Business of Media
Murdoch admits Fox hosts ‘endorsed’ Trump’s 2020 election lie
Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative Fox Corp media empire that owns Fox News, has acknowledged that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump, court documents released on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) showed, report The New York Times’ Katie Robertson and Jeremy Peters.
“They endorsed,” Murdoch said under oath in response to direct questions about hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, a legal filing by Dominion Voting Systems said.
“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it in hindsight,” he added, while also disclosing that he was always dubious of Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.
Asked whether he doubted Trump, Murdoch responded: “Yes. I mean, we thought everything was on the up-and-up.” At the same time, he rejected the accusation that Fox News as a whole had endorsed the stolen election narrative. “Not Fox,” he said. “No. Not Fox.”
Murdoch’s remarks, which he made last month as part of the $US1.6 billion ($2.4 billion) defamation lawsuit against Fox by Dominion, added to the evidence that Dominion has accumulated in an attempt to prove its central allegation: The people running the country’s most popular news network knew Trump’s claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election were false but broadcast them anyway in a pursuit of ratings and profit.
Crikey examines Rupert Murdoch’s admission that Fox News hosts ‘endorsed’ US election lie
Lawyers for Crikey, which is being sued for defamation by Lachlan Murdoch, are considering the implications for its defence of the admission by Rupert Murdoch that Fox News hosts endorsed Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 US election was stolen, reports Guardian Australia’s Amanda Meade.
Crikey’s publisher Private Media has confirmed the deposition in the US defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News is being examined by its legal team ahead of Crikey’s defence being filed next month, but declined to comment further.
The federal court trial has been set down for October and will run for three weeks, with Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of Fox Corporation, expected to attend at least some of the proceedings. Murdoch was granted leave last month to expand the case to add Private Media’s chairman Eric Beecher and its chief executive Will Hayward as respondents.
Murdoch launched defamation proceedings against the independent Australian news site last year over an article published in June that referred to the Murdoch family as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the US Capitol attack.
Paramount turned down $3 billion-plus offer for Showtime from former executive
Former Paramount Global executive David Nevins offered to buy Showtime for more than $3 billion in recent weeks but was turned down by Paramount executives, according to people familiar with the situation, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Toonkel.
Nevins’s approach, which was backed by private-equity firm General Atlantic, was the latest in a number of offers Paramount has received over the past few years for Showtime, people familiar with the matter said. Other suitors included Mark Greenberg, another former Showtime executive who most recently ran the premium network Epix, and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., some of the people said.
Paramount has decided to hold on to the premium channel and streaming service while it seeks cost savings and revenue from folding the Showtime streaming service into Paramount+ this year, as The Wall Street Journal first reported. As part of that change, Paramount Global—home to the Paramount movie studio, the Paramount+ streaming service and cable channels including Nickelodeon and Comedy Central—will increase the price of the ad-free premium tier of Paramount+, which will include the Showtime programming, to $11.99 from $9.99.
See Also: Paramount ANZ announces new-look sales team after restructure
Hundreds of BBC journalists to strike on Spring Budget day over local radio cuts
Hundreds of BBC journalists across England will strike on the day of the Spring Budget in opposition to cuts to the broadcaster’s local radio services, reports Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt.
TV, radio and online journalists will begin a 24-hour strike at 11am on Wednesday 15 March, the day of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s first Spring Budget, the National Union of Journalists said on Tuesday.
At the end of that action, journalists will begin a period of “work to rule”, in which they work only their contracted hours and duties.
Further strike dates are likely, with the dates of the local authority elections in England (Thursday 4 May), the coronation of King Charles III (Saturday 6 May) and the Eurovision song contest in Liverpool (Saturday 13 May) all being considered by the NUJ.
Social Media
Meta-funded online tool lets people remove their explicit images from the internet
“Once you send that photo, you can’t take it back,” goes the warning to teenagers, often ignoring the reality that many teens send explicit images of themselves under duress, or without understanding the consequences, reports AP.
A new online tool aims to give some control back to teens, or people who were once teens, and take down explicit images and videos of themselves from the internet.
Called Take It Down, the tool is operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and funded in part by Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
The site lets anyone anonymously – and without uploading any actual images – create what is essentially a digital fingerprint of the image. This fingerprint (a unique set of numbers called a “hash”) then goes into a database and the tech companies that have agreed to participate in the project remove the images from their services.
