In 1996 the Australian-born mogul launched Fox News with media specialist Roger Ailes, who had packaged Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon in 1968 by presenting him to audiences in highly scripted television appearances.
The Fox News Channel initially presented news from a conservative viewpoint, but over time its opinion shows, delivered as if they were news, came to dominate the channel. Those shows presented a simple narrative in which Americans—overwhelmingly white and rural—wanted the government to leave them alone but “socialists” who wanted social welfare programs demanded their tax dollars. Isolated in the fantasy world of Fox News, its viewers became such fanatic adherents to right-wing politics that Fox wholeheartedly trumpeted Trump’s Big Lie after he lost the 2020 presidential election because viewers turned away from Fox when some of its personalities acknowledged that Biden had won.
In Fox News, Murdoch created a uniquely destructive force in American democracy and public life, one that ushered in an era of division where racist and post-truth politics thrive. Fox was a shameless propaganda outfit, reaping massive profits even as it attacked core democratic values such as tolerance, truth and fair elections. Murdoch wreaked untold havoc on American democracy.
Murdoch sees it differently. In his resignation letter, he attacked “bureaucracies” who wanted to “silence those who would question their provenance and purpose” and “elites” who “have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.” He wrote that “most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth."
Forbes estimates that their media empire has enabled Murdoch and his family to amass a fortune of more than $17 billion.
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