Tag Archives: Rupert Murdoch

Lights! Camera! Places! The Trial of the Century!

Posted on by
How the Fox News hosts show up in the Dominion lawsuit documents

With apologies to Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Gwyneth Paltrow and O.J. Simpson, the trial of the century, or the past 100 years begins Monday in Delaware. That’s when FoxNews, the prime purveyor of misinformation into our modern marketplace of ideas, has to explain why it was OK or “newsworthy” to defame Dominion Voting Systems in order to keep its ratings and revenue up.

I am not the only great legal mind baffled by the lack of a settlement in this case. Given the astonishing disclosures in the deposition/pre-trial phase, with popular Fox hosts chattering about how they “hate” Donald Trump, how “insane” the idea of a stolen election is, and how they have to keep up the dense screen of smoking bullshit to mollify their (none too bright?) viewers, how does anything get better in a court room when all the redactions are lifted and Sean Hannity … Sean Hannity … is put under cross examination?

I heard someone compare this trial — which may or may not be televised – more on that in a moment — to the 1925 Scopes/Monkey trial, where the legal system had to make a seismic judgment on the validity of evolution. (I can only imagine Hannity’s thinking on something as woke and science-y as that.) It’s a fair comparison.

There’s always a danger in over-blowing the importance of any legal event. But whether Fox is found guilty of recklessly and deeply cynically promoting a storyline lacking any evidence whatsoever — and certainly amplified the kind of rabid thinking that led to a deadly riot on the U.S, Capitol is, you know, kind of a bigger deal than if Johnny Depp was a drugged-out bastard or Gwyneth failed to get out of the way of a dude on a ski slope. This case is a bona fide cultural moment.

Theories and histories and courses are already being written and taught on the role Fox and other forums of right-wing transgressive entertainment have had on American culture. This trial, with Fox dealing from a very weak hand, has the potential to fully expose the shameless, naked cynicism of a wildly lucrative and influential enterprise … to those who choose to hear it.

As of today, Saturday, no decision has been made on media requests for the trial to be televised, a la Depp v Heard, or the People v O.J. or Derek Chauvin. It will be a startling decision if the request is denied.

I mean, could the people involved, from Rupert Murdoch on down through Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo and … Sean Hannity … be any more prominent public figures inspiring any greater legitimate public interest in how they defend what they presented … on television … to millions of credulous viewers? The answer is “no.”

The presiding judge has already made things more difficult for Fox by declaring that they can not argue that the near hourly infusion of steaming offal was “newsworthy” and therefore a legitimate journalistic effort on their part. (You know, let’s hear from both sides. You first and foremost, Rudy Giuliani.) The judge has also registered displeasure with Fox playing cute about Rupert’s role as some kind of out of touch figurehead of the operation with no day to day authority over what went on. (The judge has also ruled that the prosecution can’t draw lines from Giuliani and Sidney Powell, the Kraken lady, and what happened on January 6.)

As part of my prep work, reading up and listening to (abundant) punditry on the trial, I can offer the following.

1: It is likely it is Dominion, not Fox, who is refusing to settle, on the grounds that this case is so strong and that actual malice is so clearly evident. “You want to negotiate, Rupert? Our number remains a firm $1.6 billion, plus an on-air apology from Tucker Carlson.”)

2: If Fox loses this case, it will almost certainly keep on appealing, all the way to … wait for it … Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and the rest of the Supreme Court. The thinking being that this so clearly a defining, precedent-setting moment in First Amendment litigation and the privileges of journalism that it requires full and final judgment from … the highest and most incorruptible court in the land. (Expect Sam Alito to quote something from the Code of Hammurabi.)

3: Just as Fox is saying almost nothing about Clarence Thomas’ sleazy relationship with a billionaire, expect that the name of Bill Kennard will come up often, in court and on Fox’ prime time entertainment shows. Kennard is partner in the private equity crew that owns a majority share of Dominion Voting Systems, along with being a former Ambassador under Barack Obama, a contributor to both Obama and Bill Clinton as well as a board member for AT&T and a couple other mega corporations. Fox will not be able to resist trying to sell the idea that Kennard’s presence exposes just another woke, deep state, radical socialist, George Soros-inspired, ultra liberal attack on hard working truth tellers.

