You can’t help but feel sorry for Rupert Murdoch.

In Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Dr Frankenstein created a monster that took on a life of its own, and which he could no longer control. Murdoch has outdone Frankenstein and created two monsters over which he has now lost control. They have left him floundering and threaten to inflict great damage on US democracy.

Murdoch’s first monster is the Fox News audience, which after long cultivation into the Fox News fantasy land, refuses to believe any news that does not fit its prejudices. Fox, as a result, feels compelled to reinforce its delusions rather than report accurately.

Murdoch’s second monster grew out of the first – a Donald Trump-dominated Republican Party. Murdoch wanted to make Trump a “non-person”, but the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month showed Trump now dominates the party like no one else in living memory.

‘Red meat’ to conservatives

When Fox News began in 1996, the chief executive for its first 20 years, Roger Ailes, said:

Rupert Murdoch and I and, by the way, the vast majority of the American people believe that most of the news tilts to the left.

But Fox News was never just a mainstream news service with a somewhat more conservative centre of gravity. From the beginning, it was more of a propaganda machine, and this became increasingly pronounced over the years. More and more, its prime-time offerings consisted of commentary rather than news programs, designed to feed “red meat” to the Republican base.

News that didn’t fit increasingly didn’t appear. So, when the Iraq war began, there was noisy flag-waving, but as it became militarily messier, the network gave it much less attention, although there were always efforts to find a positive gloss.

During Barack Obama’s first presidential term, Fox News acted as a recruiting and publicity vehicle for the far-right, populist Tea Party. It gave oxygen to Trump’s baseless claim that Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore was not eligible to be president. Fox News host Glenn Beck asserted Obama was a racist with a deep-seated hatred for white people.

During the COVID pandemic, it often denied the severity of the virus, and gave publicity to anti-vaxxer views and quack cures.

And after Trump’s election defeat in 2020, many Fox News viewers were ready to believe his claims of electoral fraud. Overwhelmingly, however, the key players at Fox News and in the Murdoch stable believed the election was fair.

Fox News’s chief political correspondent Bret Baier saw “no evidence of fraud. None.” Murdoch’s New York Post urged Trump to accept the result. In an editorial, the tabloid said his “baseless” stolen election rhetoric “undermines faith in democracy and faith in the nation”.

A new threat and new strategy

Very soon, a sense of crisis overcame Fox News. Its prime-time ratings had fallen, and by some measures, CNN was now ahead. What most spooked the network’s management,........

© Pearls and Irritations