This Fox News implosion is getting uglier by the hour
When Dominion agreed to a settlement with Fox News that didn’t immediately include an on-air apology, it felt like something was missing, as if there was another piece of information coming that we didn’t know about. Given that Fox News whistleblower Abby Grossberg had caught others at Fox illegally trying to hide evidence in the case, it seemingly guaranteed a win at trial for Dominion. So why would it settle instead?
Now it turns out Abby Grossberg may have blown up Fox News entirely – and Dominion may have decided to hurry up and settle while there was still a Fox News to get any money out of. We still don’t know the entirety of why Fox abruptly fired Tucker Carlson on Monday. But on Tuesday, Grossberg revealed that Carlson’s production office was being run in the kind of way that’ll likely hand her massive workplace misconduct damages. More to the point, Grossberg’s dozens of secret recordings – involving Fox News hosts and everyone from Ted Cruz to Rudy Giuliani – are now apparently part of Jack Smith’s criminal investigation.
Where does this go next? Who knows? It was one thing for Fox News to write a three quarter billion dollar check to Dominion. Now it’s had to fire its most profitable host in Tucker Carlson, which is such a problem from a balance sheet standpoint, stock market investors have now taken a half billion dollars off Fox’s market cap. Even with Carlson’s ouster, Fox will likely have to write a huge check to Grossberg. And everything that Grossberg has uncovered is reportedly now in the hands of Smartmatic, which keeps insisting that it’s taking this to trial. And that’s all before getting to the part where two Fox News hosts may have (at the least) become material witnesses in a Department of Justice criminal probe targeting Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.
I’ve felt all along that if Fox News was going to perish, it wasn’t going to be from one single blow or one single settlement or trial. It was going to be proverbial death by a thousand cuts. Fox has a certain amount of corporate cash on hand, and a certain size market cap. Rupert Murdoch has a certain amount of net worth. These are all extremely large numbers that you’d only be able to exhaust with major blow after major blow. A billion here. Another billion there. Criminal probes and controversial ousters further driving down the stock price as investors worry about the company’s viability. And all that damage causing people within Fox to turn on each other in desperate search of a scapegoat, as Murdoch apparently just did to Carlson – and not necessarily in a way that salvages anything.
All this destructive chaos, calamity, and collapse is now underway at Fox News, and the Dominion settlement was only nine days ago. What will Fox News look like in another nine days? Will Hannity still be there? Will additional whistleblowers and secret recordings emerge? Will more revelations come out that create additional billion dollar liabilities that put the company’s future financial viability in doubt?
Fox News won’t go bankrupt nine days from now, or even nine weeks from now. The company has too much remaining cash, market cap, and financial backing to go poof that quickly. But if the pattern of unraveling we’re now seeing keeps up, will there still be a Fox News nine months from now? That’s far from a safe bet. No wonder Dominion took the money while it could. If it had gone to trial and then gotten bogged down in a lengthy appeal, by then there might not have even been a Fox News to get damages from. Those words seem surreal to even type. But think about how surreal the current situation at Fox News seemed just nine days ago.
