Let’s give Donald Trump at least partial credit. He told us immigrants were ruining America. If he’d have specified that he just meant an immigrant by the name of Rupert Murdoch, he’d have done a great service to the whole country.
Murdoch’s been a plague on America since he arrived from Australia, by way of England, back in 1974. First he bought the New York Post, once a legitimate newspaper and now not fit to wrap any self-respecting fish.
Then he created Fox News, with its endless bending of the truth, its naked partisanship in the face of raw facts, its sensationalism and its launching of muscular, right-wing hysteria that helped fuel last month’s storming of the U.S. Capitol.
All have worsened the cancerous divisions tearing the country apart today.
But now, in the wake of a breathtaking lawsuit filed the other day, maybe the country will get a small but meaningful glimpse of the dangerous lies Murdoch’s on-air people have been hustling for years and years.
Last week, the technology firm Smartmatic filed a massive $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against the Fox empire, blaming such high-rated anchors as Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro for spreading phony, vote-rigging conspiracies and harming the company’s business and reputation.
The day after the suit was filed, Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” This was its highest-rated show. Such a thing is not done in television, where high ratings lead to high advertising dollars, not to decapitations.
In the face of public outrage, and lawsuits floating through the air, the classic response from Fox, and from Murdoch, has generally been to tough it out. But not this time. First, there was the silencing of Dobbs. Then, as the New York Times media writer Michael M. Grynbaum wrote over the weekend:
“Fox News, which seldom bows to critics, has run fact-checking segments to debunk its own anchors’ false claims about electoral fraud. This is not the typical playbook for right-wing media, which prides itself on pugilism and delights in ignoring the liberals who have long complained about its content.
“But conservative outlets have rarely faced this level of direct assault on their economic lifeblood.”
With Murdoch’s blessing, Fox has spent the past five years operating out of Donald Trump’s back pocket, not only blindly supporting his presidency but, in many cases, putting precise words into Trump’s mouth.
It’s been an echo chamber relationship.
Do we need reminders of the combined voices of Fox and Trump’s phony claims about voter fraud (debunked by about 60 different judges, many of them Trump’s own appointees), the phony claims about Barack Obama’s birthplace or the phony “War on Christmas” claims? Or the questioning of American Muslims’ patriotism, or the phony stories about a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member?
Fox had to pay millions to the murdered man’s family over the last story. But that was only millions — now they’re facing billions in threats.
Across the decades, the Murdoch family has pocketed such billions. Crime pays. In this case, it’s the crimes they’ve committed against truth itself.
Let’s be clear here: Fox’s talking heads are entitled to their opinions — hell, it’s the free exchange of ideas that are the backbone of our entire system of government.
But they’re not entitled to mangle the facts in order to espouse those opinions. That’s precisely the reason we’ve got millions of people who think Trump won reelection — he keeps saying it, and Fox kept encouraging him.
And it’s the reason we had all those people storming the Capitol a month ago. They weren’t playing around. They were True Believers. They were told their country was being stolen, and they wanted it back.
Of course, they were told this by a guy named Murdoch who came to America to make his fortune on the power of his lies, and the gullibility of his listeners.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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