and, ummm, “Veep”, with which it shares a lot of DNA. The soon-to-culminate saga of the gilded and truly wretched Roy family, principal owner-operators of Ameerica’s most influential mad dog conservative “news” network, is so completely locked in to the zeitgeist of this era it could pass as a documentary.

The fact that “Succession” returns at the precise moment that the Murdoch family on which it is unapologetically modeled is fighting off not one but two multi-billion dollar defamation suits for hosting and nurturing outright lies about the 2020 election is too delicious for words. (Even though I may find a few in the next couple paragraphs.)

If you haven’t watched any of the previous three seasons, I can’t help you much, other than to say the Rupert-like paterfamilias, Logan, played by Brian Cox, is currently at war with his four craven, despicable children over who gets the reins of ATN (their FoxNews-like network/money machine) when he passes on to his great reward. Needless to say none of the children trusts anyone else and all are running side scams to gut the others.

Rupert Murdoch to step back at Fox, hand off CEO title to son James - Los Angeles Times
Daddy Rupert and his boys.

It’s a thing of goddam beauty I tell you. And it very much recalls “Veep’s” farewell in the spring of 2019, two years into the Trump “administration” maelstrom of fraud, incompetence and rampant, spinning bullshit. At the time the show’s star, Julia-Louis Dreyfus made several talk show stops joking and shaking her head at the painfully obvious fact that “Veep’s” writers simply couldn’t keep up with the level of actual cowardice and lunacy playing out in the real White House.

Team Trump had trumped the most absurd satire anyone could imagine.

I have no idea if “Succession’s” show-runner, Jesse Armstrong, a former “Veep” writer, has been able to work the Dominion and SmartMatic defamation suits — with all the astonishing, incriminating texts from Fox’s wretched/ethically debauched news “stars” — into this final season. But the dramatic-to-farcical possibilities of Fox’s current predicaments are endless.

Consider Murdoch/FoxNews’ current predicament. They are currently waiting for the presiding judge to decide on a summary judgment, a complete “Get Out of Jail Free” card on the basis of the First Amendment … or some mobius-like legal convolution. Should that fail they will almost certainly have to try to settle. But at what price?

It is inconceivable that Fox would take their case to trial. Not with what has already gone public and internationally viral in the the intra-company communications that haven’t been redacted.

So it would seem that Dominion and SmartMatic are in a, um, strong position to demand ample compensation, which even at 50% of what they’re demanding could easily push $2 billion. A penalty that would almost certainly and deservedly enrage Fox/NewsCorp shareholders into a massive class action suit. Which is not to mention encouraging all sorts of other characters — cops and guards injured in the Jan. 6 riot, staffers subjected to the usual FoxNews in-house misogyny and coercions — to file their own suits.

This already colossal clusterf**k has set off speculation that — very much like “Succession’s” Roy family — someone else must be sacrificed for the good of the next quarterly earnings. (And no, I don’t pity Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs.)

“Succession” is of course very much a bubble entity. Just as Fox has mentioned next to nothing about all the texts of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity and others calling Trump an idiot and inferring that their devoted fans are clueless goobers hooked on bullshit. (I laughed so hard I wept at the e-mail from Carlson’s producer referring to their audience as a bunch “cousin f**kers.” That is so … so … “Succession”.)

The appeal, the dead-on, of-the-moment satire of the show is lost on MAGA nation. It simply doesn’t exist in their bubble. But that too is so of-this-moment. Two completely separate information/entertainment silos, with one capable of savoring a brilliant satire of a diseased reality and the other continuing to eagerly feed at a trough of prion-infused sewage.

I’ll have extra butter on my popcorn, thank you.

Yeah, It Could Have Been Worse. But We Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ Yet.

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The most oft-heard line yesterday — the day after election day — was, “Well. THAT could have been worse.” To which my standard reply was, ‘No sh*t’.”

Something happened that almost nobody quite predicted. Certainly not me. (The record will show I played my customary Low Expectation Game with remarkable brilliance.. Especially in this MAGA era, one must guard oneself psychologically. Assume the very worst and be heartened if it’s … not that bad.)

According to exit polls from different areas of the country, abortion — i.e. Republican gaming of the Supreme Court — actually was a driving force for Democrats. Crime and inflation played about as vigorously as “threats to democracy.” And … this is less well established by the current data … voters appear to have reacted quite negatively to what we’ll refer to as the tone of The MAGA Revolution.

