Mary Altaffer/AP Photo
Is there an investor out there with shares in the Fox Corporation—the publicly traded holding company that owns Fox News and is headed by Rupert Murdoch—who might want to sue the company for losing $787.5 million of the shareholders’ money in its agreement with Dominion Voting Systems? An agreement that it entered into for fear that further exposure of its deliberate falsehoods would damage the company and its value even more than the pretrial disclosures already had? A forfeiture of the shareholders’ money prompted in part by CEO Rupert Murdoch’s fear that his having to appear in public, on the stand, under oath, testifying that he knew the claims of Dominion chicanery and Trump’s victory were completely false and yet let them go out over the air might make him the subject of ridicule and contempt? And would surely make him look less the master of the universe that he wishes to be seen as? Was that the proximate cause of Fox reducing its assets by nearly a billion dollars? Was preserving Murdoch’s ego really worth that big a hit to Fox investors?
Or was it the fear that Fox News’s falsehoods were so egregious and harmful that a trial would result in the jury upholding Dominion’s claim for $1.6 billion, or perhaps, given the magnitude of Fox’s falsehoods, even more in punitive damages?
Such a suit could contend that by deliberately choosing to disregard the truth so egregiously, Fox had made itself vulnerable to lawsuits that would reduce the value of the shareholder’s investment, and had in fact reduced it by nearly $800 million. And that telling lies so big and corrosive that it seemed that Fox had made a careful study of the career of Joseph Goebbels was a virtual invitation for some aggrieved party to take it into court.
Fox could, of course, counter that it was only by indulging in its post-election lies that it could maintain its audience and, thus, its share value—that simple fiduciary responsibility required it to bathe its viewers in preposterous fabrications. (In fact, Tucker Carlson emailed as much, as the pretrial disclosures revealed.) That the network’s assessment of its audience was that Jack Nicholson line in A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth!” And that therefore, it was obligated to cocoon its viewers in a net of lies.
Just compelling Fox to make that defense would be a victory of sorts, whether or not the shareholder suit succeeded.
Doubtless, many Fox shareholders own stock in the company because they support the company’s politics and its impact on the voting public. But surely, there have to be at least some shareholders who—like shareholders in a normal company—are there for the money, which the network’s misdeeds just compelled it to toss out the window to some obscure company that never would have sued if Tucker, Sean, Laura, Lou, Maria and company hadn’t gone so far out on an obviously shaky limb.
Where are those “activist investors” (a prize-winning euphemism if ever there was one) who swoop down on companies that don’t shower shareholders with sufficient payments? Where’s Carl Icahn? Where’s Bill Ackman? Where are the guys who rage at companies for paying their employees adequately rather than shoveling that money to their big-time investors? This could be the one opportunity for these shakedown artists to shake down a mogul even more repulsive than themselves. C’mon, guys! Just this once, greed and good would rhyme. This is not something you should let slip away.
