How Fox “News” Became the “Greatest Cancer on Democracy”

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We all saw it on Wednesday night. Bret Baier, the multimillionaire supposed “real news” guy at Fox, angrily and rudely lied to the face of the Vice President of the United States and his millions of viewers, presenting an edited version of Trump’s most fascistic remarks that turned truth on its head.

This is just the most recent example of the deadly toxants Fox “News” has been spreading across the American media and political landscape for decades.

The soil in which a democracy grows and flourishes is truthful information held as common knowledge by the majority of the population. Lies, when presented as news or as truth-based information, become a poison that severely injures and can even kill a democracy.

Particularly when those lies are packaged and sold just to make a buck. Or, in the case of the Murdoch empire, billions of bucks.

American, British, and Australian democracy have suffered for decades under the assault of a daily diet of lies, half-truths, and misleading omissions from news operations run by the Murdoch family, and now imitated by the hundreds of others on radio, TV, and social media to which they’ve given example and license.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

“The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”

While Rudd calls out the Australian equivalents of Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the focus of his article and the damage done within his own nation was the influence of Rupert Murdoch.

Noting that, “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd added:

“Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”

Brexit happened in the UK because of the newspapers and media Murdoch owns there, Rudd wrote, and:

“In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”

Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted.  They’re simply pro-white, pro-billionaire, and pro-oligarchy and thus, by extension, anti-democracy. He’s simply following in the footsteps of his notoriously racist father, Sir Keith Murdoch, from whom he inherited his media empire.

“In Australia, as in America,” Rudd wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change, and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism.

“Given Murdoch’s impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it’s time to revisit it.”

Here in America, Fox “News” has had such a powerful influence on American politics that its most recent political creation, former President Donald Trump, even ordered government agencies to show it on their in-house TVs.

Fox and Murdoch’s power come, former Australian Prime Minister Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.

“Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically.

“This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.”

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6th attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time nakedly lying to their audience about what happened.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the explicit encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself, who saw the lies as the key to increased profits. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and calling him a “sore loser,” they packaged slick lies saying the exact opposite to their audience.

Along with their relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6th — all while making more billions for Murdoch and his family. 

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy, and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”

Multiple studies across the years have found that lying media operations large enough to influence a consequential portion of the public do direct and measurable damage to democratic republics. It’s why, as I noted yesterday, strongman operations like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, etc., always first take down the honest media and replace it with a steady diet of lies and distortions.

This is not without consequences. The lack of a shared understanding of political and economic reality produce:

— An erosion of trust in the media itself. Just under half of all Americans said, in a survey done by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs last year, that they have “little to no” trust in the nation’s media’s willingness or ability to report the news fairly and with accuracy. In part this is the result of Fox’s own version of Trump’s Big Lie: Fox talent continually imply or even explicitly tell their viewers that they can’t trust the “lamestream media.” This feeds cynicism, ultimately destroying faith in all media and making people vulnerable to corrupt, lying politicians and conspiracy mongers.

— Extreme politics. Deliberately misleading reporting, especially when it aligns with partisan narratives, exacerbates existing political divisions within a society; these can ultimately tear a nation apart, as any German or Rwandan citizen can tell you. It’s particularly noxious when it’s done — as it is at Fox — purely to generate billions in profits for a greedy, foreign family.

— Terrible outcomes for average citizens. In democratic societies, an informed citizenry is crucial. When a significant media source regularly lies, it distorts public understanding of key issues and events, influencing elections and producing bad policy decisions. It leads to things like the $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1 percent over the past 43 years, a reality demagogues like Trump exploit by blaming it on immigrants and minorities.

— A torn-apart society at war with itself. Repeated lies from major media outlets erode faith not just in the press, but in other societal institutions as well, including government, academia, and the justice system. This broad loss of institutional trust destabilizes society itself, as we are seeing today.

— The rise of media hustlers like Alex Jones and rightwing hate radio. As trust in mainstream media declines, people turn to alternative, less reliable sources of information. This further fragments the information landscape and makes consensus-building extremely difficult, even though it’s critical for a democratic society to survive.

— Long-term damage to public discourse. Over time, a culture of lies and misinformation degrades the quality of public debate. When facts become subjective and truth is seen as malleable, it becomes much harder for a society to address complex challenges effectively. History demonstrates that a free and truthful press is essential for a healthy democracy and stable society: When major media outlets like Fox “News” betray that trust through deliberate deception, the consequences are profound and long-lasting.

So, what can we do about the harm the Murdoch money-machine and its imitators have already done and continue to inflict on our society?

Censorship doesn’t work: Freedom of speech and opinion is even more important to a democratic society that consistently accurate news and information. And if the power of determining what is “true” is handed to government, the potential for abuse with a president like Trump becomes extraordinary.

Boycotts don’t work: Fox has demonstrated that they can shrug off advertiser boycotts on an almost indefinite basis because the bulk of their revenue comes from carriage fees cable and online networks pay to have the network on their platform.

Lawsuits and fines don’t work: When Fox was sued for lying about voting machines, they simply paid the fines and continued lying about pretty much everything else they thought was useful to keep their viewers agitated and thus increase their profits. Billion-dollar corporations can fend off lawsuits for years, can drain the coffers of less-affluent litigants, and can shrug off even multi-hundred-million-dollar fines as a cost of business.

There are, however, several approaches that offer considerable promise. They include:

— Promoting media literacy and critical thinking, particularly through public education. Finland is a pioneer in this field, requiring their schools to teach media literacy and critical thinking skills. There’s a knock-on effect when kids come home from school and discuss the media with their parents and peers. Federal legislation to fund civics, media literacy, and critical thinking in every school in America would cost so little as to be a rounding error in the nation’s budget and, like in Finland and other countries that are copying their example, will produce massive dividends in improved democracy and greater social stability and cohesion.

— Politicians braving up enough to call out lying media. For a brief moment in time, the Obama administration took on Fox “News.” In October 2009, they tried to exclude Fox from interviews with a Treasury Department official, Kenneth Feinberg. In September 2009, President Obama did a round of Sunday talk shows that explicitly excluded Fox “News.” Arnie Dunn, then White House Communications Director, came right out and said that Fox was not a legitimate news organization. But Obama and his press people finally gave in under pressure from other mainstream media outlets; they should have held to principle and made clear the specific Fox “News” lies and distortions to which they objected.

— Bringing back media competition. When Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, he killed limits on media ownership that had, for more than a half-century, guaranteed a vibrant, competitive, and diverse media landscape. Since then most local newspapers have died, radio and TV chains have reached monopoly status, and social media giants have destroyed competitors through buy-outs and anticompetitive practices. It’s time to reverse those provisions, as well as ending the social media liability limitations in Section 230 of the Act.

— Mainstream media ending their boycott on calling out Fox and other toxic media. As mentioned, it was pressure from mainstream media operations that caused the Obama administration to back down from boycotting Fox “News.” Instead, real news operations that embrace objectivity and high journalistic standards should not only shun their dishonest peer, but regularly expose their lies and distortions. Journalists shouldn’t be afraid to report on other journalists and their employers; the incestuous world of DC journalism, in particular, is doing real damage to our nation.

Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, “With freedom comes responsibility.” That includes the responsibility of media outlets that use the word “news” to present factual information and clearly label their opinion programming and writing. And the responsibility of real news operations to report on lying media just as aggressively as they report on criminals, world events, and corrupt politicians.