Fox On the Run

A couple of weeks ago Rupert Murdoch made his long-expected - and in some cases, eagerly awaited - retirement announcement, with plans to hand over control of his media empire to his son Lachlan.  As far as I'm concerned, good riddance to bad Rupert. 

By hiring the late Roger Ailes to start the Fox News Channel, Murdoch probably did more than any other individual in America to corrupt broadcast journalism with lies, smears, racism, and reactionary politics.  His anchors and commentators did a great deal of damage to the body politic by promoting all sorts of conspiracy theories and corporate-friendly analyses of serious issues such as taxes and the environment.  And the channel's bashing of liberals and Democratic politicians for the sake of character assassination for fun and profit only widened the divide between the two major parties in Washington.  Also, I need to point to Murdoch-owned papers like the New York Post, which only amplified Murdoch's right-wing polemics in print.

It wasn't just Fox News, of course.  Murdoch dumbed down popular culture with its sister broadcast network, which, despite airing a couple of watchable sitcoms and dramas, mostly aired shows lacking in taste and dignity.  It's as if the Fox network, which went on the air in prime time in 1987, aimed to attract the same undereducated, low-information proles to watch lowbrow entertainment to prime them for the ethically challenged "news" channel that came later.

It should be noted that Murdoch broadcast shows to appeal to lucrative audiences that would enable him to obtain the capital necessary to launch the Fox News Channel in 1996.  Even as he was appalling folks with "Married . . . With Children," Murdoch aired respectable black sitcoms like "Roc" and "Martin," which inevitably drew black audiences to Fox and helped his bottom line.  None of that had anything to do with a desire to help black actors break through to wider audiences. He pretty much much made the money he needed to start a cable news channel off the eyeballs of black audiences and the popularity of black celebrities.  And when the Fox News Channel debuted in 1996, it began running racist stories about how food stamps were used the most in poor "urban" (read black) neighborhoods with liquor stores.  This was some time after Murdoch had black-oriented public affairs shows on local stations he'd purchased, like WNYW-TV in New York (which he'd bought from MetroMedia) canceled entirely.

No wonder Martin Lawrence - a comedic genius with the same level of intensity and madness as the late Robin Williams - went crazy.

I can also assure you, dear readers, the Fox's acquisition to broadcast rights to National Football League, whose games it began airing in 1994, had nothing to do with the Australian-born Murdoch having a personal interest in American football.  It didn't even have anything to do with expanding the broadcast schedule of the Fox network (which still ends prime-time programming an hour earlier than the Big Three networks).  It was all in the interest of funding the Fox News Channel.  And the purpose of the Fox News Channel was to keep the Republican Party dominant in American politics.

While I'm happy to see Rupert go, lets not kid ourselves.  Lachlan Murdoch is every bit as conservative and ruthless as his father, and he will most likely keep Fox News' standard for journalistic malfeasance going strong.  Besides, after 27 years ofthe Fox News Channel on the air and 37 years of its sister broadcast network on the air, Murdoch has already done so much harm to American culture that it will likely never recover from it.

After all, despite his own better judgement, Rupert Murdoch promoted Donald Trump.