The rise of Fox News aka how the fuck did this happen?

[Dennis Donovan]

From Jane Mayer's New Yorker article:

Murdoch could not have foreseen that Trump would become President, but he was a visionary about the niche audience that became Trump’s base. In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton. Murdoch, who had been a U.S. citizen for less than a decade, invited Hundt to his Benedict Canyon estate for dinner. After the meal, Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.”

Hundt recalled the conversation as “overwhelming.” He said, “I was at this house more expensive than any I could ever imagine. This person’s made a huge mark in two other countries, and he had entered our country and was saying, ‘I’m going to break up the three-party oligopoly that has governed the most important medium of communication for politics and policy in this country since the Second World War.’ It was like a scene from ‘Faust.’ What came to mind was Mephistopheles.”

Blair Levin, at that time the chief of staff at the F.C.C. and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, says, “Fox’s great insight wasn’t necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view.” More erudite conservatives, he says, such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and Bill Kristol, couldn’t have succeeded as Fox has. Levin observes, “The genius was seeing that there’s an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race.”

</snip>

Of course, all of this was handed to Murdoch on a silver platter with the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first significant overhaul of telecommunications law in more than sixty years, amending the Communications Act of 1934. The Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, represented a major change in American telecommunication law, since it was the first time that the Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allotment.

One of the most controversial titles was Title 3 ("Cable Services&quot , which allowed for media cross-ownership. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business – to let any communications business compete in any market against any other." The legislation's primary goal was deregulation of the converging broadcasting and telecommunications markets. However, the law's regulatory policies have been questioned, including the effects of dualistic re-regulation of the communications market.

So, THAT's how the fuck we got here.

[Soxfan58]

1. Fox appeals to people lesser angels

Hate, racisim, economic discrimination. Trumps the Pied piper, fox is the flute, and the repukes are the mindless rats

[aeromanKC]

2. The Germany playbook

We used to wonder how, now we know. We've seen it right before our eyes.

[EndGOPPropaganda]

3. Good point.

Positive news is that with D control of House, Senate, Presidency, we can roll back that law and re regulate our media to reduce rightwing propaganda. (After we end the filibuster, of course. Nothing gets accomplished if filibuster is left in place .)

[DFW]

4. More people should have paid attention to the first interview with Roger Ailes

Upon the creation of Fox "News," Ailes was asked flat out if he intended to run a straight news station. He answered, more truthfully than anyone suspected, "we have an agenda." This was from the last surviving active member of the Nixon Dirty Tricks team, Ailes, and the guy who suggested (during the Nixon presidency) that the White House have its own media channel. Democrats should have paid closer attention to what was being created.

Murdoch, well aware that Democrats sometimes have the White House, too, thought it was a great idea, but thought it should be a Republican Party channel outside White House control. And so it is.

[dalton99a]

8. +1.

[Liberal In Texas]

5. A lot of it comes down to money in politics.

Sympathetic politicians had to be elected and they had to change the laws and regulations that allowed Fox to become so widespread.

The amount of money Murdoch poured into his networks start-up was awesome. Buying up the football rights alone was considered insane at the time. The three established networks couildn't come close to matching the amount of money Rupert was offering to buy professional football. This was right after he went into every major market and either outright purchased established network affiliated TV stations or offered huge incentives for others to become Fox affiliates.

The belief at the time was that Fox could never make up this massive outlay of revenue and couldn't sustain the operating losses for long and would eventually fade away. Boy were we wrong.

[PeeJ52]

6. I remember it being their coverage of the OJ Simpson murders...

They really covered it, and sensationalized it better than any of the other networks at the time, because they could. That's what got people hooked on their brand of 24/7 news. My mother, who was around 65 years old and a staunch Democrat at the time, became a loyal Fox fanatic, depending only on them for her news. Then they slowly started shifting to the right, until soon into the Clinton scandal, I remember my mom telling me "those bastards are trying to brainwash you!" and she quit watching them. They did have the best coverage of OJ though and I don't think a lot of people switched away after that ended. They liked the continuing circus atmosphere to their news.

[Dennis Donovan]

7. They probably covered the civil trial, not the murder trial.

They were on the air starting in 1996.

[Buckeyeblue]

9. I wonder how much of where we are today goes back to Vietnam?

I jokingly tell people that if it wasn't for Vietnam my kids would have never existed. That's because my wife's dad met her mom when he was in the military, thousands of miles from home. Of course, I'm playing fast and loose with logic when I say that but I wonder if the war in Vietnam wasn't the starting point for where we are today...

While the Civil War divided the country geographically, I think the Vietnam War drove a deeper wedge between our collective sensibilities. Families were divided by the war. You fast forward to 1994 and the Baby Boomers were middle aged and had lived most of their adult life in a fractured country. Once the initial fracture is there, it becomes easier to deepen the wound. Auto plants had and were closing at a rapid pace. The same, good paying opportunities that were there for previous generations of non-college educated people were gone. People were frustrated. And low information voters were ripe for the blame game that Fox is good at.

Fast forward to 2016 and this same group elected the most divisive president in our nation's history. A new normal based on inaccurate information is our new reality. Something has got to give.

[CrispyQ]

10. Fox is the evil spawn of hate radio which the dems/left have ignored for 30+ years.

And still continue to ignore.

Instead of running for president we need some of these rich billionaires to finance an Air America type station, even at a loss. There are huge areas of the country where all you hear on AM radio is hate.

[malaise]

11. Would Fox have succeeded without the Bill Clinton

Whitewater witch hunt?

[DFW]

13. Unfortunately......

That is like asking "would there be hate, fear, jealousy, ignorance and inferiority complexes without Bill Clinton?"

Yes, there will always be those. It seems there always be those that thrive on exploiting them, too.

[Greybnk48]

12. On a non-theoretical level, 911 was a HUGE boost to FOX cable news.

As I recall, the airplanes knocked out all of the major network antennas for days if not a couple of weeks because they were all on top of the World Trade Center--except for FOX, the newbie network very few people watched.

From the moment the planes hit and for quite a while afterward, all the up to the minute news that was available, was on FOX. We had every T.V. in the hallways at the University where I was teaching tuned to Fox all day every day for quite a while. My pizza place, gas station, med. clinic, and even at home we turned on cable Fox first.

It was never the same after that. It even took us a while to switch back to CNN or MSNBC.

Just my recollection in my area.