Post-judgement, does Fox News have a plan for 'Succession?'
Red Meat For Mushy Moderates
Two events that have presented themselves in recent days — one fact, one fiction — are oddly related. Both, however, shed a great deal of light on our culture and raise uncomfortable questions about its future.
First, season 4 of the widely acclaimed HBO series “Succession” began airing about three weeks ago. It had been widely anticipated by fans of the show such as yours truly. If you aren’t familiar with Succession, I would urge you to watch it. Spoiler alert: the patriarch, portrayed by the brilliant Brian Cox, dies in episode 3. And if you don’t have HBO Max (soon to be just “Max”), get it. For my money anyway, it’s the most useful entertainment streaming service on the market.
This week Fox News settled a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 Million, or nearly half the damages the company had originally demanded. After the 2020 election, Fox had allowed on-air personalities to interview Trump campaign officials who floated absurd conspiracy theories, some of which accused Dominion of having hackable machines that allowed votes for Donald Trump to be flipped in favor of Joe Biden.
During the discovery phase of the suit, multiple texts and emails from on-air Fox personalities surfaced indicating they knew the theories to be false. The bar for a public figure or company winning a defamation judgment is high because of the Supreme Court’s New York Times v. Sullivan decision, which limited the ability of public figures to win defamation suits to cases in which the plaintiff can prove either “actual malice” on the part of the defendant, or a “reckless disregard” for the truth. Because the evidence Fox was compelled to release was so damning, many legal observers said this might be one of the few such defamation cases in which a plaintiff could prevail.
Fox faces yet another suit from a different voting machine company, Smartmatic, making similar claims but asking for $2.7 billion, almost twice what Dominion had originally demanded. But the more interesting question is what becomes of the the Murdoch’s going forward?
It goes without say that Fox’s brand has been damaged, but will its audience fly the coop? Common sense tells us probably not. After all, Fox itself has scarcely covered the story, so it’s unlikely its viewers’ loyalties will be tested. And many of the other conservative media outlets Fox viewers might visit have also paid little attention to the story.
If Dominion marked the end of Fox’s troubles, I’d be tempted to say that the future for the network looks fine. But the Smartmatic suit could get even uglier, and the judgement/settlement more costly. The longer term question for stockholders will be not only the post-scandal valuation of the company but what happens after Murdoch, 92, dies. Will elder son Lachlan take over or will the board of directors cashier him and the rest of the Murdoch clan in favor of a fresh start?
Over at HBO, the future of Succession is also an unknown quantity, as the series hurtles toward the end of its fourth and final season. With a dysfunctional family at the helm of a faltering right-wing media empire, Succession is widely viewed as being modeled after Rupert Murdoch’s own News Corp, which owns not only Fox and its affiliates, but one of my personal favorite new sources, the Wall Street Journal.
Like Murdoch’s company, Royco Waystar is afflicted by nepotism at the highest levels. For this reason, I also consider Succession to be a send-up of the Trump family. After all, nepotism reigns not only in the Trump Organization, but in the White House, where the president employed his own daughter and son-in-law as high-level West Wing advisers, despite their obvious lack of qualifications. Interestingly, in both the Trump and Roy families, the lone daughter appears to be the smartest of the children.
I have few real bragging rights, but I will take credit for inventing the expression “nepotism is expensive” — if for no other reason than if you Google those words with quotes around them, you’ll find almost nothing. I was first inspired to use the derisive phrase in the newsroom of a small weekly newspaper up in the Berkshires where I was editor for 3½ years.
The publishers, an aging husband-wife ownership team of some 30 years, had in their infinite wisdom decided to hire their dopey 40-something son as deputy publisher, a title known in many other circles as “chief operating officer.” The apparent reason: the guy would have had trouble holding down a job without the protection of his parents.
He knew nothing about how to treat employees and was forever coming up with harebrained schemes to create new revenue streams, few of which amounted to anything, but one of which actually resulted in a lawsuit against the company. He routinely lost ad reps because he would take the most lucrative accounts from his sales staff, claim them as his own and grab the commissions.
His voice mail and email inboxes were often full, so clients and prospects could not leave messages for him. On two separate occasions, I walked from my car to the newsroom to unlocked it and start my day at 9 a.m. There I encountered vehicles whose drivers told me they been waiting in front of the building for appointments they had scheduled with him for half an hour earlier.
If I had to guess, I’d say the guy was costing his parents tens of thousands every year in lost accounts, mostly through sheer sloppiness and neglect. In other words, behavior that would get me or any member of my staff fired. His parents must have been aware of this, but they were willing to lose money on him because they loved him and he seemed unemployable elsewhere.
In other cases, important positions are filled because of the feeling that a relative could be better trusted than someone from outside the clan who is more experienced. President John Kennedy hiring his unqualified brother Robert to be attorney general comes to mind. In that case, you’re trading competence for loyalty — always a temptation any boss should avoid.
I get much the same feeling from watching the fictional Succession, and from observing the lives of the Murdoch and Trump families. Like most empires built on sleaze and nepotism — real or fictional — the ending will be ugly.
P.S. To be fair — and then I will stop running my mouth — there are cases in which the child of the owner is extraordinarily talented. Consider the case of marketing expert Donny Deutsch, whose father founded an advertising agency, hired his son and later handed it over to the younger Deutsch. Donny Deutsch actually made the company even better, eventually selling it for a whopping $265 million.
Have a great weekend!