Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd once called Rupert Murdoch a cancer on our society. Now, that cancer is trying to outlive its host. Starting on September 16, a Reno Court will decide whether he succeeds.
Rupert Murdoch is petitioning to change the terms of an irrevocable trust that gave his children equal say in the future of News Corp, which includes American newspapers and media outlets—the Financial Times, The New York Port and, of course, Fox News.
Whether lauded or despised, almost everyone agrees that Fox News’s influence on American lives has been profound, especially in what they believed about the pandemic that killed over a million Americans.
Why should Nevadans care? In 2022, a survey showed that 50% of Nevadans watched Fox News, the highest viewership number in the country. Coincidentally or not, Nevada also had .39% COVID-19 deaths per percentage of the population. With 12,084 lives lost, this was among the highest death rates in the United States.
Whether it was policy, people or misinformation, if the rate of COVID-19 deaths could have been lowered by sensible precautions and vaccines, to say its neighbor California’s rate of .26%, over 4,000 Nevadan’s lives might have been saved.
That is a lot of families who might still have their loved ones.
Watch it or not, Fox News affects your life.
Rupert Murdoch cannot change the terms of the trust unless it is done in “good faith” and for the sole benefit of all the trust’s beneficiaries.
The “good faith” angle would be solely tested given the other three children’s fury at their father’s final power play. Impartial observers note that Rupert intends to allow his son Lachlan to use the family trust to further Rupert’s political ideology rather than create a solid financial legacy for the members of the trust.
His preferred heir, Lachlan, is viewed as the most right-wing of his children. But, after debacles with One-Tel and the loss-making News Interactive, he also has a reputation in Australia for not being the brightest cookie in that jar.
His successes have come from having the means to buy into companies rather than build them. Elizabeth is considered the smartest of the Murdoch children. But as Australian observers note, she appears to have fallen foul of her father Rupert’s misogynistic tendencies.
Built by Roger Ailes, Fox News currently earns billions selling its brand of alternative facts and news to its loyal viewers. However, every ideology has its day. A savvy lawyer could argue that putting an ideologue in charge could deter the News network from pivoting should that market radically change in the post-Trump era.
Adept at reading and manipulating the ether of public opinion, Rupert was the master of the pivot, but Lachlan has not been tested in these waters. His first act was to use his power to sack his old foe, Roger Ailes, for sexual misconduct that had been known for years.
Lachlan’s stewardship of Fox News finances since his naming as Chairman and CEO in March 2019 has left many wondering whether he has the smarts to successfully traverse the line between “alternative facts” and defamation.
Under his stewardship, Lachlan allowed Fox News to go into overdrive with COVID-19, vaccine and election denial misinformation, seemingly without much thought for future consequences.
Nurses reported that “patients have denied the coronavirus existence or their own diagnosis up to their dying breath.” Some COVID-19 patients’ trust in Fox News anchors may have been fatal.
Despite spreading vaccine misinformation that could kill their viewers and election denial conspiracies damaging to democracy, Lachlan only fired Tucker Carlson after the $787.5m loss in the Dominion lawsuit–a lawsuit that a smarter CEO would have seen coming.
The distortions of Fox News commentary affect many lives. People who watched Fox News were less likely to take precautions against the COVID-19 virus. As the pandemic trundled on, deaths in red states, where people and policymakers were more likely to follow Fox News and other right-wing media, far exceeded blue states, where measures like wearing masks and social distancing were followed.
Even more bizarrely, Lachlan allowed this coverage to continue even after Anthony Fauci warned that failing to take simple precautionary measures could cost up to 100,000 American lives.
Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch was one of the first to take the Pfizer vaccine – for free under the UK medical system. Fox News calls that system a socialist disaster, yet it managed to vaccinate the UK population at record speed, while America had to wait until Biden’s election turbocharged the vaccine rollout.
Despite Lachlan Murdoch making the vaccine mandatory for Fox News employees, Tucker Carlson told his audience that the vaccine was not safe: “It’s clear that what is happening now, for whatever reason, is not even close to normal. It is not even close to what we see in previous years with previous vaccines. Most vaccines are not accused of killing large numbers of people…”
One has to wonder whether this is a time-bomb of lawsuits, that relatives of these people will wake up one day and decide that their loved one would still be alive if they had not trusted Fox News.
While one could argue that, with profit as a motive, knowingly supplying people with information that may cause their death is immoral, one could also say that given the scale of the pandemic with over a million lives lost, Lachlan was recklessly putting Fox News in serious financial jeopardy of future lawsuits.
Does this look like the man who could in good faith work for the sole benefit of all the trust’s beneficiaries?
Whatever the outcome, Reno will be at the center of the battle for America for the next two weeks.
Pauline Bleach is a writer who lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
Sources
- https://globalnews.ca/news/7467283/coronavirus-denier-deaths-nurse-hoax/
- https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/04/24/1089786147/covid-conspiracy-theories
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-data-is-in-fox-news-may-have-kept-millions-from-taking-the-coronavirus-threat-seriously/2020/06/26/60d88aa2-b7c3-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html
- https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-03-21/fox-news-host-tucker-carlson-on-why-he-sounded-the-alarm-on-the-coronavirus
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/21/tucker-carlson-outdoes-himself-vaccines-again/
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/06/tucker-carlsons-worst-vaccine-segment-yet/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10237459/
- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-deaths-and-cases-covid-19?time=2020-01-22
- https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths_select_32
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