4: If Rupert Murdoch can’t get himself out of testifying based on his age and fragile health he’ll be key to dropping the guillotine blade on … others. I mean, the poor guy. He’s got to still be emotionally drained after e-mailing wife #3 that their marriage was over and dumping potential bride #4 for her religious zealotry. A guy like that can get on a private jet, hell, does Delaware even have a cement runway? But if he testifies, he will almost certainly spin the argument that those “others”, namely Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs actually believed the stuff he’s called “crazy” in conversations with Fox execs. How much do you figure those three are spendiong in legal fees these days?

5: Sans settlement, the trial could last several weeks. Weeks that the Fox audience will see precious little relating to the shameless perfidy of it’s most popular hosts, and plenty about how the justice system is rigged against free speech. Various scattered pundits, desperate for a contrarian angle on the progress of the trial, will clutch pearls and fret about the precedent this sets. Wild lawsuits against honest operations who try as best they can to get the story right, report accurately and quickly apologize for any inadvertent errors!

Ignore them. Those people are fools.

What makes the Fox – Dominion suit so fundamental and profound is that no other major television news corporation in history has gone so rogue with the journalism basics of truth telling as Fox News. They are a stark and colossal outlier to fair-mindedness and good faith.

If you’re in the news game, the only precedent you need to observe is not acting with malice in pursuit of making a buck, or a billion and a half bucks …annually … for years. … from an audience that doesn’t care if you’re lying to them.

Porn Star Pay Offs, Inciting Insurrection, Sexual Assaults, Bank Fraud, Election Conspiracy and FoxNews v. Dominion. But Still … Not Even an Indictment.

Posted on by

Can I see a show of hands on the question, “Do you believe no one is above the law in America?” Please. Hands? Anyone? I didn’t think so.

Of all the lofty assertions of our exceptional nature, the claim that be they poor or be they rich and connected, everyone faces the same justice in this country is arguably the most transparently false. It’s a nice aspirational goal, but utterly without basis as we can all see day after day in the American legal system.

In the news today we have the grand jury in Georgia releasing an abbreviated, redacted version of its investigation into Trumpist meddling/fraud in the 2020 election. This plays with Special Counsel Jack Smith’s range of investigations into Trump’s hidden trove of documents at Mar-A-Lago, his incitement of a riot on the U.S. Capitol and other, um, lesser matters. Then there’s everything going on in New York, with very, very long-running investigations into Trump’s tax and banking frauds, his assaults on various women, his hush-money pay-off of a porn star. And elsewhere, but related, FoxNews’ battle with Dominion Voting Systems, and the revelation yesterday that all of its prime time hosts concurred that guests regularly booked on their shows were not only touting flagrant lies about Dominion rigging the vote for Joe Biden but were saying stuff that was, “mind-blowingly nuts.”

The point here being that we are now … years … after the fact in all of these cases (except the documents) and — exactly like Wall Street’s gamed-out trading of 2008 — no one of any significant status has suffered any consequence for outrageously obvious crimes. The kind for which you or I would have been indicted, tried, bankrupted and sentenced within months.

This point is emphasized/hammered on by Elie Honig in his new book, “Untouchable: How Powerful People Get Away With It.” A former assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, Honig is IMHO, one the better/least hyperbolic/more reliably credible cable news pundits. I caught him recently on Charlie Sykes’ daily Bulwark podcast.

(I can’t recommend Sykes’ show highly enough. Once the Jason Lewis of Wisconsin, Sykes looked at the Republican embrace of Donald Trump and essentially said, “These people are out of their f**king minds”, bailed on the party, has done multiple mea culpas for his role in enabling anti-constitutional idiocy to run rampant and now leads daily, consistently clear-eyed, rational discussions of where cult-think has led us.)

