Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters
The two tracks of Rupert Murdoch’s debasement of journalism have converged into one extremely costly crisis for him. It’s clear that Murdoch’s last years as a media tycoon will be spent paying for his criminalizing of print journalism and his primetime television assault on truth.
Prince Harry’s onslaught in a London court on Murdoch’s British tabloids exposes the long and unstinting drain on the Murdoch purse of 16 years of litigation to settle claims by many thousands of victims of phone hacking. Coming on the heels of the $787.5-million payout by Fox News to settle the Dominion defamation case it means that what were once viewed as cash cows have turned into fiscal black holes—more cases against Fox are in the pipeline and paying off hacking victims could still take years.
This may not resemble repentance but it’s surely not the way he wanted to end a life building a world-straddling media empire.
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