Fox Guards Henhouse
Their exclusive audience will never see the story, but Fox News Channel has finally and definitively been exposed for the propaganda mill it's always been.
The past couple of weeks have been revelatory where Fox News is concerned. The discovery process in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit has forced Fox owner Rupert Murdoch to speak about the network under oath for the first time, formally pulling back the curtain on what has been a thirty-two-year Kabuki performance of an opinion platform masquerading as a serious journalistic effort. A treasure trove of internal correspondence between the network’s biggest stars and senior corporate executives makes clear that journalism finishes fourth at Fox, following ratings, revenue, and stock price. This, of course, has been the biggest open secret since Liberace bought his first rhinestone cape. Nonetheless, it was stunning to hear the boss say as much. Ironically, or perhaps predictably, Fox is the only outlet this side of Highlights For Children that hasn’t reported on the Dominion lawsuit.
This Business Insider headline screams an uncomfortable truth: “STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All.”
Fox is very selective regarding what passes for news. It mostly ignored President Biden’s risky trip to Ukraine because it didn’t support their narrative that he is a clueless and doddering old man.
Tucker Carlson chose to ignore the daring Biden trip in favor of blaming Democrats for the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. He cast it all in the light of the identity politics he says he disdains, telling viewers that Democrats’ war on White people is somehow responsible for the derailment, conveniently leaving out the fact that the Trump Administration bowed to the rail lobby and rolled back regulatory safeguards that would have impacted railroads’ bottom lines.
Carlson, his cohorts on the opinion side, and company executives know their own correspondence regarding Dominion totally discredits company denials. No wonder they need to change the subject and try to gin up a new controversy to distract from the real one they’re embroiled in.
From Decoding Fox News: “The brief revealed that multiple Fox News personalities knew former President Donald J. Trump’s claims of election fraud were total nonsense, yet they pushed them on air for the sake of ratings.”
RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah professor who specializes in media law said, “You just don’t often get smoking-gun evidence of a news organization saying internally, ‘We know this is patently false, but let’s forge ahead with it.’” One particularly damning text has Tucker Carlson railing against an internal fact-checker for having the audacity to tell the truth on-air. He demanded she be fired because she was “hurting the share price” of Fox stock.
From MoveOn: “The texts aren't merely embarrassing—they provide chilling evidence that Fox hosts lie on the air, seek retribution for basic journalistic fact-checking, and provide a national platform to conspiracy theorists they know are not credible.”
Tom Friedman in the NY Times: “We all sort of knew the truth about Fox, but now there can be no doubt: Fox News is to journalism what the Mafia is to capitalism — same basic genre, but a morally corrupt perversion of the real thing.”
At Fox, it’s journalism when it suits them, and opinion when it doesn’t. It reminds me of the scene from the film “North Dallas 40” where a lineman confronts a demanding coach, saying, “Dammit every time I call it a game you call it a business, and every time I call it a business you call it a game.”
Since time immemorial, newsrooms have erected “Chinese walls“ (as in The Great Wall of China) between news, opinion, and sales. At Fox, that wall is porous. In fact, there are moments, like after the 2020 presidential election, that it leaks like a sieve.
Now they’ve been caught red handed, but their exclusive audience will never know it, because what they believe and the beliefs they broadcast have nothing in common.
On January 4, 2021, Carlson sent this text to his producer: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait…. I hate him passionately.” Of the Trump presidency he wrote: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
It turns out Fox’s critics have been right all along about two things, the fish stinks from head. Murdoch likes to show his journalistic bona fides, but Rupert is nothing more than a billionaire propagandist, and lies and deception are anything but unusual at Fox, where they serve the brand, not the facts or the news. Recent revelations that they well-knew the claims of fraud from Dominion voting machines was “Crazy” (Rupert Murdoch’s word, not mine) is just one more example.
©2023 Jon Sinton