This article is part of a series about a legal threat sent to Crikey by Lachlan Murdoch, over an article Crikey published about the January 6 riots in the US. For the series introduction go here, and for the full series go here.
There is a growing list of Fox News personalities and reporters who have fallen foul of the Murdoch business by speaking out against it, but how they fare after that appears to be a product of their place in the prime-time pecking order.
In 2021, former Fox News foreign correspondent Conor Powell told the ABC’s Four Corners that Murdoch media was the “biggest purveyor of misinformation in the world”. Fox News took umbrage with the program, as Crikey reported, but that displeasure did not extend to Powell. In his direction, it didn’t bat an eyelid.
Powell spent nine years covering conflict zones for Fox, but as a “straightforward news reporter” he said he was a small fish and “easy to ignore”.
“Lachlan and Rupert, they’re not news guys. They care about media in the sense that it’s a driver of profitability,” he told Crikey. “I was never part of their opinion side, which is what they really care about. Fox gets their hair up when people associated with prime-time shows speak out because it’s integral to the Fox brand.”
Like Powell, former News Corp lawyer Joseph Azam got no grief when he left and later spoke out: “I’m not an important person in their eyes.” Nor, he said, was the Fox News producer who spoke out against the broadcaster’s anti-Muslim rhetoric.
So, who is a VIP in the Murdoch mind? Azam said the ideal candidate is “on air”, a money-making machine whose words could redirect revenue from Murdoch media to competitors and, critically, someone with the “ability to sustain media attention”.
Prime-time personalities fit the bill, which is why so many are under stringent non-disclosure agreements (NDA). Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson declined an interview with Crikey for this very reason.
“The Murdochs have a history of throwing huge sums of money to keep people quiet,” Powell said. “Fox News has bought a lot of their critics’ silence with paid NDAs, particularly employees who suffered abuse at the hand of executives like Roger Ailes and on-air stars like Bill O’Reilly.
“It’s too bad more people aren’t able to speak out about the misconduct they witnessed.”
Silent or not, a lot of damage control is done by the brand’s conservative viewing base, who Powell said are sustained on a “red meat” diet of “misinformation” and therefore unperturbed by revelations that their preferred news source is problematic.
More problematic is that their loyalty doesn’t stop there. Azam said that although the big bosses have let him be, Fox viewers have not: “I still receive death threats. It’s easy to forget that they have an entire army of people who will do the dirty work for them by virtue of being indoctrinated.”
This base buffer makes it much easier for Fox to play a “combative” game in the US. “They love a public fight against other networks and enjoy demonising those that speak out,” said Powell. “It’s part of the ‘how do we make money off this?’ approach.”
It’s a slightly different game in Australia; Murdoch media dominates and its base is baked-in, but not to a US degree. Here there is pushback. Murdoch’s Australia edition is therefore more vulnerable to reputational damage.
“People speaking out in Australia and other countries can hurt the brand,” Powell said.