In short, Honig’s view of the likelihood of conviction in any of these cases is not encouraging. He firmly believes Attorney General Merrick Garland has lost his window for effective prosecution and is desperately looking for any way to avoid indicting Trump … on anything … preferring someone else, like Fulton County District attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta do the deed first and take him off the hook. Jack Smith may have a more “aggressive” attitude toward Trump, but he answers to Garland.

Furthermore, and this is where the rubber really doesn’t hit the road, is the matter of securing convictions. Good luck, says Honig, getting a unanimous verdict in New York, much less Georgia on any case where 30% of the possible jury pool remains convinced Donald Trump is not only innocent of anything and everything but sent from God on high to save them from woke liberalism. Point being, says Honig, no “buck stops here” prosecutor, like Garland, wants/dares a (super) high profile acquittal on their record.

But sadly, there is no “sure thing” in American court rooms, other than you know some black kid caught selling dope on a street corner.

Honig didn’t get into the Fox-Dominion case on Sykes show, but here’s tech’s Grand Inquisitor Kara Swisher on her podcast, (Also highly recommended.)

The takeaway there being that Rupert Murdoch has the resources and legal firepower to whittle Dominion’s $1.6 billion claim down to a rounding error for Fox, maybe even with the standard legalese of “admits no wrong-doing” in its final settlement. A settlement that will get no play on Fox and quickly disappear from public memory, much like Bill O’Reilly’s $32 million pay-out to one woman for whatever he did to her. (The “non-consensual sex” and gay porn angles are always worth a headslap.)

This stark, relentlessy reaffirmed double standard for American justice has no obvious resolution. (Honig argues for Garland to try the case against Trump for the basic Constititional demonstration that acts so egregious and historical must be publicly adjudcated, lone MAGA juror be damned.)

My only suggestion would be for pundits and legal experts to at least do us the courtesy of A: stop asserting that “no one is above the law” in this country and/or B: disclaim that assertion whenever someone else “wonders” if that is the case.

Again, the Star Tribune and MPR Keep Their Distance from a Big, Volatile Story

Posted on by

As of last Friday, Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews/Fox Business News empire had mentioned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 3,181 times in 42 days, an average of 75 times a day. Murdoch’s media empire is similarly obsessed with my congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, to the point where last week his Manhattan paper, the New York Post, mashed her up — on a full-color cover — with the exploding World Trade Center.

The pile-on aimed at Omar naturally included Murdoch/Fox’s biggest fan/property, Donald Trump, who went on a Twit tear against Omar to the point that literally hundreds of other publications and public figures have expressed disgust at the attacks and fear for Omar’s safety. As of this morning U.S. Capitol security is “assessing” how much additional attention they need to give … a freshman congresswoman from Minnesota.

I’ve always placed faith in the notion that it’s pretty easy to see what people fear most simply by listening to what they talk about the most.

In the case of MurdochWorld the concept of fear is of course inseparable from their “assessment” of what their audience wants to hear. (What’s the First Rule of Show Biz? “Give the people what they want.”) In AOC and Omar, Murdoch-Fox has a twin tri-fecta for its predominantly old, white and male audience — i.e. two young, not-(entirely) white women.

As I say that part is easy to understand. Not that it makes the threat to Omar’s safety any less legitimate. Hell, less than two weeks ago FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that white supremacy was a “persistent, pervasive threat” to the security of the United States. No one following the news with intelligence and good faith denies what the FBI is correctly seeing. Not that Sarah Sanders or Trump or Stephen Miller or Fox (as far as I can tell) made so much as a peep about this FBI’s of fact.

But here’s the curiosity, locally, as far as the Ilhan Omar story goes. While the furor of what Omar said to a group in California in late March has been intense, to say the least, Minnesota’s largest news organizations have been treating it like a mildly curious side-show. Strib reporter Patrick Condon wrote a straight-down-the-middle-no-value-judgment-here piece on April 11, dutifully quoting, in a fair and balanced way, both sides of the controversy, giving each equal weight. Since then though, as Trump has twitted and the attacks on Omar by Murdoch Inc. have become an international incident, the Star Tribune has left the story to wire services, as though what? their DC correspondents have more important stories to cover?

