The defamation case filed by the Dominion voting machine company against Fox News was settled on Tuesday, April 18, 2023, the day when the trial was supposed to begin, for a whopping $787 million. That Fox wanted and needed to settle the case was evident since the discovery process had revealed all manner of highly damaging information that the upper echelons at Fox knew the serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) claims of election fraud and of Dominion’s involvement were without merit even as they publicly supported them.
Fox News’s most high-profile personality Tucker Carlson was abruptly fired on Monday, April 24, just six days later, reportedly on the direct orders of Rupert Murdoch, even though Murdoch reportedly liked Carlson and got on well with him on a personal level and he brought in good ratings and revenue for the network.
The close juxtapositioning of the two events strongly suggested that they were connected but there was nothing in the settlement agreement that said it was the case and both Dominion and Fox were tight-lipped about it. While Carlson had denigrated SSAT and said that he hated him passionately and described SSAT’s lawyer Sydney Powell as lying and her claims as insane, he was yet willing to go along with the fraud claims because Fox viewers were angry with the network for calling Arizona for Joe Biden and effectively dooming SSAT’s chances of winning. But while Carlson was the star of the network, others like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Maria Bartiromo and others were also promoting the Big Lie. So it was not clear why Fox fired its star while keeping the rest.
Since the Dominion settlement said nothing about firing Carlson, it was assumed that some unknown reasons were behind the action. Operatives at Fox leaked news that suggested other reasons for the firing, such as the bad work climate created by Carlson, his withering denigration of top management, misogynistic comments, and other innuendos. But nothing definite was revealed.
We may now have an answer to this puzzle. In his new book The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, Michael Wolff lays out why Carlson’s was fired. Wolff is not the most reliable of reporters but what he describes is plausible and is the only theory that I have heard to date that makes any kind of sense.
It hinges on several factors. One is that Fox and Murdoch desperately wanted to avoid going to trial. The pre-trial release on internal memos and conversations at Fox were bad enough. They did not want to have their prominent personalities and Murdoch himself to face the additional humiliation of their top people being cross-examined under oath. So they were desperate to settle and Dominion knew this and was holding out for a billion dollars. But a billion was a psychological threshold that Murdoch would not cross, so Fox offered to settle for less but secretly threw in a sweetener and that was that Carlson would also be fired. But Fox did not want that to be part of the written settlement arrangement since it would enrage their viewers. But why would Dominion take that offer on faith? It turns out that they did not have to. According to Wolff, when settlements are reached, there is a period of sometimes up to one week given to both parties to officially file the settlement document with the court. During that time, parts of the deal which were privately agreed to but not part of the written agreement must be implemented by the parties. If they do not do so, the deal can be called off by the other party by not filing the settlement with the court. So Wolff’s account suggests that Carlson’s firing six days later was part of such an unwritten agreement.
Here are the relevant excepts from the book.
The positions were: Fox’s — or Murdoch’s — continued determination not to go to a billion but with anything under it fair game, and Dominion’s expectation that it had considerable room to go above $500 million with the hope that it could yet break through Fox’s billion-dollar resolve.
There was also a sweetener: putting Hannity on the table. The Fox News host would be fired concurrently with the settlement. Murdoch had always wanted to get rid of Hannity, and perhaps MAGA insider Hannity’s scalp would make Dominion more likely to accept a nine-figure settlement? It was a thing they might have done without this suit, and might do in the future anyway. Still, rolling it into the deal was convenient psychologically and tactically.
But it would be a gentleman’s agreement. There would be no official side letter about firing Hannity, no real acknowledgment even in the settlement that they were doing this as part of the deal. In one sense, there would be no enforcement mechanism. But, practically speaking, after a settlement is reached, the parties have a period of time, often up to a week, to file with the court. Technically, a settlement could come apart in that time if anticipated conditions or actions — for example, a gentleman’s agreement — were not honored. So Fox would make its gesture, this coincident event, within a week.
…Hannity had been offered as a sweetener. But Carlson, the ratings leader, increasingly the real, hard-core face of the new demagogic right wing, was sweeter. He won’t go to a billion. He just won’t. Not going to happen. It’s Rupert. You know Rupert and money, when he digs in. So that’s it. We’re here.
Seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars. There it is. Far and away the largest defamation award ever made, outside of Alex Jones — and Jones isn’t good for it and we are. And while we’re not making this a part of anything — he can’t live with that — we do understand what you want and things will happen. It will happen by the end of the week. It will be done.
Can you live with that? Can you live with $787 million … and Carlson?
As I have said, Wolff is not the most reliable of sources. But his account is plausible and fits the facts as we know them.
Another possible reason for firing Carlson could be that he was getting to big for his britches anyway. Murdoch has said outright that he hires “types,” not individuals or personalities; and Tankie Tucks became too much of a personality in his own right for the boss’s taste.
(Notice how Murdoch is now supporting Glenn Youngkin for President? That’s the same rationale at work: Youngkin fits the “type” Murdock wants — rich, but also sufficiently “populist,” white, handsome, bland, and dutifully repeating all the current talking-points without sounding too crazy or unpredictable or in danger of going off-script.)
” for a whopping $787 billion.” -- bit of a typo. It was actually 787 Million.
[Thanks! I have corrected. -- Mano]
I wish that error had been in the court’s ruling, just to give old Rupe a heart-attack…
Firing Carlson took the Dominion settlement/admission out of the headlines immediately and across the nation.
I suspect that that (possibly combined with the keep-the-underlings-under-control hypothesis from Raging Bee @ # 1) motivated Murdoch’s “snap” decision -- and it worked.
That seems to be a pretty deep misunderstanding of the electoral process.
Prl, of course. “Fox viewers”, as you quoted.
