It's Time to Stop Pretending the Murdochs Are in the News Business
It’s Time to Stop Pretending the Murdochs Are in the News Business
For Rupert and his sons, the press has always been the prime weapon in their power-seeking agenda.
https://www.thenation.com/article/murdoch-empire-fox-power-money/
The New York Times Magazine’s recently published forensic examination of the power and influence of the Murdoch media empire is both a testament to what journalism can accomplish and an indictment of what it has, in the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his two sons, increasingly become. The 16,000-word investigation should quiet anyone who thinks that the survival of that often-infuriating newspaper is of no particular consequence to the future of American democracy. It should also lay to rest any remaining arguments that the Murdochs are engaged in anything but a power-seeking charade: pretending to be in the news profession while subverting it at every turn.
The piece, titled “Planet Fox,” by Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, has not received the attention it deserves, in part because it does not contain any blockbuster scoops that could easily fit into a CNN or MSNBC chyron or pithy tweet. What it does contain is a history of how one family has been able to use the power of the press to subvert democratic norms, misinform citizens, undermine governments, and fill our national debates with lies, misogyny, racism, and ethnocentrism while calling it news.
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In the United States, Trump’s rise complicated the story a bit. Murdoch initially resisted supporting a man he regularly termed a “fucking idiot,” whose policies on immigration he disliked, and whose vulgarity he disdained. But here, again, money talked. Nothing goosed Fox News’ ratings like Trump’s Nuremberg-style rallies, and with Megyn Kelly and other Fox News personalities criticizing him, Breitbart was winning over the network’s once-loyal audience. Of course, Trump’s success was Fox News’ Frankenstein monster: a product of the channel’s 20-year war on truth.
With the accused sexual predator Roger Ailes ousted (and dead), Trump has become Fox News’ de facto chief programmer. Until recently, Ailes’s aide-de-camp and, according to many, enabler of his sexual misconduct, Bill Shine, was double-dipping, with generous severance payments from Fox in addition to his White House communications chief’s salary. Demonstrating that those roles were actually one job, Shine appears to have arranged for special access for Hannity at Trump press events, as well as an appearance onstage with Trump during a 2018 rally. He also could be found issuing instructions to Fox News producers: for instance, demanding the removal of a chyron deemed unfavorable to Ivanka Trump.
Still, amid all the revelations—the power plays, the venal deals, the palace intrigue—the greatest shame of this story goes to people who receive no mention at all. It belongs to the journalists who, against all evidence and to the detriment of their profession and their nations’ democracies, continue to participate in the charade that what the Murdochs do is journalism and that, therefore, their dishonesty, provocation, and propaganda deserve to be taken seriously as news. Without their help, none of the above would have been possible.
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Fuck Rupert Murdoch. 
