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Former Murdoch Exec: Fox News Is Poison For America

Rupert Murdoch, whom I served for seven years, has many business and journalistic achievements. He owes himself a better legacy than a news channel that no reasonable person would believe.

It was my great honor to join Rupert, Barry Diller (who now is the chairman of IAC, The Daily Beast’s parent company), Jamie Kellner and many others in the early days of Fox Broadcasting Company, the network that’s the home to The Simpsons and the NFL. I worked closely with Rupert and I found him to be brilliant, courageous, optimistic, and a gentleman. (Everything that follows regarding Fox News and Rupert Murdoch represents my opinion.)

I had first-hand exposure to all of those qualities as he defied all of the odds to build a fourth network—a network that an expensive government study in the 1980s had concluded was “not likely to be viable.” He ignored the ridicule from ABC, CBS, and NBC, whose president called us the “coat hanger network”—a reference to the loop antennas required to receive our weak UHF local affiliate stations. Rupert never lost his confidence or his optimism. He snatched the Sunday afternoon NFL games away from CBS. He recruited strong VHF local affiliate stations from all three of the old networks. And by 2005 he had built the most watched broadcast television network in America. Amazing!

Initially Fox News followed the standard Murdoch playbook: find a market in need of new competition, jump in with both feet and shake up the status quo. Clearly there was an opening for a responsible and truthful center-right news network. And that is how Fox News started. I played a cameo role in the birth of Fox News by accompanying Roger Ailes to meet with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to seek his help in persuading Time-Warner CEO Gerry Levin to carry Fox News on the all-important Time-Warner Cable systems in New York City. Levin did not want to provide “oxygen” for a new channel to compete with Time-Warner’s CNN. Ultimately Murdoch had to pay a massive “tribute” to cable operators to get Fox News added to their systems. But as always, he was confident—confident that his new channel would be a success and that he would get all the money back. And he did.

But, in recent years things have gone badly off the tracks at Fox News. Fox News is no longer a truthful center-right news network. The channel (especially the leading prime-time opinion programming) has contributed substantially and directly to:

• the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by disparaging the wearing of life-saving COVID masks;
• divisions in our society by stoking racial animus and fueling the totally false impression that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are engaged in nightly, life-threatening riots across the country;
• the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by fueling hesitation and doubt about the efficacy and safety of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines [Fox News provided me examples of pro-mask/vaccine on-air comments, but in my opinion, they were heavily outweighed by the negative comments of the highly rated primetime opinion hosts];
• former President Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him by providing a continuous platform for wild and false claims about the election—claims refuted by more than 60 judges, Republican State election officials, recounts in numerous States and Trump’s own Attorney General; and
• the Jan. 6, 2021, violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by continually promoting former President Trump’s “Stop The Steal” rally.