Rupert Murdoch Poured Gasoline on Democracy and Got Burned Too

It is depressingly easy to summarize the career of Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old media mogul who on Thursday announced that he would retire in November as chair of Fox News and News Corp. Over the past half-century, Murdoch made billions of dollars with media properties that preached a reactionary populism rooted in fear and division. His outlets pandered to their audiences’ secret cruelties and validated their worst instincts. Over time, they fostered a virulent strain of head-in-sand cultural conservatism that helped transform multiple national polities while fortifying Murdoch’s own personal financial interests.

Like many media moguls before him, and like countless contemporary corporate plutocrats, Murdoch wielded the levers of power in ways that enshrined his own wealth and influence first and foremost. His professional life has been an exercise in asymmetrical symbiosis, where every hand somehow ends up scratching Rupert Murdoch’s back. His voracious U.K. tabloids struck fear into the royals and the posh, while demonstrating that Murdoch’s reach was on par with their own; his alliance with Margaret Thatcher helped sustain her brand of free-market conservatism, which in turn allowed him to expand his own Fleet Street monopoly. His New York Post peddled lurid tales of a city in dangerous decline—a proven tabloid newsstand-sales tactic, and one that also helped convince Gotham voters to elect tough-on-crime mayors who took office fully aware of the importance of staying on Murdoch’s good side.

And then there’s Fox News, Murdoch’s jewel, which has done journalism a great service by consistently demonstrating just how little regard a great mass of Americans have for it. From 1996 onward, Fox News has been not just the consistent cable-news ratings leader, but a conservative star-making machine and crucial cog in the GOP’s electoral apparatus. While relatively few people watch Fox News—relative, at least, to sports and Survivor and various Dick Wolf shows—its centrality to the modern conservative project means that its importance cannot entirely be captured by its ratings numbers. Even today, even as Donald Trump loudly and frequently announces his frustration with Fox News, down-ballot conservatives seeking fundraising boosts are still all but forced to genuflect to its power, and in turn to the power of the man who is ultimately responsible for putting them on the air.

You get the picture. Murdoch has spent his career peddling a dyspeptic paleoconservatism that was bad for democracy, good for business, and very good for the business of being Rupert Murdoch. On the other hand, by creating the Fox broadcast network, Murdoch also brought us The Simpsons, Futurama, Arrested Development, and the jolly celebrity impressions of NFL funnyman Frank Caliendo. While Murdoch’s contributions to the annals of televised comedy certainly don’t cancel out the rest of the lines on his résumé, they do, at least, shed a bit of clarifying light onto this darkest of media careers.

Murdoch built his empire largely by seeking out unfulfilled market segments and offering the public unfiltered alternatives to mainstream cultural stuffiness. When he decided to challenge the hegemony of the three broadcast television networks in the United States, his startup network Fox had its first successes with three shows that were radically different from anything being aired by its competitors: Married… With Children, a raunchy family sitcom that was as dumb and irritating as most people’s actual families; the proto-reality series Cops, which took your typical cop show, stripped away all of the budgets and plots, and foregrounded a bourgeois disgust for poor people; and The Simpsons, which proved once and for all that nerds from Harvard can be funny.

Unconstrained by history or propriety or the burdens of prior success, Fox looked very, very different from CBS, NBC, or ABC. Fox News, in its way, was the next beat of this story. Eager to compete with Ted Turner’s CNN, Murdoch empowered GOP operative Roger Ailes to build him a cable-news network modeled after the red-meat talk radio bombast popularized by Rush Limbaugh. The network launched in 1996, and Murdoch soon found that there was a vast and underserved audience of troglodytic shut-ins who wanted little more from their daily newscast than to be constantly reassured that everyone else was the problem. While CNN brought its viewers international coverage and took the news part of its name very seriously, Fox News avidly pursued the culture wars and reshaped American political discourse in its own image.

While Murdoch may not have been all that involved in the network’s day-to-day operations, he certainly didn’t tell Ailes to stop pouring gasoline on the fires of conservative resentment. That blaze became uncontrollable in 2016, when U.S. voters elected as president the ur–Fox News viewer, Donald Trump, a man whose personal and political opinions were predominantly composed of the cruel, angry illogic in which the network had trafficked for two decades. By that point, Ailes had been ousted over accusations of sexual harassment and the Murdochs had assumed direct control of the network.

In one sense, Fox’s 2016 achievement—the election to the presidency of an empty fool created entirely in the network’s image—might have marked the pinnacle of Murdoch’s career. And yet, in the finest tradition of Gothic horror, Murdoch found himself unable to control this being of his own creation. While Trump’s ungovernability drew Murdoch’s disdain, the president’s popularity with the Fox News base kept the network in his thrall, even as he repeatedly demonstrated his unfitness for office. It eventually became clear, much to Murdoch’s horror, that Trump was propping Fox News up and not the other way around, as evidenced by the short-lived viewer exodus to OAN and Newsmax in November 2020 in retaliation for Fox’s decision to correctly report that Joe Biden had won Arizona.

It was during the network’s hasty attempts to win back its lost viewers that several Fox News hosts unwisely advanced, on air, many of the Trump camp’s stolen-election lies. This little bit of journalistic malpractice ended up costing Fox $787.5 million in April, when it settled the case that Dominion Voting Systems had brought against it; there are more lawsuits involving the 2020 aftermath that still threaten Fox’s coffers. And yet, despite Fox’s best efforts over this past year to make Ron De Santis’ presidential campaign a thing, Trump still leads the polls for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination—a darkly hilarious outcome that demonstrates both the scope and the limits of Murdoch’s influence.

Fox News created Trumpism, and yet can no longer control it, which leaves the network in the uncomfortable position of having to choose whether to give its viewers what they don’t want—i.e., straight talk about the extent of Trump’s unsuitability for office—or making the lucrative albeit humiliating choice to eat crow and reboard the Trump train for 2024. It’s a wretched choice, which is perhaps one of the reasons why Murdoch is stepping down now and passing the mess over to his son, Lachlan, whose ascent to the Fox and News Corp. chairmanships is a bit of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for prize, sort of like when Homer bought the cursed monkey’s paw in that one Simpsons episode. Sure, Fox News might be evil and dangerous, but the chairmanship comes with a free frogurt!

The question you might be asking is whether Fox News will change for the better under the leadership of Murdoch fils. That question is easily answered with a resounding and confident no. Cable television is in decline, and many of the remaining subscribers, it seems fair to say, are older people who lack the interest or ability to cut the cord and switch to streaming services. It’s no secret that this demographic tends to be more conservative, and conservative voters in 2023 are by and large Trump voters. While Lachlan may share his father’s disdain for Donald Trump, he is unlikely to let his personal opinions get in the way of business. He is, after all, his father’s son.

And what of the father, as he retires from public life? Many have made the case that Rupert Murdoch was the most effectively vile political antagonist of his generation. It’s a fair argument: The media outlets he controlled have had a consistently malignant effect on the tone and substance of politics and discourse in America, the U.K., his native Australia, and elsewhere; the example his success set for other would-be make-rich populist demagogues, meanwhile, served as a force multiplier for his means and methods.

But the perception of that outsized power is also a product of the ways in which media mythologizers love to trumpet the importance of their own industry. Murdoch has had a massive influence on contemporary politics, yes, but so too have people such as the late GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson and Federalist Society majordomo Leonard Leo and other operators who prefer to work in the shadows. All of these men want to believe that they can control fire; few of us ever see it when they end up getting burned. In many ways, Murdoch’s story was only unique insofar as it played out in public, as did the story of his eclipse. When he dies, it will not take long for the world to forget his name.