This morning’s Strib has a tout to the latest Omar story (inside on A4) at the top left of the front fold. But the reporting therein is a product of The Washington Post.

Since the uproar over her “some people did something” speech the paper has taken no op-ed stance on the controversy. Likewise, MPR is content to use AP coverage  — of an international furor over Minnesota’s highest profile congressperson. (Obviously, MPR is never in the business of taking a values-based stand on anything, much less assessing the validity of what Omar said in California or the Fox media/White House attacks on her.)

The behavior of the Star Tribune and MPR on the Omar story bears a striking similarity to their “we have no fingerprints on this” non-coverage of accusations of staff abuse by Amy Klobuchar.

Which leads you to ask, “What is the similarity here?”

Is it that neither news room is yet aware of what the Fox/Trump machinery is saying about Omar? Of what papers from England to Australia are saying about the episode? Are both newsrooms too understaffed to prioritize a national/White House assault on … a metro area congresswoman? Or is it perhaps another one of those stories that screams “partisan dynamite” so loudly that it is most, um, prudently, farmed out to other more faceless, and more distant messengers, organizations who are less well-defined targets for wrath and antipathy?

I’m guessing it’s the latter.

The basic rub with this latest Omar story is that no fair-minded, dutiful reporter could listen to her entire California speech and come away with any interpretation other than what she was saying was that the entire world’s muslim community — 1.5 billion people — was being held responsible for the criminal actions of 19 people, “some people”, who attacked the US on 9/11. Likewise, no professional newsroom could look at the truly dangerous Murdoch/FoxNews/Trump re-framing and exploitation of those comments and see it as anything but the grossest and most reckless kind of exploitation.

Could Omar have spared herself some of the heat from the Murdoch/Trump echo chamber if she had instead said something like, “… 19 criminals, 15 of them privileged youth from our great ally Saudi Arabia, attacked us on 9/11 and as a result every muslim everywhere, all 1.5 billion of us, has been tarred as a radical terrorist. Did that happen to white, male Americans when Timothy McVeigh blew up that building in Oklahoma?”

Maybe.

But given the Fox/Trump obsession with selling muslim terror to their primary audience and the stark visual reality of Omar — a brown female in a hajib, I truly doubt it. Anytime she says anything, her words are a target for hyper-cynical retrofitting. Every day the Murdoch machine needs new fuel to fire the base.

Still, I fail to see how the Star Tribune and MPR, again, can see this latest full-frontal attack on, as I say, the most prominent person in the state’s House delegation, as a noisy sideshow most wisely left to others to cover.

Oh yeah, they’d take plenty of heat if they gave a full and accurate appraisal of Omar’s comments and the tone of the Murdoch/Trump reaction. But the thing is, that’s the news game. It’s what happens when you — not someone else — does your job and gives your audience the complete story.

If that scares you, find another line of work.

Obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes

Posted on by

At the moment I’m struggling with an Elizabeth Holmes obsession. No, not that kind of obsession. Rather the kind that can not understand how people like Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, nutjob Amway heiress Betsy DeVos, the Cox family of Cox Communications, the Waltons of WalMart, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, super-lawyer David Boies were conned by a twenty-something blonde with a weird voice who never blinked.

The story Holmes is all over the place at the moment. There’s a podcast, “The Dropout”, an HBO documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” by Alex Gibney,  the book most of this is based on, “Bad Blood”, by Wall Street Journal writer John Carreyou and soon … a Hollywood movie with Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, (to be directed by Adam McKay of “The Big Short” and “Vice”.)

