The most powerful person in traditional media globally is Rupert Murdoch, the Australian owner of hundreds of media outlets, including The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun in the UK, and of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post in the US, plus a string of Australian titles.
The feather in his cap, though, is Fox News, the absurdly right-wing US TV channel that faithfully sided with Donald Trump in his bid to undo the 2020 US presidential election results by claiming electoral fraud.
Murdoch may no longer be the outright owner of 21st Century Fox entertainment businesses, having sold his main interest for US$66 billion in 2017 to Walt Disney, but the defamation saga currently being played out in the US is worthy of a new silver-screen feature on the backroom politics of media moguls and their minions.
The main story would be about what a mogul might do to stay on top and then, when faced with a US$1.6 billion lawsuit, just who gets fed to the lions in order to save the family silver. The backstory would be Trump's attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
If you are a movie buff, the brilliant, Oscar-winning Citizen Kane (1941, black and white, about the making and undoing of a US newspaper magnate) would be near the top of your list of classic films. And there too would be multi-Oscar-winning All the President's Men, the 1976 cine account of how the icons of modern journalism Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post successfully followed a trail to uncover the Watergate scandal and bring down a corrupt president.
Then Republican President Richard Nixon's re-election team organised a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, stole sensitive documents and wiretapped the place. The subsequent White House cover-up, which involved bribery sanctioned by the president and other abuses of presidential power, brought down the re-elected Nixon.
Of course, Trump lost the 2020 election despite claiming it was rigged, but the plot thickened in an unexpected way - good plots always surprise - when Dominion Voting Systems, the company that owned the electronic voting technology, filed a suit against Fox News for defamation by allegedly 'recklessly' broadcasting false claims of a fraudulent election system that has damaged the company's reputation. Now, $1.6 billion is a lot of money, even for 92-year-old Mr Murdoch, the last remaining 20th-century media baron, with an estimated net worth of US$21.7 billion (March 2022), one of the richest 100 people in the world.
In defence of Fox News, a barrage of e-mails and other documents have been released in the current pre-trial stage to show that Fox Corporation chairman Murdoch and Fox News executives and producers, behind the scenes, disbelieved Trump's claims.
However, damningly, Fox broadcast them anyway in order to keep Trump and valuable advertisers onside. Even Tucker Carlson, who appears to be the most unbelievably ardent Trump on-screen supporter,
