In the land of the blind, be the King.

Let us hear no more of Rupert Murdoch’s boundless power. Rupert Murdoch is not a powerful man. He is, to judge from the Dominion voting machine trial, a tremulous, bent-backed servant to the collective id of the Fox News audience, hereinafter known as The Horde. Little wonder that he swaps out wives and fiancés faster than the average archaeolithic tyrant changes colostomy bags. With girlfriends, at least, he has some agency. An email will suffice to rid himself of the latest complication to the NewsCorp succession plan.

But there is no ridding himself of the Horde, or the spiralling cost of its care and feeding, currently running to US$787.5 million in direct expenses for defamation and an unknowable amount for the palliative care of America’s dying democracy.

Where once the titan Murdoch bestrode the world, great age and greater folly now hurry him on toward oblivion, while the very Horde he raised claws him in its clutch.

Forgive yourself the shameful joy of relishing his loss. There’s nothing shameful about it, and the loss, while spectacular in dollar terms, will likely be written off as a business cost on the family’s tax returns. The loss of reputation is no loss at all because none of these billionaire losers or their multi-millionaire hirelings gives one wet shit for what you think of their reputation. They can barely hide the contempt they feel for their audience.

To wade through the private correspondence of the Murdochs’ courtiers is to marvel at their scorn for the rubes tuning in every night. It’s exquisite, in a way, an almost perfect recasting of the fear and loathing for the Other, which is NewsCorp’s raison d'être, onto the viewers without whom the network would cease to exist.

Whereby viewers, of course, I mean The Horde.

The Horde has no face but millions of mouths. It has no eyes, but it sees all, and after Fox brought the hammer down on Donald Trump at 11:20 p.m. on election day, it saw red, and those millions of lipless mouths started to scream.

King Rupert listened.

As James Poniewozik wrote in the New York Times…

All this, trial or no trial, makes clear what Fox News really is. It’s a service provider. That service is the maintenance of a reality bubble and the deference to beliefs that Fox’s hosts helped shape.

Seen this way, the Dominion case wasn’t so much about Fox telling its audience what to believe. It was about the audience telling Fox what Fox needed to believe — or at least, what it needed to give the appearance of not not believing.

Message received.

That’s a helluva tight spot for a billionaire tyrant to get himself into.

But that’s what happens when you aggregate millions of angry muppets into a profitable demographic. You end up needing the muppets more than the muppets need you.

Must be humbling to find out that for all of the private jets and megayachts, your top-rating cable news network is now in the business of making hostage videos.

Or not.

It’s good to be the King, even if your subjects’ vows of loyalty are a chorus of screeches, hisses, and grunts demanding that, having put out their eyes, you do nothing which might threaten them with ever seeing clearly again.