Reduced to its most basic, Holmes claimed to have created a home espresso-size machine that could take a blood sample from a pinprick and run 200 analyses pretty much while you waited. Tapping the above-mentioned luminaries and more, she pocketed $900 million in investments, set up shop in Silicon Valley, hired dozens of employees, (as many marketing and branding gurus as scientists and engineers), and began building the intense cover-gal cult of blonde and blue-eyed Elizabeth … i.e. the long-awaited female Steve Jobs.

Everything about Holmes and her company, Theranos, is now in ruin. The $900 million is gone — $300 million to lawyers she was once paying at the rate of $1 million a month — and Holmes is facing charges of criminal fraud that could toss her in jail for 20 years. (Although, given what’s happened with Paul Manafort, she too may get off with probation for her “otherwise blameless life.”)

My copy of “Bad Blood” just arrived. But I watched Gibney’s doc, listened to a couple of hours of the podcast and inhaled a half-dozen Vanity Fair-like features. It’s an amazing, Hollywood-worthy story. (And the lead character is blonde!) But even after all that, I’m still left asking, “How?”

How did major league figures like Shultz, Kissinger, Boies, Slim, Murdoch and others buy into this con? Murdoch in particular invested $120 million. (DeVos was good for $100 million. Shultz, Kissinger and Boies were board members.)  On what possible basis?

I used to assume that before a canny old bastard like Murdoch threw down as much as a 20% tip he’d made damn sure he got everything and more than he was paying for. As in, for example, the best scientist-engineers he could find, with orders to Holmes that they were coming into her lab to verify that the machine — which she named “Edison”, after you know who — actually worked, or at the very least that there was bona fide science showing the concept was doable.

Clearly, none of that happened.

Being a wretched cynic and part-time pervert, my first theory was that the weird but-still-sort-of-attractive blonde was “encouraging” the old dogs with private, Robert Kraft-like consultations, even though at their age you’d worry that Shultz and Kissinger might have a stroke at the mere thought of it.

But apparently that isn’t true, either. The best explanation to date of this stunning gullibility on the part of some of the absolute lions of Spy vs Spy vs Spy insider diplomacy, international investment and skullduggery is that … she won them over, and kept them won over despite mounting evidence of fraud, purely on the basis of her family pedigree and Jobs-inspired bullshit.

In her family history there is a genuine medical hero, with a hospital named after him in Cincinnati and then there were her D.C.-based parents/power couple. (Her father was for a time — wait for it — an executive at Enron.) Somehow, maybe because when you get to a certain status in life you get lazy and place more value and trust in the pedigrees of who you know than real-time due diligence, the Shultzs, Kissingers, Boies, Waltons and Murdochs lent their name, reputation and money based on social association instead of gimlet-eyed investigation.

All to a con that on the face of it seemed far too good to be true.

Not that I worry for a second about any of them, you understand. It’s just that if these types of people — Harvey Weinstein’s go-to-guy Boies in particular sticks in my mind — are so judgmentally sloppy and easily deluded by a character like Holmes how can they purport to have any credibility on any other subject?

Part of the explanation for their immunity from shame and reputational disgrace is of course that most of them have their own media offices and control their own press. Stories such as this are fascinating because they are so rarely revealed to the public, much less so widely disseminated.

Still, not one of them hired an actual expert to find out if there was anything behind the bullshit … coming from the dropout child of pedigreed parents?

The revolution can’t come soon enough.

This Just In: Bill O’Reilly Full of [bleep]

Posted on by

Lambert_to_the_SlaughterMaybe the strangest thing about the still unfolding “Bill O’Reilly is a bullshitter!” story is that anyone with their wits still about them ever thought he wasn’t.

It is ridiculously entertaining to read David Corn’s Mother Jones piece, and now yesterday’s howler about Bill knocking on the door of a key JFK assassination figure at the very moment the guy inside blows his head off with a shotgun. Gripping stuff if not for the recordings of O’Reilly on the phone … from 1200 miles away. I mean, there’s a hilarious Ron Burgundy aspect to O’Reilly’s uber-manly tale of dragging an injured colleague to safety amid a murderous police rampage in Buenos Aires when in fact the “riot” was barely more than a routine demonstration, no one was killed and no CBS employee reported so much as a twisted ankle or required any level of medical attention.

