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News Corporation will release its 1st Quarter Fiscal 2010 today. (webcast link) I wrote a few financial analysts and asked them "What is the ROI to News Corp if some politician is shot at a Tea Party Fox organized? Some people say that Glenn Beck losing 80 advertisers had no impact because of the "great PR". Has this resulted in actual greater revenue on other shows?
Certainly Murdock can lose money on Beck for as long as he likes. But is the money coming out of his own pockets or out of the pockets of News Corp shareholders? Shareholders, as we all know, insist in maximizing shareholder value Quarterly! Show us the money!
Knowing how the world works, none of these questions will get asked. They will be dismissed as beneath the notice of the financial wizards of Wall Street. However, I just wanted to get them "out there" so that in the future when the "Nobody could have anticipated" event happens you and the plaintiff attorneys can point to this and say, "You were warned News Corp, you ignored the signs, just like the Entercom radio station did. Now you need to pay the price."
Here was my letter (slightly edited for posting here)
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Jason Bazinet,Citigroup
Jason: I know you have your own questions for News Corp’s earnings call today, but could you do me a favor and ask a few of the following questions during the Q&A session?
What steps has Fox parent News Corporation taken to protect their assets in the event of a shooting at a Fox sponsored tea party event?
Last week a jury ruled that Entercom Communications Corp (ETM:NYSE) subsidiary has to pay 16.6 million to the family of a Sacramento woman who died in a radio station water-drinking contest.. (Link) Although she signed a waiver and the station claimed they were not responsible for her actions, the jury still ruled that the subsidiary was negligent in the wrongful death case.
News Corp subsidiary Fox News has been actively organizing and promoting "Tea parties". Angry Fox viewers have brought weapons to these events to intimidated the President and other politicians. If someone is shot Fox will of course claim that they are not responsible for the actions of individuals just like Entercom did. But as we have now seen in the Entercom case that defense does not hold up in court. especially when the station is the driving force for getting people to participate.
It appears that Fox is not only ignoring the danger signs, it is actively calling for action that they have no way of controlling in an effort to boost ratings.
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What steps have you taken to protect your assets in the event of a shooting at a Fox sponsored tea party event? Have Fox News competitors taken steps to protect themselves from shooting deaths at tea parties that they organize and support?
Has Fox taken out more insurance? Has News Corp? Can you name the insurers? Have the insurers taken into account the Entercom ruling yet for your premiums?
What steps has Fox News taken to recoup the revenue lost from 80 advertisers leaving the Glenn Beck show? (link to list of lost advertisers)
If the Beck show has high ratings but low revenue how long does the network plan to keep losing money on the show? Is there a path to profitability?
If the "high ratings" of the show is supposed to result in greater revenue for other parts of the company, is there any documented figures to make this connection? Third party audited figures? (The myth of Fox News ratings bump)
Which departmental budgets are subsidizing the Glenn Beck salaries and production costs?
If internal Fox budgets are not subsidizing the Glenn Beck show, is the funding coming from Chairman Murdock?
If Fox News is not subsidizing the Glenn Beck show and Chairman Murdock is not personally funding it, then funding is coming out of a News Corp budget. What form does the company expect the return on investment to take? Better relationships with the current government? A better Federal regulatory environment?
The Wall Street Journal is still an advertiser on the Glenn Beck show, does this mean that the marketing budgets for News Corp in-house properties have been told to subsidize the Beck show by News Corp management?
Thanks,
LLAP
Spocko
P.S. See Spocko v. talk radio hosts in the New York Times for a bit about me
29 Comments
great letter and diary spocko. recommended.
Thanks. I’m on hold right now listening to groovy guitar new agey music waiting for the earnings conference call to start.
Exciting!
I can hardly wait to hear nobody ask my questions!
Thank you Spocko, again and again.
Thanks Laura:
UPDATE: None of the financial analysts asked my questions. I knew it was a stretch, but I thought linking the recent wrongful death from the radio contest to future injury violence at Tea Parties needed to be done.
The station organized and promoted the contest. Fox organizes and promotes the Tea Parties.
Something went wrong in the radio contest. Something will go wrong at the tea party.
Someone got hurt, someone will get hurt.
The radio station paid the fine and fired the employees but kept their license. News Corp will have to pay, they won’t fire employees, they won’t lose their license because they will use the “Free speech” or as I like to call it the “I have a made up right to talk about killing people and if my boss doesn’t complain you can’t touch me” line . Or the ever popular “we can’t be responsibility for crazy people” line.
