Last week the reigning king of prime-time cable, Tucker Carlson, was abruptly fired with no forewarning to him or his millions of nightly viewers. Most observers of the abrupt and unanticipated firing point to the $787.5 million Dominion defamation lawsuit as the reason, which is fine with owner Rupert Murdoch whose pride and reputation prefer that no one know the true reason he acted so abruptly.
To be accurate the Dominion lawsuit was an indirect factor in Rupert Murdoch’s decision to fire Tucker Carlson, but in reality, there is a potential lawsuit far more frightening to Murdoch, that has nothing to do with the Fox Fake News channel’s standard operating procedure of lie-for-pay propaganda that defames anyone or any corporation. In addition to the potential lawsuit that Murdoch secretly fears, as of March 20, 2019, he is now less than half the powerful titan that he once was leaving him very vulnerable to all of those he has run roughshod over in the past.
Some of those Murdoch has run roughshod over in the past are cable and satellite providers such as Comcast, Spectrum, DirecTV, and Cox. According to Media Matters Murdoch has been able to raise prices and charge disproportionately high carriage fees for the Fox News channel, due to his history of deceptive and aggressive negotiating tactics during contract renewal talks with cable and satellite providers. Ever since a successful 2009 boycott of 300 advertisers of Fox and former Fox TV host Glen Beck, Murdoch switched his focus to carriage fees to make up for the loss in ad revenue. Murdoch has been so successful at forcing disproportionately high carriage fees that the Fox News channel could have zero dollars in ad revenue and still have at least a 35% profit margin.
This fact alone puts a lie to the thought that Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson due to fear of losing advertising revenue, also since Carlson’s show was cable’s highest-rated and was one reason Murdoch could demand the high carriage fees, the economics would dictate he not fire Carlson. Fox is about enter negotiations with 3 major cable providers, Comcast, Spectrum, and Cox over carriage fees to renew their contracts to carry the Fox News channel, in past times this would give the media titan Rupert Murdoch, another revenue-based reason why now might not be the best time to fire cable’s highest-rated personality.
But now in 2023, Rupert Murdoch is a shell of the media titan he was before March 20, 2019, when he sold 300-plus channels in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, the Indian satellite television broadcaster Star India, the 20th Century Fox film and television studios, U.S. cable channels such as FX, Fox Networks Group, a 73% stake in National Geographic Partners, and a 30% stake in Hulu to the Walt Disney Company. Before that in June of 2018, he lost a 40% stake and a bid for the remaining 60% of the British satellite, broadcast, and streaming news service Sky News to American media conglomerate Comcast.
Owning all those assets before the sale to Disney and the loss bid to Comcast, combined with owning American cable’s most-watched news channel gave Murdoch immense power and stature not only in carriage fee negotiations with cable providers, it made Murdoch an untouchable force that one crossed at serious risk to their very existence in both the American and international entertainment and news media industry. As Murdoch enters carriage fee negotiations this year his pre-2019 $90 billion market cap Fox Corporation has been reduced to Fox Broadcasting, the 28 Fox local TV stations, the Fox News channel, the Fox Business channel, and two national Fox Sports channels with a $17 billion market cap.
Recognizing this weakened state Murdoch attempted to strengthen his hand by merging his $10 billion market cap News Corporation, which owns the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and book publisher HarperCollins with the Fox Corporation to create a combined company with a $27 billion market cap. Until he was rebuffed by major News Corp. shareholders who said HELL NO, don’t infect our company with the Fox Fake News channel.
This rare rejection of a Murdoch business maneuver occurred before the Carlson firing, leading 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch to the realization that since he no longer controlled a mega media empire he is no longer feared, which then caused him to start hearing footsteps. It’s those footsteps that forced Murdoch to fire the highest-rated cable personality, not the Dominion lawsuit, just before entering cable carriage fee negotiations, where he will need as much cable rating leverage as possible to secure a Fox carriage fee increase.
They are also the same footsteps Murdoch saw creep up on another media mogul Sumner Redstone. In 2016 under pressure from shareholders and facing a lawsuit challenging his mental competence, a then 92-year-old Redstone was forced to resign as executive chairman of CBS. Since the Dominion lawsuit has revealed that Murdoch personally oversaw and participated in the behavior that cost Fox $700 million, Murdoch fears it raises 2 questions about his mental competence and mental judgment. The first question is how could he personally participate in and allow such reckless behavior. The second question is knowing that he was personally guilty, why did he allow the Dominion case to ever proceed to the point that it did, before settling the case and avoiding all the damaging disclosures about himself and the Fox Corporation?
When these 2 business judgment questions are combined with the personal judgment question of how Murdoch, a 4-time marriage divorcee, announces he is getting married for a 5th time and 2 weeks later calls off the marriage, even Murdoch himself knows he looks incompetent and vulnerable to the same footsteps that dethroned Sumner Redstone. As a result of hearing those same dethroning footsteps Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson in a Hail Mary attempt to say to the world, I’m still mentally competent, my judgment is still sound, and I’m still the same guy who built the largest individually-controlled media empire in world history!!!
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