This week, Rupert Murdoch formally stepped down as the chairman of News Corp. At the annual shareholder’s meeting, the 92-year-old media mogul inveighed against the “suppression of debate by an intolerant elite who regard differing opinions as anathema”. He also passed the baton to Lachlan Murdoch, his 52-year-old son, “a believer in the social purpose of journalism”.
Murdoch also told those assembled that “humanity has a high destiny”. Unmentioned: how Fox News’s coverage of the 2020 election led to its shelling out of hundreds of millions to settle a defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, or how other suits continue.
Five days after the election, insisting Donald Trump could not have lost to Joe Biden – as he clearly did – Maria Bartiromo defied management to become “the first Fox host to utter the name ‘Dominion’”, writes Brian Stelter, a veteran Fox-watcher and former CNN host. “All gassed up on rage and righteousness, [Bartiromo] heaped shame onto the network and spurred a $787.5m settlement payment.”
Bartiromo popularized the Trump aide Sidney Powell and her special brand of insanity. Their enthusiasm became fatally contagious. January 6 and the insurrection followed. Two and a half years later, Bartiromo is still on the air. Powell is a professional defendant. Last month, she pleaded guilty in Fulton county, Georgia, to six counts of misdemeanor election interference and agreed to six years of probation. She still faces potential civil liability and legal sanction.
“What Bartiromo began on a Sunday morning in November … destroyed America’s sense of a shared reality about the 2020 election,” Stelter laments. “The consequences will be felt for years to come.”
In the political sphere, Trump shrugs off 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats to dominate the Republican primary, focusing on retribution and weaponizing the justice department and FBI should he return to power.
With less than a year before the 2024 election, Stelter once again focuses on the Murdochs’ flagship operation. Like his previous book from 2020, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, Network of Lies offers a readable and engrossing deep dive into the rightwing juggernaut paid for by the Murdochs and built by the late, disgraced Roger Ailes.
Now a podcast host and consulting producer to The Morning Show, an Apple TV drama, Stelter also has journalistic chops earned at the New York Times. He wades through court filings and paperwork from the Dominion litigation, talks to sources close to Fox and the Murdochs, and offers insight into the firing of Tucker Carlson, the dominant, far-right prime-time host who was suddenly ditched in April. Stelter’s book is subtitled The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy. He overstates, but not by much.
Unlike Bartiromo, Carlson didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. He was sly and calculated, not crazy.
“Carlson privately thought Powell’s ‘software shit’ was ‘absurd’,” Stelter writes about the idea that voting machines were outlandishly rigged. “He worriedly speculated that ‘half our viewers have seen the Maria clip’, and he wanted to push back on it.” But Carlson didn’t push back hard enough. He went with the flow.
He now peddles his wares on what used to be Twitter, broadcasts from a basement, and hangs out with Trump at UFC. For a guy once known for wearing bow ties, it’s a transformation. Then again, Carlson also prided himself on his knowledge of how white guys ought to fight, an admission in a text message, revealed by the Dominion suit, that earned the ire of the Fox board and the Murdochs.
In Stelter’s telling, Fox “A-listers” received a heads-up on what discovery in the Dominion case would reveal.
“‘They’re going to call us hypocrites,’ an exec warned.” Plaintiffs would juxtapose Fox’s public message against its internal doubts about voter fraud claims. “It was likened to ‘a seven-layer cake of shit’,” Stelter writes.
The miscalculation by Fox’s legal team is now legend. It led Murdoch to believe Dominion would cost him $50m. But even Murdoch came close to concluding it was “unarguable that high-profile Fox voices” fed the “big lie”.
Stelter captures the Murdochs’ struggle to make money, keep their audience happy and avoid liability. It is a near-impossible task. The beast must be fed. There is always someone or something out there waiting to cater to Trump’s base if Fox won’t. After the 2020 election, Trump forced Fox to compete with One America News and Newsmax for his attention and his followers’ devotion.
The Murdochs’ pivot toward Ron DeSantis as their Republican candidate of choice won’t be forgotten soon, at least not by voters during the GOP primary. Despite being assiduously courted by Fox to appear at the first debate, which it sponsored, Trump smirkingly and wisely declined to show. Fox still covers Trump’s events – until he plugs Carlson, the defenestrated star.
Judging by the polls, none of this has hurt Trump’s hopes. He laps the pack while DeSantis stagnates, Nikki Haley threatening to take second place. At the same time, some polling shows Trump ahead of Joe Biden or competitive in battleground states and leading in the electoral college. For now, Fox needs him more than he needs Fox.
In that spirit of “social purpose” reporting lauded by his dad, Lachlan Murdoch will be left to navigate a defamation action brought by Smartmatic, another voting machine company, and, among other cases, a suit filed by Ray Epps, an ex-marine who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges for his role in the January 6 insurrection but became the focus of conspiracy theorists. Sating the appetites of the 45th president and his rightwing base never comes cheap.
In the Smartmatic litigation, Fox tried to subpoena George Soros, the bete noire of the right. It lost, but conspiracy theories die hard. US democracy remains fragile, the national divide seemingly unbridgeable. Expect little to change at Fox. The show must go on.
Network of Lies is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