Now, the caveats. The participating platforms are, as of Monday, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Yubo, OnlyFans and Pornhub, owned by Mindgeek. If the image is on another site, or if it is sent in an encrypted platform such as WhatsApp, it will not be taken down.
In addition, if someone alters the original image – for instance, cropping it, adding an emoji or turning it into a meme – it becomes a new image and thus need a new hash. Images that are visually similar – such as the same photo with and without an Instagram filter, will have similar hashes, differing in just one character.
‘Sometimes things break’: Twitter outages are on the rise
After Elon Musk bought Twitter last year and eliminated thousands of its employees, many users were so alarmed by the cuts that #RIPTwitter and #GoodbyeTwitter began trending, report The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac, and Kate Conger.
The social media service remains operational today. But its outages, bugs and other glitches are increasingly piling up.
In February alone, Twitter experienced at least four widespread outages, compared with nine in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. That suggests the frequency of service failures is on the rise, NetBlocks said. And bugs that have made Twitter less usable — by preventing people from posting tweets, for instance — have been more noticeable, researchers and users said.
Twitter’s reliability has deteriorated as Musk has repeatedly slashed the company’s work force. After another round of layoffs on Saturday, Twitter has fewer than 2,000 employees, down from 7,500 when Musk took over in October. The latest cuts affected dozens of engineers responsible for keeping the site online, three current and former employees said.
White House sets deadline for purging TikTok from federal devices
The White House on Monday gave government agencies 30 days to ensure they do not have Chinese-owned app TikTok on federal devices and systems, reports Reuters’ David Shepardson.
In a bid to keep U.S. data safe, all federal agencies must eliminate TikTok from phones and systems and prohibit internet traffic from reaching the company, Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young told agencies in a guidance memorandum seen by Reuters.
The ban, ordered by Congress late last year, follows similar actions from Canada, the EU, Taiwan and more than half of U.S. states.
The device ban — while impacting a tiny portion of TikTok’s U.S. user base — adds fuel to calls for an outright ban on the video-sharing app. National security concerns about China surged in recent weeks after a Chinese balloon drifted over the U.S.
‘Everybody is worried’: Why governments are banning TikTok from devices
Canada has banned TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices due to security concerns, reports 2GB’s Ross and Russel.
It follows similar actions in the US, where more than half of states and Congress have banned TikTok from government devices, and the European Union, which has temporarily banned TikTok from phones.
Professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California, Karen North, says “everybody is worried about the infiltration of TikTok”.
“TikTok is a giant data collection machine … should the data collection machine be on the phones of people who have secure and potentially important confidential information on their phones, or even in the networks they’re connecting to?”
Sports Media
Fox League’s Matty Johns on the new season, podcasting and how he knew coaching wasn’t for him
There are some footballers-turned-commentators who feel a tinge of nostalgia, even regret, for their own playing days whenever they see the teams run on to the field for a new season, reports News Corp’s James Wigney.
Fox League stalwart Matthew Johns is categorically not one of those people. It’s not just the brutal toll that more than a decade of playing five-eighth for the Newcastle Knights, Wigan Warriors, Cronulla Sharks, NSW and Australia took on his body.
There are also the mental scars from having the game he played and adored from his early childhood in NSW’s league-crazy Hunter Valley become all-consuming in an unhealthy way.
Coaching’s loss was the media world’s gain, with Johns carving out a successful post-football career that has featured stints on the NRL Footy Show, eight years of breakfast radio with Triple M in Sydney, and more than a decade with Fox League, where he hosts The Late Show With Matty Johns, Sunday Night With Matty Johns Live and the Matty Johns Podcast.
Johns is working hard to expand his podcasting. In addition to his league podcast and the family one – born out of contractual obligations during Covid lockdowns – that he hosts with his wife Trish and their two sons Jack and Cooper, he’s about to launch a series featuring people who fascinate him from the sporting and non-sporting world.
“It’ll be actors, musicians, media people, things like that – people I just found interesting,” he says of the coming series, titled Good Chat.
So far, he has recorded episodes with long-time friend Stan Grant, comedian Wendy Harmer, media personalities David Hill and Mark Fennessy, Hoodoo Gurus bass player Rick Grossman, Wallabies coach Eddie Jones, league player turned actor and director Matt Nable, former detective and top podcaster Gary Jubelin, and he’s hoping to add Kyle Sandilands and The Project host Waleed Aly.