Just a flesh wound, declares Jack Shafer, who titles his piece Rupert Wins Again.
Getting out from under all of that hurt for $787.5 million is a kind of bargain for a company with a market cap of $17.3 billion. Fox has $4.1 billion in cash and warrants on hand, says the New York Times... [Murdoch always pays] his way out of jams. The Dominion case and the similar Smartmatic case that awaits its place in the defamation docket, are not aberrations for Fox. It’s all a part of Murdoch’s way of doing business.
UD‘s got no doubt Murdoch, like his fellow slashed and amputated knights Berlusconi and Trump, remains a fully intact legend in his own mind. Smartmatic, just to take one of many lawsuits Rupert faces, demands 2.7 billion and will, you figure, get one billion. Doing the big math on Fox/Murdoch is always going to be tricky (he apparently spent 1.7 billion to get rid of his second wife), but even with a ton of assets the enterprise absurdly endlessly drains – and publicly humiliates – itself in what only a nut would call a winning strategy. Just for starters:
[T]he condemning depositions of Fox anchors and executives, admitting that they knew their stories were false and sources were ludicrous, opens Fox’s board to serious claims of negligence and breaches of fiduciary duty—violations of a board’s duty of care and duty of loyalty under Delaware corporate law.
But there’s so much more.