Future Fox looks same
Rupert Murdoch on Thursday announced his resignation as chairman of Fox Corporation and News Corp. He’ll serve as chair emeritus of both organizations. People will say a lot of things about the move, though no one will likely say it’s premature: Murdoch, after all, is 92.
His has been a long and tenacious career. There’s an underside, however, to Murdoch’s endurance: He launched the crown jewel of his media empire — ratings-topping Fox News — in 1996, at the age of 65. Then he stuck around another 27 years, long enough for the network to try to sabotage American democracy by promoting President Donald Trump’s stolen-election lies — and pay out $787.5 million in a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems relating to that coverage.
All under his guidance.
In a memo to employees, Murdoch framed his work as the stuff of any old media executive: “For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change. But the time is right for me to take on different roles, knowing that we have truly talented teams,” he wrote. Fine sentiments for an intra-office memo, though history will record that the “news and ideas” subject to Murdoch’s engagement include the “great replacement” theory, runaway covid-19 quackery, conspiracy theories related to Jan. 6, 2021, and every off-the-shelf falsehood about Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and their ideological ilk.
And that’s just the stuff on Fox News. Murdoch’s media career has spanned continents and industries. He started on his path to moguldom in his native Australia, inheriting his father’s newspaper business at the age of 22. He quickly displayed a talent for acquisition and tabloidization, building out a diversified company that included the Australian, the country’s first national paper. He broke into the madcap London market in 1969 with his purchase of News of the World, a property he’d end up shuttering in 2011 amid a phone-hacking scandal, including a dismal episode in which the paper gave false hope to the family of a disappeared teen girl that she might still be alive.
Here in the states, his holdings now include Fox News, Fox Television Stations, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and HarperCollins, though he has sold off a number of properties, notably 21st Century Fox, New York magazine, the Village Voice and others.
Although Murdoch’s passions lay in newspapering, he recognized early on that a prosperous media empire would require diversification. In 1984, he told Fortune, “I don’t know any better than anyone else where the electronic age is taking us, or how it will affect a large newspaper company. But I do know that … you will have to be a major player in the production of entertainment programming,” he said.
Which is to say, if Murdoch had been less visionary about the media business, American democracy would be in better shape today. Put aside his stewardship of properties such as the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post or 21st Century Fox: It’s Murdoch’s management of Fox News that will define his legacy, and the judgment will be damning.
At the network’s launch in 1996, Murdoch placed Republican operative and television producer Roger Ailes in charge of turning Fox News into the country’s No. 1 cable news operation. Ailes eventually succeeded, on the back of distorted and often false programming that vilified liberals and served as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party — essentially a glossy, televised version of a right-wing tabloid. Ailes lasted until 2016, when a lawsuit filed by onetime Fox News host Gretchen Carlson helped expose a wide-ranging sexual harassment scandal. Fox News ushered in new management and upgraded its human resources practices.
Yet subsequent events demonstrated that the Fox News programming formula - Republican propaganda and high ratings - was more durable than its architects. Minus Ailes, Fox News continued its path toward reckless and biased reporting, a strain personified by the now-former host Tucker Carlson. For more than six years of prime-time broadcasting, Carlson served as disinformer in chief at Fox News, a run that enjoyed the support of Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, the other top executive at Fox Corporation and News Corp. “Inside the network, [Carlson] answers solely to the Murdochs themselves,” noted a New York Times investigation.
Carlson’s extremism set the stage for the disaster that unfolded in Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election. Though Democratic nominee Joe Biden beat Trump fair and square, network officials allowed some anchors to indulge the idea that the election was stolen from the incumbent, as Dominion’s suit against Fox News displayed.
To tell the truth, they discovered, would have alienated a big chunk of their audience, which was already finding full-fledged election-theft coverage on other networks. Part of the narrative was that Dominion, which provided voting technology to multiple states, had participated in vote-flipping schemes to benefit Biden. In his deposition in the case, Rupert Murdoch was asked if he could have kept conspiracy-spinning voices off the network’s air. “I could have. But I didn’t,” he responded.
Murdoch also could have reached an early settlement with Dominion, but he didn’t. Instead, the litigation produced documents exposing his propagandistic ambitions. In a November 2020 email to Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott, Murdoch discusses the network’s approach toward Trump’s election challenges and the critical runoff elections looming for both U.S. Senate contests in Georgia. “Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can,” wrote Murdoch.
Italics inserted to highlight the Murdoch legacy. Lachlan Murdoch issued a statement congratulating his father on a “remarkable” career. “We thank him for his vision, his pioneering spirit, his steadfast determination, and the enduring legacy he leaves to the companies he founded and countless people he has impacted,” said the statement.
Forecast for Fox News: Business as usual, or worse.