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APRIL 20, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

It's Time for a Shareholder Suit Against Fox

The squandering of nearly a billion bucks due to management's
misconduct should prompt a shareholder revolt.

Is there an investor out there with shares in the Fox Corporation-the
publicly traded holding company that owns Fox News and is headed by
Rupert Murdoch-who might want to sue the company for losing $787.5
million of the shareholders' money in its agreement with Dominion
Voting Systems? An agreement that it entered into for fear that further
exposure of its deliberate falsehoods would damage the company and its
value even more than the pretrial disclosures already had? A forfeiture
of the shareholders' money prompted in part by CEO Rupert Murdoch's
fear that his having to appear in public, on the stand, under oath,
testifying that he knew the claims of Dominion chicanery and Trump's
victory were completely false and yet let them go out over the air might
make him the subject of ridicule and contempt? And would surely make him
look less the master of the universe that he wishes to be seen as? Was
that the proximate cause of Fox reducing its assets by nearly a billion
dollars? Was preserving Murdoch's ego really worth that big a hit to
Fox investors?

Or was it the fear that Fox News's falsehoods were so egregious and
harmful that a trial would result in the jury upholding Dominion's
claim for $1.6 billion, or perhaps, given the magnitude of Fox's
falsehoods, even more in punitive damages?

Such a suit could contend that by deliberately choosing to disregard the
truth so egregiously, Fox had made itself vulnerable to lawsuits that
would reduce the value of the shareholder's investment, and had in
fact reduced it by nearly $800 million. And that telling lies so big and
corrosive that it seemed that Fox had made a careful study of the career
of Joseph Goebbels was a virtual invitation for some aggrieved party to
take it into court.

Fox could, of course, counter that it was only by indulging in its
post-election lies that it could maintain its audience and, thus, its
share value-that simple fiduciary responsibility required it to bathe
its viewers in preposterous fabrications. (In fact, Tucker Carlson
emailed as much, as the pretrial disclosures revealed.) That the
network's assessment of its audience was that Jack Nicholson line in

**A Few Good Men**: "You can't handle the truth!" And that therefore,
it was obligated to cocoon its viewers in a net of lies.

Just compelling Fox to make that defense would be a victory of sorts,
whether or not the shareholder suit succeeded.

Doubtless, many Fox shareholders own stock in the company because they
support the company's politics and its impact on the voting public.
But surely, there have to be at least some shareholders who-like
shareholders in a normal company-are there for the money, which the
network's misdeeds just compelled it to toss out the window to some
obscure company that never would have sued if Tucker, Sean, Laura, Lou,
Maria and company hadn't gone so far out on an obviously shaky limb.

Where are those "activist investors" (a prize-winning euphemism if ever
there was one) who swoop down on companies that don't shower
shareholders with sufficient payments? Where's Carl Icahn? Where's
Bill Ackman? Where are the guys who rage at companies for paying their
employees adequately rather than shoveling that money to their big-time
investors? This could be the one opportunity for these shakedown artists
to shake down a mogul even more repulsive than themselves. C'mon,
guys! Just this once, greed and good would rhyme. This is not something
you should let slip away.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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