Fox News Conspiracies

SMH, by Malcolm Turnbull and Sharan Burrow

Rupert Murdoch succeeded where Vladimir Putin failed.

He turned Americans against each other, promoting anger, hatred and lies. Murdoch knew Donald Trump’s claim that the election was stolen was a lie,

but his Fox News network persuaded millions that it was true.

Update, Huff Post, 2023 March 9

Fox Chair Rupert Murdoch In Filings Says 2020 Election 'Not Stolen' Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said under oath that he believes the 2020 presidential election was free, fair and not stolen.

Update, Huff Post, 2023 March 9

Tucker Carlson Exposed:

Says He Hates Trump 'Passionately' In Private Texts

"Trump was a “demonic force” and “a destroyer”.

Fox News trumpeting conspiracies is worse than we thought

SMH, by Bill Wyman

former arts editor and assistant managing editor

of National Public Radio in Washington,

teaches at the University of Sydney

The media company Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s baleful, partisan and dishonest news channel, were fighting the truth that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and he and lot of his nutty myrmidons set about trying to overthrow the result.

Rupert Murdoch now admitted under oath before a court in the US that the news presenters at Fox knew they were telling lies.

Internal text messages show that Fox personalities and producers were saying one thing in public and another behind the scenes. We repeatedly see, for instance, that Fox’s supposed news folks actually knew it was all nonsense and said so among themselves.

The claims (by their on-air guests) were “crazy”, “insane”, said staffers, including the network’s stars. Their guests were “lying”, they acknowledged. And yet they kept putting them on air.

But not only that, they realized that as soon as they were telling the truth in their bulletins, their audience was switching channels. So, worried about their ratings (and their revenue) they returned to telling the election lie.

Enter the whirlwind that Fox reaped. It’s kind of delicious to see Fox confounded, finally, not by decency or ethics - which, under the First Amendment in America, are not required qualities in a news organisation - but rather the mule-headed obstinance of its audience.

Fox has been radicalising these folks for decades with lies and racist and hateful conspiracy theories. When the company pulled up short, the audience began leaving. So, Fox turned up the volume to get them back.

Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump

Sydney Morning Herald Editorial

Tail wagging the dogin Rupert Murdoch’s moment of truth

with content from Farrah Tomazin:

Trump and Murdoch have fallen out.

Can they survive without each other?

The Australian-American media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s sometimes breathtaking talent for walking away from tight situations has been tested by his admission Fox News commentators endorsed false allegations by former US president Donald Trump that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

When Murdoch revealed that his network presenters had “endorsed” Trump’s lies of a stolen election, and that company executives could have intervened to prevent those lies from being aired, not surprisingly, Trump was furious by the stunning admission.

“If Rupert Murdoch honestly believes that the Presidential Election of 2020, despite MASSIVE amounts of proof to the contrary, was not Rigged & Stollen [sic], then he & his group of MAGA Hating Globalist RINOS should get out of the News Business as soon as possible, because they are aiding & abetting the DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA with FAKE NEWS,” Trump wrote.

“Nobody wants Trump as an enemy,” Murdoch said. “We all know that Trump has a big following. If he says, ‘Don’t watch Fox News, maybe some don’t.’”

Behind the scenes, the latest court filing reveals, that similar concerns were playing out among primetime presenters and other executives. Sean Hannity, a longstanding Trump ally, had been “privately disgusted by Trump for weeks, but was scared to lose viewers.” Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s son, said in his testimony that a ratings drop would “keep me awake” at night.

And presenter Tucker Carlson privately acknowledged that the claim of rigged Dominion voting systems were “absurd”. Yet when Fox’s White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich tweeted that “there is no evidence that any voting system” altered the election, Carlson suggested to Hannity she should be fired.

The angry tirade was further evidence of the fallout between Trump and Murdoch, the Fox Corporation chairman whose media outlets propped up the former president for years - even to the point, it would seem, of deluding the audience about his baseless lies.

A proprietor known throughout the Australian media industry for exercising tight control over his far-flung empire, Murdoch’s admission raises the possibility that the tail is wagging the dog.

He has walked away before saying he did not know what his staff were doing.

In 2013, Murdoch told the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee inquiring into phone tapping of victims of crime and celebrities by British newspapers he was unaware hacking was more widespread than originally claimed, and he had “clearly” been misled by some of his staff.

“This is the most humble day of my life,” Murdoch said.

So as the race for the 2024 US election heats up, it begs the question, is the bromance truly over? Or does Trump still need Murdoch and does Murdoch still need Trump?

A.J. Bauer, a professor at the University of Alabama who researches and analyses trends in conservative media, says he can’t see Murdoch wanting to support Trump unless he was profitable or useful. Right now, that’s debatable.

If anything, Bauer says, Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen is costing Murdoch, both in terms of legal fees to defend the Dominion case and the possibility of hefty fines should Fox lose, which appears likely.

Murdoch’s admission has steeled senior Democrats to demand Fox stop disseminating the “big lie”, and in the lawsuit capital of the world, rainmakers are looking for clients. That said, it could be premature to count the nonagenarian out. Now 91, longevity is in Murdoch’s DNA.

His mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, died aged 103.

Republicans wish Trump would vanish

but won’t dare make him disappear

The disgraced former president will loiter as his party’s problem, but not everybody else’s.

There will be a delightful development in US politics in 2023. Yes, Donald Trump will still run clumsily rampant, with legal and political imbroglios surrounding him.

But in a very real sense, things will be different. Trump is out of office, and the courts have made clear that, since he is a private citizen, he will face whatever justice due him as one, even as formal indictments loom.