While dozens-to-hundreds of utter trolls were re-elected, including Ron Johnson next door in Wisconsin, (and hoo boy, the second guessing there over running a slick, Obama-like black guy), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordon and various other leading lights of the modern conservative intelligentsia, places like Kentucky (!) voted to protect abortion and both Minnesota and Michigan hit a liberal “trifecta”, winning control of both houses of their legislatures and re-electing Democratic governors … you know those “tyrants” who bought into the COVID-19 hoax.

But while we take a (very) brief moment of comfort in a (slim) majority of sanity, we must turn our attention to … the next election … the campaign for which has already begun. Particularly on the Republican side.

Our raging, policy-averse conservative friends are already trying to digest the one-two punch of Donald Trump’s election night faceplant, and Ron DeSantis’ 20-point wipeout of Democrat(*) Charlie Crist. More to the point, practically overnight DeSantis has been effectively anointed as “The Next Crass White Hope” by Rupert Murdoch and other big money players.

So, that said, let me offer a fresh dystopian prediction.

Trump has already declared he will make “a big announcement” at Mar a Lago next week. Other than blaming Melania for picking Dr. Oz to run in Pennsylvania, the assumption is he will tell the world he is once again ready to return to the golf course, the White House dining room or the Presidency, whichever gives him more “executive time.” The Presaidency being the one that was stolen from him by pedophile satanist liberals and is owed to him through the divine hand of God. (Ask any white evangelical.)

But given DeSantis’ performance Tuesday night, his relative youth, his every-bit-as-cruel theatrics and Trump’s vividly evident failures in this week’s elections, DeSantis now has even less-to-no reason to concede the stage. And as I say, while Logan Roy, excuse me, Rupert Murdoch, has already made his choice known, you can bet other tycoon-level Trump benefactors, like Chicago Cubs owner Todd Ricketts, now see a far, far better bet in DeSantis than another date with a whiny, obese, flagrantly incompetent three-time election loser. (2018, 2020 and 2022 for those of you scoring at home.)

This morning’s Murdoch-owned NY Post.

I regard this as a given: As the pile-on against Trump from people like Murdoch continues, DeSantis will move ever closer to announcing his candidacy. Which presents you, me and anyone who can bear to watch with a solid, two-year race to the deepest pit of ugliness and cruelty.

And that’s just what they’ll do to each other. Never mind what they propose for immigrants and anyone who isn’t clustered in The Villages.

DeSantis’ situation is a bit trickier of course, in that he still can’t know how adhesive MAGA nation is to Trump and Trump alone.

DeSantis after all is not a TV celebrity. (Insiders regard him as “a weird dude.” Not that Trump isn’t. But Trump made MAGA laugh.) DeSantis is not a character gullible TV addicted geezers actually believed is fabulously rich, glamorous and all-knowing, despite constant, powerful evidence to the contrary.

Trump drew hundreds of thousands of astonishingly aggrieved chumps out from under rocks, largely because … they saw him playing a tough-talking rich guy on TV. But unlike The Big Money Boys who have keen olfactory lobes for losers and bad bets, pitiful MAGA nation may remain so deluded by Trump’s faux majesty that they will stick with him, and continue tithing their Social Security checks to “Donny 2024” come hell or high water.

Which makes DeSantis’ best play … the “Trump-is-a-Loser” card. “Loser” being the “brand” Trump, he of “so much winning” infamy, hates most.

DeSantis game will be to steadily, persistently convince the saddest of sad Trumpers that their former God-King is now a loser. A creaking hulk incapable of delivering them the meat they yearn for most, which isn’t lower gas prices or less crime but rather constant, ever more ugly slap-downs of woke liberals.

As for Trump, along with needing to hoover up every nickel of chump money he can for the 15-20 legal cases he’s fighting, (all of which should accelerate given his weakened political standing), the two facts we all know with absolute certainty are thEse:

1: Trump is simply not psychologically capable of responding to taunting competition with anything but more and worse ugliness.

And 2: He is can not under any circumstance admit and accept final, total defeat.

Not that DeSantis doesn’t deserve every bit of the ugliness and viciousness Trump will hurl at him.

In my many long years of despising and spleen-venting over cynical politicians, including of course Dick Nixon, I have never been more repulsed by a viable presidential contender than Ron DeSantis. This guy is truly, unequivocally rancid … and so content with being despicable, that ugliness and cruelty is actually what he’s selling.

So yeah, this one wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But if an obscene sh*t show is your idea of background entertainment, that act has already begun.

*Former Republican and treadworn politician Charlie Crist was the best the Democrats could do? Jeeeeezus.)