Rolling Stone has a terrific article up, in the wake of the New Yorker expose,The Making Of The Fox News White House, earlier this week. It describes how Fox News was never intended to be news. It was designed as the television version of Murdoch’s tabloids, in Australia and the UK. Murdoch went for the lowest common denominator, and he found it. What if Nixon had had It?
Think, for a moment, what Fox News has become. It used to simply be a forum for Republican apologia. It was the dream of Roger Ailes, the former network president and erstwhile Richard Nixon aide to create the television news buffer that his old boss never had during the Watergate scandal. Who knows whether Nixon might have weathered covering up a break-in and provoking a Constitutional crisis, to say nothing of having a criminal for a vice-president, had his administration had a 24/7 television defender.
The irony, as this article points out, is that both Murdoch and Trump, wealthy white men born to privilege, use Fox News to weaponize “populist resentment of elites.”
I worked across the street from Fox News’ midtown Manhattan headquarters at MSNBC from 2010 to 2015, when Barack Obama was in office. During that time, Fox devolved into something darker. The network’s racism and misogyny became much more explicit. It frequently welcomed then-businessman and reality TV star Donald Trump on air to promote birtherism, and its hosts embraced numerous other conspiracy theories. But even Murdoch, who by Mayer’s reporting seems to see the world more clearly than his channel, has stood by as this pattern has grown worse, with the ascendance of Trump to the White House and the removal of Ailes for his allegedly rampant sexual predation. Now, with the very rare exception, hosts like Tucker Carlson run unchecked by anyone outside of media critics, distributing a nightly helping of Trump sycophancy and white-nationalist evangelism.
Cable news hosts and guests on other networks have been known to say things that seem deliberately provocative, or at the very least, ignorant of the history and current reality of far-right domestic terrorism. But Fox makes that a nightly occurrence. Carlson’s lies about immigration have become a staple of his primetime program, and he has given quarter to the dregs of humanity. In February, host Laura Ingraham compared Planned Parenthood to Adolf Hitler, either unaware or unsympathetic to the fact that such rhetoric has inspired terrorists like Robert Dear to attack clinics in the past.
If you read the New Yorker piece, you see that one of the things Fox News did to influence the election was to kill the Stormy Daniels story, which entertainment reporter Diana Falzone was ready to break long before the Wall Street Journal got it. Falzone no longer works at Fox News. She was required to sign a non disclosure agreement, not to talk about her work at Fox News. Now she’s working to get out of the NDA, according to Jane Mayer, so that she can talk about the Daniels story, which, if released in 2016, could have swayed the election. Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch literally may have swayed this election for Donald Trump by repressing that one story.
Nicole Hemmer, author of “Messengers of the Right,” says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”
Richard Nixon didn’t have state TV to buttress him, with a 24/7 defense. If he had, he might never have been toppled. Fox News made the difference in Trump getting elected. Are they going to make the difference in him staying in power as well? And how are they going to influence future elections? Is the Fox News candidate going to become the Republican candidate, as a matter of course? Food for thought.