The question is, how much and is it just written off the “cost of doing business”.
Gathering a mob that gets a politician killed seems to me to be bad PR, but what do I know, the ratings for Fox would be huge! “Exclusive footage of a Fox Tea Party member shooting their Congress person! Only on Fox!”
After the next shooting of a politician or a doctor Fox News and right wing hosts will want to distance themselves from the person who acted. I want to link them as tightly as possible NOW. I want to show the world that they OWN this violence and in the world of corporations it is the financial realities that sometimes get a company to stop.
O’Reilly can say that he wasn’t responsible for killing Dr. Tiller, But what if his company sponsored rallies where they gathered people like Dr. Tiller’s killer?, “This is a revolution! You need to do something to take back the country! Here are some names of traitors who need to be confronted!”
Thanks for doing this, and good try. I live in Sacramento part-time, so I’m well aware of the water-drinking incident & recent court case. Good idea to tie that in – at any rate, why not?
You are taking an action to confront a situation, about which many of us are holding our breaths, crossing our fingers, and hoping doesn’t happen.
The crazed right appears to believe that they have divine “approval” to do whatever the eff they feel like, all in the name of the Christo-fascist “god” (no longer in the name of Jesus bc he is far to kind, enlightened and socialistic for them). The murder of Dr. Teller, the Holocaust museum guard, and similar activities this year is frightening. And these loose canons are getting looser, feeling emboldened and entitled, and frankly, don’t seem to give a damn, esp if the ratings improve. Yeee-haw!
So good luck with your efforts. Seems like it can’t hurt.
Good on you, Spocko!
Lemme know if I can help you further with the SEC/EDGAR thing we were talking about earlier.
Thanks onitgoes. You point out the murder of Dr. Teller and the Holocaust museum guard. The way that talk radio dodged that bullet (so to speak) was to work the idea that they weren’t responsible for what some crazed individual does with the violent rhetoric they hear and the specific targets that they are offered.
Fox wants the credit for the Tea Party mobs, they want the energy. If they want the credit then they need the blame.
This is a very directed activity vs some random person hearing something and going and acting on his own. The mob effect should be considered. The threats to the President have gone up 400 percent from previous Presidents.
The language of “we need a revolution” and “a show down” for the tea parties and faux town halls are designed to intimidate. They are NOT even using the fig leaf of telling people to be peaceful.
During the 60s and right up till 2008 the right actively goes after people on the left like they are terrorists. People being arrested for wearing the wrong t-shirt vs bringing a gun to a Presidential event?
The Republican’s don’t want to “own” their base, but I want to lash the crazy people to them so tight that they can’t run away from them. I want them to find the crazies tied to their back with guns a blazing. They will still say, “I don’t know who you are talking about? [bam bam] I don’t know any violent people [bam bam] that person tied to my back wearing the Fox logo shooting people has nothing to do with me!”
Awesome. Of course, Glenn Beck *did* do his little “Please don’t kill anybody” PSA during the town halls, so they’re totally covered.
Thanks Kelly your earlier help was really valuable!
Exactly, the reason I used the Sacramento radio station example was that the hosts said that the woman signed a waiver, so they thought they were covered. They played the audio of that comment as well as the audio of people calling up and saying, “This is dangerous!”
In the end the jury ruled that the signed waiver didn’t stand up against their reckless negligence. (I think they used some more lawyerly words.)
Exactly. Elected reps, like Bachman, toss out inflamatory language recklessly at the drop of at a hat. Beyond how irresponsible this is, these are the same idiots that rant about Bill Ayers as if he is currently a terrorist & some kind of danger to society. The aggravation factor of their hypocracy is matched only by the cognitive dissonance of their attitudes & ideas. I love your idea of tying any major problems that erupt to those responsible for encouaging crazy stuff.
Good luck!
Thanks. If you have any other ideas on how to make sure that the people who are encouraging the crazy stuff are actively linked when the problems happen let me know. I always learn so much from the people here.
Fox is money maker for News Corp, or it wouldn’t exist. Murdock is not a political type, only money matters.
