Murdoch will be remembered for his cynical manipulation of American democracy | Opinion
Rupert Murdoch’s decision to step down as chairman of Fox News and News Corp. has generated nationwide discussion about his legacy and impact on American politics and the world of journalism. Launched in 1996, Fox News quickly became the media darling of conservatives, hailed by officeholders as a journalistic counter to what they perceived to be a liberal bias in network news coverage and a voice for their views and causes. Fox enjoys a special status in right-wing politics and remains the most-watched cable news outlet in the United States.
Murdoch’s worldwide impact on media — television, newspapering, publishing and film — through ownership of 20th Century Fox, global brands such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and Harper and Row and Fox Broadcasting Co. — is incalculable. After seven decades of swashbuckling dealmaking, Murdoch, an Australian immigrant who became an American citizen, has achieved outsize wealth and influence in his adopted homeland.
What remains is to take the measure of his impact on American politics.
Whatever else may be said about this international media mogul who injected his television network into American campaign politics as an advocate for a presidential candidate, a set of issues and an ideology, this much is clear: Murdoch has inflicted grave damage on our democracy.
Murdoch has traveled the path of his yellow journalism predecessors who peddled exaggeration, sensationalism and falsehoods to sell newspapers. Through his creation of Fox News, Murdoch has perpetuated in the name of television ratings a stream of conspiracies and lies that has rocked the foundation of our constitutional democracy, undermined governmental institutions, misled the electorate and subverted professional journalism, on which the citizenry relies for truth, facts and evidence — all crucial ingredients for the preservation of the republic.
Under the guise of its reporting banner — “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide” — Murdoch’s Fox News, more fables than news, has peddled false narratives that have distracted viewers from facts central to understanding the issues of our time. It has shaped and, indeed, warped American politics through an agenda that is anti-immigrant, opposes women’s reproductive rights and spearheads the white replacement theory.
Murdoch is chiefly responsible for the rise, success and power of Donald Trump. Fox provided Trump with regular access to its programs, which eased his transition from business to politics. It provided Trump with a 24-hour platform to promote his racist lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace, which jump-started his long campaign for the White House. It sported discussions of whether, during the 2008 presidential campaign, a harmless, fun and universally practiced “fist bump” between then candidate Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, was really a “terrorist fist jab.”
Fox nurtured and spread Trump’s baseless attacks on the mainstream media as “the enemy of the people,” a ruthless, derisive and menacing term employed historically by authoritarian regimes. And Fox News punctuated programs with Trump’s attacks on mainstream reporters as purveyors of “fake news,” which entwined the interests, future and currency of both.
Fox, with Murdoch’s approval, supported Trump’s lies about the presidential election of 2020 being rigged and stolen, which was the driver behind the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Fox has paid a high price for spreading the lies of the Trump team. In April of 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion voting Systems $787.5 million to avoid Dominion’s claims that the cable news network knowingly broadcast falsehoods about the outcome of the election, including assertions that Dominion’s voting machines flipped votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
In a pretrial deposition, while under oath, Murdoch testified that he believed the election had been fair and that Trump had not been cheated of victory. He also acknowledged that various Fox News commentators had endorsed the Big Lie — the lie that the election had been stolen.
The malignancy of the Big Lie, the essential fuel for Trump’s 2024 campaign, has inflicted untold harm on American democracy. Murdoch might have prohibited Fox from promoting the authoritarian lie, but he did not. That choice remains a permanent stain on his legacy and is the measure of his impact on our nation’s politics.