(Joking because the subject of your comment is ambiguous, but I know what you mean)
The best interpretation you could give it is anger that Fox would believe the official “lie”.
The worst interpretation is that the idiots really do think cause and effect are backwards.
They’re Fox viewers after all. Hard to imagine which might be the majority.
This is something that has puzzled me in many US elections, perhaps those with more knowledge can explain: what is the big deal with people/networks “calling” states? Who gives a monkey’s, and more importantly, why? Ultimately, it’s just some person or organisation saying they *think* candidate X has beaten candidate Y. It doesn’t matter, it has no bearing on the actual outcome of the election… does it?
Then again, I may be being hopelessly naive because I live in a country where elections are decided on numbers of votes cast on the day, rather than by court cases days or weeks later.
It’s always struck me that in this situation “the network” is like a person sitting in a bar somewhere with no TV or internet connection, guessing the result of a sports game happening in a different city that finished an hour ago. Their opinion, however informed or passionately expressed, however detailed or based on past performance or statistics or whatever, is entirely irrelevant to the settled fact of what actually happened -- so why would anyone care?
@ sonofroj
It’a combination of the call costing Fox ratings, and a misguided sense of Fox being disloyal to Cheetolini. It doesn’t need to make sense, we’re talking about Republicans. X-D
Inside the Panic at Fox News After the 2020 Election -- The New York Times
https://archive.is/7xrJY
sonofrojblake @8: the reason that the TV networks do it is that they want to attract more viewers. Viewers are their product, advertisers are their customers.
The question is why viewers would be attracted, and it’s not hard to guess that it’s the suspense. Who’s ahead right now? What predictions can we make from the trends? What’s the likely outcome in states where the polls have closed and vote counts are starting to trickle in? The networks structure their programs to maximize the suspense.
@ 8 sonofrojblake
This is something that has puzzled me in many US elections, perhaps those with more knowledge can explain: what is the big deal with people/networks “calling” states?
Probably time zones. In Canada, before the internet, it was illegal to broadcast/report riding results until the last poll in the West had closed. The idea was that if an erection looked to be going one way in Atlantic and Central Canada it might well affect voter turnout in the West. Polls St. John’s Newfoundland close 4.5 hours earlier that in Victoria British Columbia.
sonofrojblake @#8,
In US elections, the official result is not determined until all the precincts have fully reported the results and it has been checked. That can take days and even weeks. But various media organizations have teams of statisticians who have databases of past results and how they vary precinct by precinct and they do pretty sophisticated analyses of the results as they come in and at some point, if they feel they have enough data to predict with certainty the outcome, they will ‘call’ the result and they are usually right. Sometimes they can do this with just a few percent of the votes tallied. The Associated Press is the outfit that most people think is the most reliable.
Mano,
Otherwise not. But that’s the visuals.
Competitiveness, first mover advantage, network effect outcome possibly being part of the motivation to beat other networks to the punch.
Had it been a bad call, it would have been good for Fox, as it turns out.
Alas, it was the correct call, and thus it was bad for Fox, as it turns out.
They tried to fix the bad, but as it turns out they had to pay that “$787 million” mentioned in the OP. So far, of course.
Karma.
“the official result is not determined [for] days and even weeks.”
This is another thing I don’t get. What the fuck are you people up to? In 2019 the UK tallied about 32 million in about 14 HOURS. This was not unusually quick.
<clickety-click>
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/its-normal-not-to-know-the-official-results-on-election-night-heres-why
There you go, sonofrojblake
Precisely what I’d expect of you -- patronising and entirely useless. I know perfectly well what mechanisms are in place that cause the ludicrous delay -- the massive decentralisation, the insistence on having multiple elections for different, more trivial things on the same days as the presidential vote, the ludicrous time allowed for mail-in ballots to arrive AFTER election day.
Trump was right when he wrote “U.S. is a laughing stock on Elections.” Quite apart from anything else, he won one, which is self-evidently hilarious (unless you live there…).
The point of the question, which obviously sailed over your head, was not “what are the superficial causes of the delay?”, but rather “why are these obviously stupid things not fixed in a nation with any pretension to being advanced?”. I suspect the answer is that the powerful like it complicated and difficult, and the people don’t get a say.
sonofrojblake, when you try to be condescending, you really make a farce of it.
First, you can’t manage to ask the question you now claim you wanted to ask, and second, you imagine that a pretence to be advanced entails a different political election system.
Heh.
Why do you imagine they are not fixed, as in, they are broken?
They have the system they want, obviously.
Did they not, they would change it. Quite doable.
Sure, it’s different to what you have (or to what we have here in Oz, you know, a preferential voting system and mandatory voting.
The former allows for more than two parties to have some significance, the latter avoids the problem of getting a special interest group to vote more than the norm.
Unlike in the rest of the world?
Heh. Sure, suspect such simplistic stuff. I can’t stop you.
PS Amusing system, to be sure.
“Between 73 and 79 days after the presidential election, the president-elect of the United States is inaugurated as president by taking the presidential oath of office. The inauguration takes place for each new presidential term, even if the president is continuing in office for a second term.”
(Why Between 73 and 79 days after the presidential election?
And by that I don’t mean the actual question I asked, of course; rather, why it hasn’t been fixed)
(Why is the 2nd Amendment interpreted the way it is?
And by that I don’t mean the technical details of the history of it and the Supreme Court decisions and the judges who made them and that sort of stuff, but rather why it hasn’t been fixed)
Heh
Why is the 2nd Amendment interpreted the way it is?
Which interpretation are you asking about? The one that says the right to keep and bear arms is limited by the statement of purpose in the first half of the sentence? Or the one that just plain ignores the first half of the sentence?
This one, Bee:
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-ii/interpretations/99