“News Group Newspapers (NGN) cannot allow some of those documents to see the light of day” a person familiar with the case told the Daily Beast. Harry’s refusal to settle out of court-as thousands of other hacking victims have done because they lack his kind of wealth to support protracted litigation-means that damning documents uncovered during discovery would suddenly be made public in court. Moreover, Harry’s attack on the “grotesque and sadistic” London tabloids is likely to bring more reputational harm. This may not resemble repentance but it’s surely not the way he wanted to end a life building a world-straddling media empire. 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. 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. 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. The two tracks of Rupert Murdoch’s debasement of journalism have converged into one extremely costly crisis for him.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |