To put the current fight within the family of Rupert Murdoch for control of the Murdoch media empire in context, one needs to understand the changing political media landscape in the past three decades.
When the cable news channel Fox News started in 1996, it barely made a blip in the public consciousness. It was designed to be right wing and its founding CEO Roger Ailes was unapologetically so. But initially most people, and even journalists in major media like ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and the print news were not even aware of its existence or confused it with the Fox TV broadcast network. That changed in 2000 when in the highly close presidential election, Fox News made an early and controversial call giving Florida to George W. Bush and that proved to be a significant factor in determining the final outcome.
Since then, it has become a dominant voice on cable news by blatantly catering to a right wing audience while at the same time trying to retain a semblance of credibility as a news organization by hiring away journalists from other news organizations and by having at least some of its programs try be at least partly credible and not obviously right-wing propaganda. But then they found themselves with competition for their audience by the arrival of even more right wing cable news outlets like One American News Network (OANN) in 2013 and Newsmax in 2014.
Although the audiences for these two rivals are much smaller than for Fox News, they do pose a threat to its dominance. With the arrival of creepy Donald Trump on the scene in 2015 and his attacks on the legacy media, the competition for his favor and the right wing audience among his followers ramped up and in trying to protect its right flank, Fox News went pretty much full MAGA with fewer and fewer journalists remaining who would even try to provide alternative points of view.
The election of 2020 was a critical point for Fox News. Although its news coverage and commentary was unabashedly partisan, the team that did election analyses and projections consisted of data scientists and statisticians who are professionals in their fields and late on election night, Fox was first in calling the state of Arizona for Joe Biden. Although this did not clinch the election for Biden (that had to wait until a few days later when Pennsylvania was called for Biden), it did make the path to victory for creepy Trump very much harder and went against his claims earlier in the eventing that he had won the election. He was furious and demanded that Fox retract its call, even telling Rupert Murdoch to order the change. But the election statistics team resisted the pressure, saying that they were confident of their conclusions, and they were proven right.
But Fox News viewers were furious and accused it of betrayal and started switching over to OANN and Newsmax during the night and Fox saw a precipitous drop in its ratings. This caused alarm within the network and to prevent further erosion, it went into full MAGA overdrive, propagating the lies about a stolen election and that the Dominion voting machines and the Smartmatic software were responsible for switching votes from Biden to creepy Trump. OANN and Newsmax also made similar accusations.
Dominion and Smartmatic promptly sued all three of them and here is where things stand in these cases and others against people like Rudy Giuliani.
- Dominion settled with Fox News in April 2023 for a hefty $787.5 million.
- Dominion’s case against Newsmax is set to go to trial in April 2025.
- Dominion’s case against OANN is going forward
- Smartmatic’s case against Fox is pending.
- Smartmatic’s case against Newsmax was settled on September 26, 2024, though the terms of the settlement not have not become public.
- Smartmatic’s case against OANN was resolved through a ‘confidential settlement’.
You can be reasonably sure that the cases that were settled were for hefty amounts since the lies these three media outlets propagated were not just obviously false but outlandishly so. The pending cases are also likely to be resolved before they get to trial, because of the danger that juries will award massive punitive damages for recklessness.
Fox News is trapped by fear that any less devotion to the MAGA cause will cause them to lose audience share to OANN and Newsmax, and so it must try to be as right wing as it can, especially since creepy Trump gets upset when their coverage is not even more fawning and he runs to OANN and Newsmax. Fox News could try to crush its right wing rivals by becoming even more extreme than it is now but then its claim to be a news organization would be even less credible.
This is the context in which the fight for the future of Fox News takes place. Rupert Murdoch clearly wants his son Lachlan to be the sole power holder in order to keep Fox News on its current path or become even more right wing, while the other three oldest children seem to be embarrassed by being associated with such a blatantly propagandistic outlet. The only outcomes for them are to take control and move it more to the center or take a buyout and wash their hands of any association, though the taint will never ever go away.
Schrödinger’s election result? The outcomes were at that point determined, surely?
The Fox channel showing regular television programming and news only a couple of hours a day debuted sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s, just as many people in the USA were getting cable tv and finally had a choice of channels to watch besides whatever their tv antennas could pick up. Even back then, their everyday programming skewed to the crass and sensationalist, while their news was conservative and right-wing. I was a young adult then, and the older adults around me were appalled and disgusted by the trash that aired on Fox. Funny, those same people are now addicted to it.
“The outcomes were at that point determined, surely?”
In a functioning democracy like the UK, yes. But people forced to live in the banana-republic-like shitshow that is the US take it for granted that the number votes cast is but one factor in determining the outcome of an election. Obviously the TV pundits’ opinions on the night matter, and of course the courts.
In seriousness, can any USAian explain again why anyone gives a shit what the TV shows say after the polls are closed?
@1 In 2020 Fox calling Arizona for Biden doesn’t change anything -- several states were close, but none of them were close enough for the result to be in doubt, and Trump needed to overturn more than one of them. In 2000 Florida was close enough that it isn’t clear who won, and the overall election was close enough that everything hung on Florida. I don’t find it obvious that Fox’s call was crucial, but a public perception that Bush had won might have given cover for the Supreme Court to put their thumbs on the scale.
One analysis I read suggested that the reason Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are so opposed to moving even a little to the left is because Fox News will then lose market share to the mainstream news outlets. That this fight isn’t really about politics, but about market share.
I suspect there is a little of both in there, because having a trained audience can make politics a lot easier. And politics keeps the regulations away. Codifying the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ (if that was possible) would kill Fox News. Better to have a trained audience who will help keep the regulations away and put up with the occasional lawsuit than have the government require that anything presented as truthful has to be truthful.
Katydid@2- The MAGA progression shown in the comic Mano posted a few days ago speaks to your point. You have to give them credit for planning their propaganda decades in advance.
If an asteroid hits the Fox News HQ the human race will be better off. The Americans seem unable to sort out TV network integrity by themselves, tangled as they are in commercial considerations.
@3 sonofrojblake, the news coverage (mostly live, by reputable media outlets and their data analysts) is how people learn who has won what state. As you know, in the crazy US system, that’s how the president gets elected, no need to count or even to determine the national popular vote.
The data analysts “call” the state as won by whomever as soon as they’re sure that enough votes have been counted to make the result firm (reputable analysts have never been wrong, to my knowledge.) Then, by the time the voting on the west coast closes at 11PM Eastern Time (if you wait up until the voting closes in Hawaii, you are going to be very sleep-deprived), the networks call who won the election. So, that’s how people find out who the new president is.
Used to be, before 2000 and 2016, you’d know who’d won by 11 PM Eastern Time, and could go to bed. Not this election, I’ll be bound! They might be still be quarrelling over the vote counts after January 21, the day that the next president has to be inaugurated.
Whatever the result, the other side will challenge it. It will end up in the Supreme Court for sure, not a very good prospect there.
Garnetstar @ 8
Speaking of staying up late, the debate between the veep candidates starts 9 Merican time, meaning 3 am Swedish time 🙁
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OT
Congratulations to Jimmy Carter, 100 years today! Unlike Rupert ‘father of lies’ Murdoch, Carter has used his long life to help people. 💐
birger @8, not worth you staying up for, I think. They’ll report the next day all the hilariously stupid things that Vance said, you’ll get a laugh out of it, and that’s all it’s worth.
I believe that MAGAs were mad, not because the call that Biden had won Arizona was crucial or even interesting, but only because Fox was the first network to make the call. If the other networks had called it first, I suppose it would have been all right with the Trumpies.
Anyone remember the hilarious Fox situation in the 2012 election? Fox analysts called that Obama had won Ohio, and that gave him the presidency. (I believe that Fox was also the first to call that, but Trumpies weren’t around then to resent it.)
The Fox anchors were so gobsmacked that Obama won (that was the universal republican delusion at the time, that he was certain to lose) that one Fox anchor had to walk back behind the set to the office of the data analysts and interview all of them and ask how sure they were of their call. They said, 100% sure, and they were good analysts, so the anchor had to walk back to their desk and both anchors had to announce that Obama had won. You should have seen their completely astounded faces, and their stumbling voices as they said this truly unbelievable result, funniest thing ever.
I gather that Fox fired the head of their data analysis group, or maybe all of it, after 2020 election, so that accurate calls won’t be made this election. *That* solves the problem!
Matt G @#6:
Decades is right. Remember that Fox News founding CEO Ailes was a Nixon staffer. The rise of Conservative Talk Radio that paved the groundwork for Fox News happened because Ailes and some of his buddies at the time figured that the problem with Watergate wasn’t that Nixon had actually done anything illegal; no, the problem was the the way the media reported on it made Nixon look bad and forced him to resign. So the whole point of this starting back in the 1970s was to create a news source and capture the audience so that they could get away with whatever they wanted without having to worry about being held to account by a majority of the population listening to non-partisan media.
… to take control and move it more to the center …
The less-toxic Murdoch spawn have the same weakness as their brother and father: even minor hints of moderation will cost them the core of their primary audience. Prudence, Elizabeth, and James Murdoch all surely know what happened when McDonald’s attempted to widen their market by offering vegetarian sandwiches: they lost a lot of regular customers and failed to draw new ones. If they win, they have only the choice between riding their rabid cash cow or selling it (trying to kill it outright would only result in the classic Hydra-growing-two-heads-where-one-was-cut-off problem).
We seem stuck with a large pro-fascist media sector, with democracy’s sole hopes consisting of the increasing decrepitude of the boomer generation (in its prime decried as hippie radicals -- where did we break bad?), and the possibility of the neo-Nazis crashing in disgrace in next month’s elections. Only the former prospect is inevitable; the latter depends on the current twenty-somethings, particularly the patriarchy-resistant women among them -- who will face a lifetime of struggles just to hold their present ground.