If someone was shot at a tea party, they will just do like they always do, and blame left wing extremist. Make that into fact, a news story, and blast it out twenty four hours a day.
iremember54. I don’t understand your comment. Do you not understand what I did and why I did it. I asked several questions directed to the CFO and COO of News Corp. And if you look at the numbers you see that they made less money than they could have. Fox is making money but not as much as they could if Beck hadn’t cost them 81 advertisers.
No matter how big you are as an organization that kind of revenue loss hurts and you keep subsidizing the cost only if you have a bigger plan. Murdock might have that plan, but I was asking the analysts and the investors to make him articulate that.
Something along the lines of “Sure I’ll keep paying losing money on Glenn Beck because I like him. And I’m paying for it out of my own pocket. We use his great ratings to sell our other programs because nobody else will advertiser there.” Now then the analysts could ask, “How has that been working out for you?” now he might not answer, but it will show yet again how political Murdock really is and raise the question, should this man really have this much control? Maybe News Corp should be broken up?
And yes they will try and blame a liberal for any shooting, “liberal plants in the Tea Parties!” and that is why I want to keep identifying the people at the Tea Parties NOW so that when they finally take a shot we will have evidence that they have been Tea Partiers (R) from Fox for a long time.
Just like I wanted to have photos of the guy who came to a Code Pink “show down” sponsored by KSFO and Melanie Morgan. They guy brought a knife and slashed the microphone cord of Medea Benjamin and then the Code Pink Sign. When he comes to another KSFO rally we can show that he has a history of violence at events sponsored by KSFO.
Didn’t mean to mess with your point. Ailes runs fox and Murdock lets Him have a generally free hand. Even if Beck loses money, He gereates a percentage of viewers, that also watch the rest of Fox, so the loss is not as great as it appears. Believe Me they consider the whole picture, and the dollars tell the tale.
They are lying about their numbers Sinclair Broadcasting was in trouble almost bankruptcy this summer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Sinclair-owned_stations
http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/corporate_power/consolidation/sinclair_broadcasting1529
Sinclair has 17? fox stations and a bunch of other stations they have a crushing debt load they expanded and tried to grab all the Market share they could.
Now Fox and Sinclair are both claiming to have made money this quarter? Outside of some short term profits like asset sales ( I know Fox sold some Newspapers ) these companies did not find enough advertisers in this economy to save them.
I do not think that even those Newspapers Fox sold could save them. I’m thinking Chewbacca I’m thinking Death Star Enron accounting funny companies used to take the debt of their parent company off their books.
In other news Rep Michelle Bachmann’s Chief of Staff has quit has she finally had enough or has she decided to quit before Michelle does something that would make Fox New’s insurance rates go up?
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/11/bachmanns-chief-of-staff-quits.php?ref=fpa
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200911030004
Fox News did not get a ratings spike after Obama declared war on them so where did these profits that they claim to have made come from? All media is suffering from lack of advertisers in this economy but Fox makes a profit? Ratings flat lined Newspapers sales up newspaper sales price up to but not enough to cover advertiser losses. Maybe their movies are pulling them through but Sinclair Broadcasting is also doing mysteriously well.
I doubt Fox can afford to lose Sinclair’s tv station’s right now.
So if Fox is to survive Sinclair must also I find this all very suspicious.
News Corps “plan” if there is a lawsuit is to whine about frivolous lawsuits; claim their First Amendment rights were being violated; blame Democrats for causing the inevitable violence; and lobby Congress for more “tort reform” to avoid taking personal responsibility — thereby proving it is nothing more than an empty slogan unless you are a single pregnant woman or you are facing foreclosure because of fraud by your lender.
I’ll give it some thought, but it’s hard to say. Some have suggested picketing/protesting at tv & talk radio stations. It might get down to that. The protests would have to be clear, though, about tying those media outlets directly to concerns about incendiary language leading to such incidents as Dr. Tiller’s death, or the over 400% increase in threats on the POTUS, which has caused the Secret Service to ditch or outsource some of their work bc they can hardly keep up with it.
The corporate media, including MSNBC & NPR, are all culpable in this mess. What BHO has been doing – I think – in calling out Fox as NOT a news outlet is one step. Let’s face it Fox can shout all it wants about how they’re just pundits babbling & not news (or whatever). But Fox knows full well that if they push out some sensational $hit, the rest of the corporate media will rush to churn it out in their news cycles. and so it goes.