I’d add that this is the stuff of full-on parody if it weren’t for the fact that Stephen Colbert built a career doing exactly that. (Can you imagine the delirium Colbert’s writers would be in with this run of red meat?)

Comparisons to Brian Williams’ self-immolation miss the central difference here pretty badly. Williams was employed with the explicit understanding that he was credible, trading only in the facts as best as NBC could report them. Bill O’Reilly is the key mouthpiece in Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes’ enormously profitable political campaign masquerading as a news organization. Williams’ viewers were justifiably disappointed to learn of his bizarre embellishments. O’Reilly’s viewers, I strongly suspect, do not care in the least what he has embellished or flat-out invented, as long as he continues to attack Murdoch and Ailes’ and their designated enemies.

With that in mind it’ll be easier to understand why FoxNews not only isn’t going to “investigate” O’Reilly’s superhero imaginings, and is instead gleeful at a fresh opportunity to attack the “guttersnipe liberal media” and threaten straight news pinheads with bodily harm. It plays directly into the fascinating psychology wherein ardent zealots confronted with information that unambiguously contradicts their beliefs double down on their erroneous thinking rather than concede and align themselves with reality.

Prediction: O’Reilly’s ratings will spike over the next month.

This incident brings two things back to mind.

1: Liberals take FoxNews far too seriously, and I fully admit my complicity on that point. For years I’ve fulminated myself into apoplexy at Fox’s shameless absurdity and cynicism, convinced that the network was an aggressive form of cancer soon to terminate all higher brain function among the credulous masses. But somewhere after the 2012 elections, when all of Fox-think was revealed to be astonishingly incompetent at both campaigning and campaign analysis, I settled down. Their bona fides, such as they are, are all but completely limited to an old, embittered demographic of rapidly diminishing electoral significance.

Here’s Frank Rich not long ago on the topic.

I suspect the irrelevance of FoxNews to the 300 million Americans who are not lapping it up 24/7 has something to do with Jon Stewart bailing on “The Daily Show”. FoxNews as a punchline is a settled, cliched commodity.

2:  Blogging colleague Joe Loveland passed this on yesterday. It’s the annual Pew survey on America’s most and least-trusted broadcast news operations. In the realm of what we’ve come to expect the survey’s authors write:

“Fox News is both the most trusted and least trusted name in news. 35% of Americans say they trust Fox News more than any other TV news outlet, followed by 14% for PBS, 11% for ABC, 10% for CNN, 9% for CBS, 6% each for Comedy Central and MSNBC, and 3% for NBC. It leads the way because of its continuing near total support among Republicans as the place to go for news- 69% of Republicans say it’s their most trusted source with nothing else polling above 7%.”

Think of that. 69%. Pretty well proving Murdoch and Ailes’ show biz genius at giving their people the campaign message they want.

But in the context of Bill O’Reilly’s naked bogus-ness, it also explains why he’ll suffer no reputational damage. Fox’s world is designed as an “us v. them” battlefield. O’Reilly is the high profile field marshall under constant attack from common enemies. To support Bill without equivocation is to be a loyal soldier.

Contrast that, as Joe pointed out, with the dismal all-in loyalty liberals have to their alleged message-bearer, MSNBC.

“It’s interesting that while Fox News and MSNBC are often thought of as equivalent, Fox News is by far and away the most trusted source of GOP voters while MSNBC is only tied for 4th among Democrats.”

The underlying point here is that liberals and conservatives affiliate with and consume partisan messaging in vastly different ways. Other psychological studies note conservatives’ far higher levels of trust in authority, e.g. Bill O’Reilly, and liberals’ elevated levels of skepticism toward leadership/herd thinking. One group embraces the minister-to-parish relationship. The other tolerates it in small doses.

Second prediction:  Bill O’Reilly will soon reveal that it was he who shot Osama bin Laden and to thunderous applause will vilify any left-wing guttersnipe who says otherwise.