Bye, Rupert
The Goblin Scampers, His House of Horrors Still Hypnotizes Millions
Goodbye Rupert. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
I recently read Michael Wolff’s new book on Fox to write a review that The New Republic will shortly publish. Henry Holt required me to sign an embargo NDA agreement so stringent that I would almost have to hand off my first born, so I can’t share any details. I think I can say it is a descent into a swinish hell that deserves its own Hieronymous Bosch painting.
The grotesque figure of founder Roger Ailes was the tumor. His 2017 death did not cure the metastasized cancer that is Fox inside the American political system.
Rupert Murdoch is the environmental toxin that created both Ailes and Fox.
A borderless billionaire, Murdoch infected the entire English speaking world with his brand of media segmentation. He pioneered newspapers and broadcast operations first in the UK that deliberately segmented the public into interest groups, feeding them back lies and propaganda that confirmed their own biases. Crossing the pond during the Reagan years, he got American citizenship faster than anyone in history. Powerful right wingers even then were salivating for what he was going to bring to the United States: the end of the Walter Cronkite era.
He quickly started buying up American television broadcast licenses, and grabbed as much of the NFL as he could get his hands on. The plan was to use football to attract eyeballs then feed right wing propaganda into stupefied cortexes.
It worked. Thirty years on, Big Lie broadcasts are mainlined hourly into the veins of half-awake Americans by means of cable.
For more than 21 years, the “24-hour all-encompassing news service” FOX News Channel has been America’s most watched news channel, attracting nearly 50 percent of the cable news viewing audience according to Nielsen Media. And as the Dominion lawsuit showed us, Fox cannot claim to be anything other than a right wing propaganda messaging machine.
Since 2017, not long after the inauguration of Trump, Fox dropped its “fair and balanced,” motto. Foxologist Gabriel Sherman reported at the time that the network dropped the motto because it was too closely associated with Roger Ailes, the doughy and perverse Republican strategist who created and managed Fox until he was run off by sexual harassment suits at the dawn of the #metoo era, to die in a fall at his Palm Beach manse soon after.
Today, the network launders into the mainstream formerly fringe theories and paranoia that used to be the province of OKC bomber Timothy McVeigh. Hourly, Fox spews wacko claims about “weaponized government" and the notion that the Department of Justice or the FBI or the Deep State devised Covid and created the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection as a false flag operation. The convictions of dozens of Proud Boy fascists and hundreds of guilty pleas, or the evidence gathered and shared by the J6 House committee has absolutely no effect on their views.
While tens of millions of Americans sit brainwashed inside the Fox information silo, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which handed out the licenses and supposedly oversees public communication, has so far been helpless to do anything.
One of the many horrors of the “Reagan revolution” was the end of the Fairness Doctrine. Created in 1949, the doctrine mandated that broadcasters include differing viewpoints on matters of public importance. In 1987, a Republican-controlled FCC abolished the act after earlier claims by Reagan administration officials that it violated the First Amendment. Congress tried to reinstate it by statute, but the “Great Communicator” vetoed it.
Too late, now, some of Fox founders like Preston Padden and other once-powerful country club/non MAGA Republicans are aghast at the beast they helped create. Some even support a lawsuit in Philadelphia, filed by progressives, that is attempting to get the FCC to review Fox’s broadcast license there in view of the undeniable truths explored by the Dominion lawsuit about the company’s lie-spewing.
Why did Rupert do this to our country? Why, money of course. The old man and his family wallow on a pile of it. Some of Murdoch’s children have been open about their dislike of Fox’s de facto leader, Donald J. Trump. Murdoch’s son James, for example, hosts fundraisers for Biden. But his brother Lachlan, hiding out in Australia, is his dad’s designated replacement, and he clearly plans to keep running Fox on Rupert’s model, offering its segmented audience“information” that it wants to hear and see, and never the facts.
The sick joke today is in this line from Murdoch’s good-bye letter to his employees: "Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class,” he wrote. “Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth."
The mumbly old gnome is richer than Croesus. He has spent a considerable portion of his life surrounded by sycophants and servants, served by chefs, traveling on private jet, lolling on yachts or at his vineyard in California or at his ranch in Montana and luxurious suites and manses in New York, London and Sydney. He acquired all those perks by cynically picking off low information football fans in America and systematically poisoning them and ultimately the entire American public discourse with Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity and their shameless bullshit and lies - for nothing but profit alone.
That’s what I call elite contempt.
RELATED
Full text Murdoch resignation letter
Philadelphia FOX license FCC lawsuit
Quoting last lines of Bob Dylan’ s masters of war in my head as I read this. Maybe not directly trading arms, but certainly a catalyst for misery - and death. How is anyone born with the kind of impulse he must have had to poison the well? Yes, I’ll be glad when he’s dead.
Brilliant, Nina--as always. I love reading your work.