They’re all owned by mega-corporations, and much like Pirate Murdoch, they’re mainly interested in the bottom line. I’m not so sure, though, that is the only motivating factor. They, including Murdoch, are also interested in pushing an agenda that is favorable to their bottom line.
It certainly seems that the teabaggers – as strange and loony as they present themselves – are willing “fluffers” for the corporations. Let’s face it, many of those at town halls are on government health care, but they try to claim that the gov’t would do a “bad job” with the public option, or that it would “cost too much” – and those are the somewhat rational arguments. But their nutty shrieking certainly helps big Ins and big Pharma rip all of us off, doesn’t it?
Frankly, if someone gets killed: yeah big ratings for the media. So the media owners don’t really care.
Getting back again to the question: how to tie responsibility to these corporate fat cats, and NOT let it become a media spin circus where Acorn and Bill Ayers and purported left wing terrorists get the blame???
It’s tough when the left really has very little voice in the media – mainly only on blogs. Blogs have helped us a lot, but not enough.
So, long story, short: yes, it would be a good idea for all concerned to continue pushing responsibility onto the media and elected representatives and paid corporate shills wherever we can.
And good luck to us all.
Spocko, now you’ve got it out there: You’ve asked the question, and they’ve ignored it. They will, I fear, soon have cause to regret it.
I find it interesting that this event is being scheduled on Guy Fawkes Night.
You know ThingsComeUndone. This is an excellent point. What struck me in listening to the conference call was just how inarticulate they were. Of course there were all sorts of things that they said they couldn’t talk about (which is always amusing to me how little disclosure they actually have to give). Future deals etc. But as we have seen in the past there are lots of accounting tricks that companies use to follow people. I remember reading a part of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else by David Cay Johnston where he talked about the way that some of the accounting tricks were discovered. It took about 1/2 an hour for a competent person.
It would be great for some journalist and competent financial person to look into their books and accounting methods. Now what Newspaper could we find that has experts in this area? Hmmmm. Thinking, Thinking. OH I know! The Wall Street Journal!!!
Ooops. Murdock owns them! Oh well. He is too big to fail. I’m sure that the government will bail them out if necessary. After all you wouldn’t want to piss off both Fox News AND the Wall Street Journal.
Excellent point OldGold! Thank you!
The abuse by Fox of their broadcast license is one thing. They always play the “Free Speech!” card even when they are calling for violence. And, as even the most dense right winger knows, falsely yelling fire in a crowded threatre is not covered. So that is one of the other reasons I always focus on the VIOLENT comment and the suggestions of violent action. Those are areas that can and should be limited. But even then, the right wing starts to think, the government can NEVER tell us what to say. We are a world of our own! That is why I went to the advertisers and now the financial analysts. I asked the analysts, will the death of people from a Fox News Riot have any NEGATIVE impact on Fox News?
The Entercom ruling shows us that the public will not buy the line that the station has no accountability when they organize something dangerous. Some people argued that the woman bore some responsibility for getting involved, but the jury ruled that the station was 100 percent at fault.
Even if they ruled 50/50 it would still be a loss for the view that they are NOT responsible for the actions that happened when they organized the event –sent they should have known it could lead to death.
Fox News knows that their mob can get violent. Fox News knows that their viewers have killed people that their hosts have targeted.
Fox News is counting on the media protecting them by using the “That could have been us!” but the actions that Fox makes are qualitatively different than other media.
My bold Newscorp is a big media company lots of stock analysts follow this stock they know this stock. Imagine any regular at FDL not knowing the facts about healthcare? about Holy Joe? the war in Iraq?
You are inarticulate (barring speech problems, shyness etc) when you don’t know a subject or you are worried and or lying about a subject.
Major banks lent NewsCorp money to buy the Wallstreet Journal, Newscorp put its stock up as collateral for the loans that stock has since gone down. The banks should be foreclosing on Fox.
If I could get more details that I trusted I would look at it more.
Fox lied about getting a ratings bump after they went to war with Obama and that was a few weeks ago. Fox I am sure is lying about making more money when every other media corporation is suffering a bad advertising market.
If they lie about this stuff well then I can’t trust their financial numbers then can I?
Christmas is coming biggest ad buy season of the year NewsCorp has to get some money because after that its tax time.
once a good defense lawyer explains to a jury that having to ask your audience to “PLEASE not kill someone” isn’t exactly the kind of thing that a normal speaker would have to say, it should take a jury about 5 seconds to find beck guilty