Rupert’s Headline Risk

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Welcome back to In the Room, my biweekly private email on the inner workings of the media industry. Tonight, some pregame analysis on the Murdoch media trial of the century, why Fox and Dominion never settled, and a nascent Bill Kennard conspiracy theory.

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Rupert’s Headline Risk

As Fox’s Dominion case heads to trial, and Hannity and Tucker et al. face the prospect of testifying before a jury, many Murdoch-watchers are grumbling about why he didn’t settle in the first place.

DYLAN BYERS

Over the weekend, Fox News settled a defamation suit relating to its promotion of voter fraud conspiracies in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The network announced on Sunday that it had reached an “amicable” resolution with Majed Khalil, a Venezuelan businessman who had sued Fox and its former host, Lou Dobbs, for falsely claiming that he and other Venezuelans had orchestrated “a non-existent scheme to rig or fix the election” against then-president Donald Trump. It was the latest in a string of settlements that Rupert Murdoch, the chair of Fox Corp., has made over the course of his career to defuse scandals that might plague his media empire—from the U.K. phone-hacking scandal to the sexual harassment claims brought against Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and others by female employees at Fox News. The Washington Post recently reported that...

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