Fox News is a cancer
Fox News is a societal cancer. News Corp is the most corrupt company in the United States and the greed of the Murdoch family is rivaled only by the deadly Sackler family, who poisoned millions with opioids. Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch have similarly poisoned America. Instead of pills, they pushed lies, conspiracies and insanity that numbed the minds of millions of Americans through gaslighting, manipulation and propaganda.
Fox News perversely wraps itself in the American flag, while sickly declaring and positioning itself as the voice of “real” or “authentic” Americans. There is no greater locus of extremism, dishonesty and corruption in American life. There is no greater source of division, and no greater forum for acidic idiocy in America than Rupert and Lachlan’s malicious network.
What happened at Fox News between election night 2020 and every day since is the greatest scandal in the history of journalism. There is nothing that approaches the infamy of what Rupert Murdoch and his child allowed. The result was an attack on the peaceful transition of power from one administration to another that was mutually incited by a defeated president, corrupt politicians, corrupt officials, corrupt journalists and corrupt media companies. Fox News and Donald Trump were at the center of a ghastly ecosystem of militia groups, including neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, QAnon conspiracy loons and legions of weak-minded and ignorant Americans who fell for the Murdochs’ lies hook, line and sinker.
John Kennedy once warned about the foolish men who pursued power by attempting to ride the back of a tiger. He observed they usually wound up inside. This is what happened to Fox News. They created a malignant community for millions of isolated, lonely, angry and aggrieved viewers, and their audience morphed into a political party that was fueled by malice and built around the nasty stand up schtick of the most odious hustler ever to find his way to the White House. The Fox audience was fed a steady diet of provocation, instigation, political nonsense, curated outrages, false equivalencies and fear that required constantly higher dosing to sate the grievance cravings of its junkie audience.
Rupert Murdoch admitted that the prime time spine of Fox News is a love canal of dishonesty. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro and Laura Ingraham are no different than infomercial hustlers pushing snake oil. They are liars who make millions of dollars lying. They incite, divide and manipulate the American people for a living. They are appalling.
Some years ago, the venerable ABC news anchor Ted Koppel sat across from Sean Hannity and told him the truth about how terrible he was for America. Let’s watch a brief clip from this interview: