Tag: Rupert Murdoch

Steve Schmidt rains hell on the ‘moral rot’ of Fox News and Rupert Murdoch for vaccine lies

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In a series of tweets posted early Friday morning, former Republican Party campaign consultant Steve Schmidt pointed an accusing finger at Fox News, various personalities on the conservative network and media mogul Rupert Murdoch for being responsible for thousands of deaths from COVID-19 and claimed they have “blood on their hands.”

Reacting to a report that Fox News star Tucker Carlson laughed off questions over whether he has been vaccinated despite his nightly questioning of whether vaccines are needed, Schmidt — who ran former Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign against Barack Obama — fired off a volley of attacks that ended with him calling Fox News “one of the singularly most corrupt institutions that has ever existed in the history of the United States.”

Tagging Carlson and Fox News colleague Laura Ingraham in this his first tweet, Schmidt pointed out that they and their families have been vaccinated while encouraging their viewers to avoid in the name of freedom. Continue reading.

My grimly ironic conversation with Trump, the fourth horseman of our media apocalypse

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The Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse — Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump — have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives. Two of them are gone now, but their legacies, including the News Corporation, the Fox News empire, and a gang of broadcast barbarians will ensure that a lasting plague of misinformation, propaganda masquerading as journalism, and plain old fake news will be our inheritance.

The original Four Horsemen were biblical characters seen as punishments from God. By the time they became common literary and then film currency, they generally went by the names of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Matching each with Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, and Trump should prove a grisly but all-too-relevant parlor game. The originals were supposed to signal end times and sometimes, when I think about their modern American descendants, I wonder if we’re heading in just that direction.

Reflecting on the lives of those modern embodiments of (self-) punishment makes me wonder how we ever let them happen. Isn’t there any protection against evil of their sort in a democracy, even when you know about it early? Maybe when evil plays so cleverly into fears and resentments or is just so damn entertaining, not enough people can resist it. Hey, I even worked for one of the horsemen. It was my favorite job… until it wasn’t. Continue reading.

Murdoch’s Fox News, New York Post start to distance themselves from Trump

The TV outlet in particular is credited with helping bring Trump to power in 2016, but now seems to be in the process of dumping him as Biden closes in on the White House

NEW YORK (AFP) — Fox News and the New York Post, magnate Rupert Murdoch’s main media outlets, have started distancing themselves from Donald Trump as the US election vote counting drama drags on — a first since the president came to power and a potential turning point.

On Thursday night in Phoenix, Arizona, supporters of Trump bluntly shouted “Fox News Sucks” in reference to the news outfit considered fiercely loyal to the president for the past five years.

Fox News infuriated Trump and his people on election night by calling Arizona for Democrat Joe Biden. Continue reading.

What happens to Fox News if Trump loses? Rupert Murdoch is prepared.

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Spend a couple hours with Fox News on a typical weeknight, and you may come to see the potential election of Joe Biden as a cataclysm in the making.

Prime-time host Laura Ingraham recently warned her viewers of the “Bolsheviks and billionaires” she said were propelling his candidacy. Frequent contributor Dan Bongino called Biden’s campaign “the biggest con job in presidential election history.” Just last week, Sean Hannity sent a camera crew to stake out Biden’s house to demand answers about the alleged contents of his son’s laptop. Even the network’s senior political analyst, Brit Hume, has repeatedly called the Democratic presidential candidate “senile” on air.

But behind the scenes, a strange calm prevails. The man who helped create Fox News as the most influential platform for conservative politics in America fully expects that Biden will win — and frankly isn’t too bothered by that. Continue reading.

The Making of the Fox News White House

Illustration: Tyler Comrie; photograph from Getty

Fox News has always been partisan. But has it become propaganda?

n January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.

But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.” Continue reading “The Making of the Fox News White House”