A trio of former senior Fox executives recently published a statement expressing regret for their role in helping bring Fox News into existence. “We never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become,” they wrote. While the executives didn’t work directly for the Fox News operation, they helped News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch “give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox Television that came to include Fox News Channel.” For this they feel “deep disappointment.”
A couple somewhat conflicting idioms come to mind: Too little too late. Better than nothing.
The who could have ever seen this coming narrative isn’t convincing.
First, the authors’ attempts at self-reflection come up short. It’s unclear exactly when all three of the executives ceased working with Murdoch, but what’s obvious is that this kind of note could’ve come many, many years ago — and it could be far more introspective.
The authors of the letter say they all “greatly admired” Murdoch in the 1990s as he angled to create Fox as a competitor network to ABC, NBC and CBS. “We genuinely believed that the creation of a fourth competitive force in broadcast television was in the public interest,” they write.
But the who could have ever seen this coming narrative isn’t convincing. Well before the ’90s, Murdoch had already established a reputation as a right-wing activist media mogul. His publications played a vital role in providing sympathetic coverage of hard-right politicians like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former President Ronald Reagan. (Reagan’s team even credited Murdoch’s New York Post with delivering the state of New York to him in 1980.) Publications like the Post weren’t beacons of journalistic integrity, but tabloids that trafficked in right-wing fearmongering and sensationalism.
And even Fox News didn’t just come out of nowhere at News Corp. Murdoch first tried — and failed — to buy CNN. Then he experimented with Fox News-style programming long before the network went on the air, as a 2011 Rolling Stone report documented:
Those false starts included a 60 Minutes-style program that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program. “The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger [Ailes] arriving,” says Dan Cooper, managing editor of that first iteration of Fox News. Like Joseph Coors before him at TVN, Murdoch envisioned his new network as a counterweight to the “left-wing bias” of CNN. “There’s your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda,” says Eric Burns, who served for a decade as media critic at Fox News. “That’s its original sin.”
In other words, Murdoch’s propagandistic agenda was clear well before Fox News even emerged.
The authors’ attempt at self-exculpation gets even worse when you take into account that at least one of them, Preston Padden, who worked as a lobbyist for Fox, has argued that Fox News was actually a fairly normal media operation for its first decade or so of existence. A few years ago, Padden wrote an op-ed in The Daily Beast arguing that up until around 2005, Fox News was a “truthful center-right news network,” and seems to identify its worst sins in its role in helping set the stage for the Jan. 6 insurrection and Covid denialism.
But from its very inception, Fox News was an overtly political operation. Before being hired by Murdoch to run Fox News, Roger Ailes was arguably the premier and most ruthless right-wing political consultant in American politics. His entire career was spent innovating in the space of helping major Republican politicians from Richard Nixon to Reagan to George H.W. Bush look more media savvy. Fox News was never meant to be a news-gathering operation. It was a partisan weapon and a fear-generator. And this was obvious in the kinds of media operations Fox News ran from its beginnings in 1996, whether in the way it tried to call the 2000 election early or its influential role as one of the most militant advocates for the mendaciously waged War on Terror or its literal coordination with the Bush administration on re-election talking points. Why would that kind of media operation turn its back on a future Republican president who lied?
This statement could’ve come out a lot earlier, but it didn’t, and it seems that it may have been in part because of some political sympathy with its agenda. A more thoughtful statement might’ve reckoned with how Fox News’ DNA primed it to become a disinformation machine, precisely because its founding mission wasn’t truth, but to serve as a party organ.
That all being said, the existence of this document is helpful from a historical perspective. If even those who were initially OK with Murdoch’s political style grew to be repulsed by it, that’s a useful sign post for chronicling how the American right evolved.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.