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, however, was that two small news operations, Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN), which were even more right wing than Fox, were being publicly praised by Trump and had picked up viewers.
Fox’s sense of crisis led it on a fateful path. It may have been a panicky overreaction.
A post-election decline in viewership — especially among those of the losing party — is not unusual. After Obama’s victory, for example, Fox quickly regained ground, becoming the strongest opposition voice against the new administration. Moreover, even though Newsmax had picked up viewers, its total audience was still minuscule compared to Fox’s, and neither it nor OAN had anything like the resources needed to compete effectively with Fox.
Six days after the election, on November 9, 2020, Fox News executives nonetheless committed the network to push “narratives that would entice their audience back”. In the double-talk of Fox News management, they resolved to “respect” their audience, by which they meant reinforce their delusions.
This resulted in a mammoth turnaround. Within two weeks, Fox News had questioned the election result 774 times, according to Media Matters for America.
The fact this switch of strategy meant the network was deliberately promoting a falsehood seems not to have troubled any of them. Nor did the fact that they were, in the words of their sister publication, the Post, undermining faith in democracy and the nation. The key thing was that the audiences came back.
The truth comes out
Now focused on promoting claims of electoral fraud, the network’s primary targets soon included the two companies that provided electronic voting equipment for the election: Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.
On the political battleground, there were rarely tangible consequences for running baseless stories. But Fox had wandered into a legal minefield. And it was not tiptoeing.
Trump’s lawyer, Sidney Powell, alleged the companies that had administered the voting machines had committed “the most massive and … egregious fraud the world has ever seen”. Lou Dobbs was perhaps the most outspoken of the Fox News presenters, calling it “an electoral 9/11” and a “cyber Pearl Harbour”.
Dominion sent 3,600 communications to Fox News denying the various accusations to no effect. Then it mounted a defamation legal action. The case went on for several months, and on the day the trial was about to begin, Fox settled. The result was a massive defamation payout: US$787.5 million (A$1.2 billion).
But it was not only the expense; it was the embarrassment. As part of the discovery process and the depositions required, Dominion gained access to thousands of internal Fox News documents, demonstrating the stark contrast between what the network’s personalities said in private and what went to air.
Murdoch, in his deposition, said he never believed any of the claims of computer fraud. The internal communications also showed how deeply he detested Trump. After the January 6, 2021, riots at the US Capitol, he wrote in an email that he aimed to make Trump a “non-person”.
Trump’s response to these revelations was swift and predictable. On his Truth Social platform, he wrote:
If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged and Stollen [sic], then he and his group of MAGA [Make America Great Again] Hating Globalist RINOS [Republican in name only] should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding and abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS.
Trump’s resurrection and Murdoch’s isolation
The schism between Trump and Murdoch was deep and bitter. Fox’s subsequent search for an alternative to Trump was most publicly visible in late 2022 and early 2023. In the 2022 US midterm elections, the Democrats did much better than expected, and Trump-endorsed candidates performed poorly. The shining exception for Republicans was the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis.
Murdoch embraced him. Always subtle, a New York Post front page anointed him “DeFuture” and later had a caricature of Trump as Humpty Dumpty, headlined “Trumpty Dumpty”.
DeSantis was a determined cultural warrior, and no doubt Murdoch and others hoped he could represent “Trumpism” without the legal and personal baggage.
However, DeSantis proved to be Trumpism without a hint of charisma. Nor did DeSantis dare question Trump’s narrative of victimhood, endorsing his claims of a stolen election and that the legal cases against him were political witch hunts.
By late 2023, it was clear DeSantis was going to lose the Republican primaries to be the 2024 presidential nominee — and that Trump was going to win again. All business logic pointed towards the need for Fox News to make amends with Trump. And for Trump, political logic pointed towards the need for a détente with the biggest and most influential conservative media organisation.
The rapprochement began in January 2024. Fox staged a town hall event for Trump, the first time he had been live on the network for two years. It not only gave Trump a platform, but it was also timed to overshadow the other Republican presidential candidates having a debate on CNN.
DeSantis was angry, saying Trump has “got a Praetorian Guard of the conservative media, Fox News, the websites, all this stuff”.
As a final act of obeisance, Murdoch attended the Republican National Convention. But it merely underlined his new marginality. Trump, himself, was polite: “I speak with Rupert Murdoch a lot. […] He’s 100% sharp, he’s sharp as a tack.”
Donald Trump Jr, now the self-proclaimed MAGA enforcer, was less polite. He claimed he had been blacklisted by Fox News, which Fox denied. Then he said:
There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party you had to bend the knee to [Murdoch] or to others … I don’t think that’s the case anymore.
To annoy Murdoch further, one of the stars of the convention was Tucker Carlson, who was fired by Fox 15 months earlier. Carlson sat in Trump’s VIP box next to the ex-president, while Murdoch was some distance away in a separate box.
Moreover, Murdoch seemed to have zero influence over Trump’s vice presidential choice, and perhaps was even counterproductive. There were reports he had lobbied against the selection of JD Vance, while Donald Trump Jr and Carlson were both extremely proactive in pushing Vance.
Carlson reportedly advised Trump: “When your enemies are pushing a running mate at you”, referring to the Murdoch empire, “it’s a pretty good sign you should ignore them.”
What damage has been done?
All of this serves to underline Trump’s continued dominance. To advance in the Republican Party, it is necessary to pay homage to Trump and his fictions. Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, The Washington Post looked at nearly 700 Republican candidates for federal office and found that at least a third embraced Trump’s false election fraud claims.
Not only is the party subjected to his worldview, but there is also a new group of influential, pro-Trump, mega-donor billionaires, whose influence may be increasing, and whose views could, at best, be called eccentric.
Elon Musk, for example, seemed to promise he would give a pro-Trump political action committee US$45 million (A$68 million) a month, but in true Trumpian fashion, later seemed to backtrack. Musk also believes “the woke mind virus” is “one of the greatest threats to modern civilisation”.
Another tech billionaire, Peter Thiel, Vance’s principal backer, has said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Indeed, he thinks “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
This Republican Party is a very different beast from the one over which Murdoch exercised so much influence in recent decades. Indeed, Peter Wehner, who worked for three Republican presidents, says the party today under Trump is pretty much the opposite of its former self.
Murdoch has never given much hint of being someone who harbours regrets. But America’s political landscape today is one he would abhor: the legitimacy of the electoral system is under assault, conspiracy theories have more potency than in decades past, and the Republican Party is dominated by someone he detests and considers a danger to democracy.
Does he ever acknowledge how his own actions gave momentum to forces that now run against and threaten his own values? He might plead commercial necessity, but surely he knows the disservices to American democracy his media have done.
This was originally published in The Conversation.
