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By Mark Jacob
We can speculate about who is most responsible for the ascendance of American fascism.
Is it Sen. Mitch McConnell, who protected Donald Trump during his impeachments, leaving him eligible to run again?
Is it Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had four years to bring Trump to trial for trying to steal the 2020 election but failed to do so?
You could say it’s Trump himself, but the aspiring dictator is really the frontman – the showman – for a well-financed anti-democratic movement that was decades in the making.
My nominee for chief culprit in the rise of fascism: Rupert Murdoch.
On Oct. 7, 1996, a headline in the New York Times read: “At the new Fox News Channel, the buzzword is fairness, separating news from bias.”
Murdoch’s new cable news channel debuted under the leadership of Roger Ailes, a sexual harasser and former Republican media consultant who promised “objective reporting.” While Fox News was more conservative than CNN, it didn’t start out with the relentless bashing of rational government that characterizes the channel today. In the beginning, Fox had shows like “Pet News.”
The turning point came with the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama. That “radicalized the network,” according to Brian Stelter, the CNN media reporter who has reported extensively on Fox.
In his book “Hoax,” Stelter recalled how Fox helped make Trump a political star with a weekly call-in on “Fox & Friends” that started in 2011. A favorite topic was Trump's claim that Obama was not born in this country and thus not eligible to be president. Noting the dubious nature of birtherism, host Steve Doocy told Trump: “They’re trying to paint you as the mayor of Crazytown for bringing this up.”
And now, with the help of Fox News, Crazytown has annexed the rest of the country. Crazytown’s mayor is president-elect.
Fox and Trump share propaganda tactics: Twist the facts to make your case. Cast yourself and your audience as victims of “the elite.” Spread fear about everything. That’s why Fox has specialized in declaring wars:
There’s a “war of Christmas,” a “war on straws,” a “war on parents,” a “war on the suburbs,” a “war on cows,” a “war on hot dogs,” a “war on Christianity and Judaism,” a “war on white men” and a “war on soda.”
After the 2020 election, Fox declared war on the truth to such an extent that it had to pay $787 million to settle a lawsuit for broadcasting lies about vote fraud. But that was just the cost of doing business for Murdoch and his son and successor, Lachlan.
Now Fox is downplaying the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, which was fueled by its lies. The network’s Brit Hume recently called concerns about the future of democracy “a BS issue” because the Capitol attack “was over in a matter of hours.”
Fox viewers believe that kind of garbage because another Fox tactic is to trash rival news outlets, as if all other forms of information are suspect.
This cocooning is one reason people who primarily get their news from Fox News and other right-wing media are more ill-informed about inflation and crime than Americans overall, according to recent research. This ignorance was a major contributor to Trump’s victory, and Fox will keep nurturing that ignorance to stay on the new president’s good side.
Fox used to be bigger than Trump. Now Trump is bigger than Fox.
And Trump often pressures the network to be even more subservient. He has blasted Fox for allowing Democrats on its broadcasts and accepting their campaign ads. If Fox became any more compliant, it would become state TV, even more closely resembling North Korean media (remember Kim Jong-il’s 11 holes-in-one in a single round of golf?) or Iraq’s Baghdad Bob ("There are no American troops in Baghdad”).
Then there’s the question of what other TV news outlets will do. Trump has already talked about cracking down on them, and he will soon have ways to do that, including regulatory oversight of their affiliates.
CNN was fairly tough on Trump in the run-up to the election. Might that channel become a leading critical voice during the second Trump regime?
Um, maybe. That’s more likely than getting hard-nosed commentary from NBC, CBS, and ABC. It’s not that some journalists won't try. They will. But the bean counters won’t want that, and even the toughest news people get worn down eventually without top executives’ support and reinforcements.
There’s very little progressive news on TV now, and we may soon see even less. The most prominent center-left outlet, MSNBC, is owned by a corporation that tried to hire coup plotter Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst. That corporation also decided to delay the broadcast of a documentary about Trump’s family separation policy until after the election.
When Trump named Susie Wiles as his White House chief of staff last week, the people on MSNBC called her "a self-described moderate ... well respected and liked." Please. She ran the campaign for a convicted felon who orchestrated an insurrection. If she's a “self-described moderate,” I'm a self-described centerfielder for the Yankees.
We’ll see flashes of tough reporting on Trump by some outlets, at least at first. But I’m worried that daily TV coverage of him will be deferential. That’s the traditional treatment of the head of our government. If you doubt that, remember how the networks bent over backward for George W. Bush when his administration lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The TV news outlook seems grim – even grimmer than the situation for legacy newspapers – but it’s not time to give up. Public pressure can pay off. I’m convinced that the New York Times was tougher on Trump in the last month before the election because of criticism by people like you and me.
Now is the time for us to demand better TV news, loudly, and to reward courage when we see it.
