On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses the Murdoch family legal dispute and what they want to do with Fox News
Carusone: “We've got a real, live example and illustration of Fox's destructive power in practice ... It shows you all you need to know about what Fox News has been, but more importantly, where it's going”
Written by Media Matters Staff
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From the December 10, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Rupert Murdoch, the patriarch of the family the show is partly, loosely based on, is trying to secure the future of his empire, which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and major newspapers and television outlets in Australia and Britain.
The Times reports this, quote, "A Nevada commissioner ruled resoundingly against Rupert Murdoch's attempt to change his family's trust to consolidate his eldest son Lachlan's control of his media empire and lock in Fox News' right-wing editorial slant." That's "according to a sealed court document obtained by The New York Times. The commissioner, Edmund Gorman Jr., concluded in a decision filed on Saturday that the father and son, who is the head of Fox News and News Corp., had acted in, quote, 'bad faith' in their effort to amend their irrevocable trust, which divides the control of the company equally among Murdoch's four oldest children -- Lachlan, James, Elisabeth and Prudence -- after his death."
The Times reports that this effort was made not for money reasons, but for editorial reasons. Quote, "Murdoch, now 93, has long intended to bequeath these sprawling media conglomerates to his children... But he is also determined to preserve the right-wing bent of his empire, and reconciling these two desires has become a growing challenge for him... James and Elisabeth are both known to have less-conservative political views than their father or brother. If Murdoch fails to lock in Lachlan's leadership of the company, he will be unable to ensure that Fox News will remain a right-wing news outlet after his death, putting in jeopardy the legacy of the conservative empire he had spent his life building."
Fox News, which was founded in 1996, has changed the media landscape as the preeminent right-wing television network and has held an outsized impact on the actions of our government, especially with Donald Trump atop the Republican Party and heading back to the White House. Demonstrating that point, so far nearly a dozen of Trump's new staff picks for his second term are Fox News hosts or contributors.
Joining our conversation, president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone, is back. David's here as well. Angelo, just in your view, what matters most about this story?
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): I think what matters most is the timing here. And the timing doesn't just overlap with that Succession episode, which is really important, because that then led to James and Elisabeth beginning to have some planning and discussion meetings about what happens in the event of their father's death, which partly led Rupert Murdoch to think about, "Oh, wait a minute, they may try to replace Lachlan." But something else happened in that period in 2023, as well. And that's that all of the revelations from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News also came to light. And what the public got was a clear view of what was happening inside Fox News right in the lead up to and in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and just how deep Fox was in terms of helping Trump, you know, undermine the election integrity, to lie about it, that they knew the things they were saying about the election being stolen was a total lie, yet they continued to push it over and over and over again, even at the highest levels.
And so, if you're Rupert Murdoch, one of the things that happens when you sort of begin the process of, 'Hey, let's change the trust so that they don't boot out Lachlan,' is that you got a perspective on just how important Fox News was. Without Fox News, much of what took place in 2020, including January 6, wouldn't have been able to happen, because Fox News really helped build the scaffolding. They very much validated all of the lies that Donald Trump told, even Rupert Murdoch said it. That Fox was the only entity that could have prevented January 6 by telling the truth. He even thought about it two days beforehand then ultimately decided against issuing a directive to his on-air talent to actually get out there and tell the truth about the election.
So, to me, that's the part that's really significant here, is that it's not some academic experiment, or the family drama is obviously fascinating and intriguing, it's that we've got a real, live example and illustration of Fox's destructive power in practice, and now, given the fact that Trump is back in the White House and Rupert Murdoch's attempt to sort of, just reinforce and entrench Lachlan's sort of future there, I think it shows you all you need to know about what Fox News has been, but more importantly, where it's going. And now we have a chance to change that, obviously, potentially. But, I think that to me is the one part of the story publicly, when I've seen the reporting that has been missing, is that the catalyst was, you know, they started discussing it because of what was happening in the media at the time around the Dominion filings.
Citation
From the December 10, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Angelo, I think that one of the things that happens when you win is you over-read the significance of a victory. Any normal person does, so Trump is surely doing that. But the other thing -- on the other side when you lose is you think you have to scrap everything. The truth is the country is divided exactly in half. But one thing that clearly doesn't work as well on the pro-democracy side is the information delivery system. The truth is much more tedious, it takes the truth-telling side, which is the Democratic Party, the pro-democracy coalition, disaffected Republicans, a lot longer to combat the lies and deliver those messages to the public. What is an effort to build something equally powerful look like if that side wanted to try to build it?
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, and I think you said something both before the break and just now, which is that you sort of captioned it. Even this idea that they have -- that it's responsible for Democrats to combat the lies, part of the challenge there, the fundamental challenge there is that Fox News and the Republican narrative has narrative dominance. So you have to always be responding to it, you're always in a defensive posture because of both the gravitational force of Fox News and then the rest of that right-wing media landscape, which can often function like an echo chamber, and that's how they get narrative dominance.
So, to your point, the way you deal with that is, you know, tactically, you can combat the lies every day, and that's a challenge, but your question is on it, which is that we need something bigger and deeper. And what I would say is that it's a mind shift orientation, you know, Fox News originally was born out of the idea that something needed to be created to make sure that what happened to Richard Nixon never happened again. And Fox News was part of a constellation of Republican, right-leaning media properties that were being invested in because they understood the long-term political advantage. They needed to balance out what they saw as the rest of the media.
I think the same thing has to happen on the liberal side. There's a lot of hand-wringing about it. It's not a resource question. There's a billion dollars spent on ads that don't really, that didn't really work last cycle. You could take 10% of that, a small fraction, and dump it into building audiences. Many of those creators that build those audiences, many of them won't go anywhere, but some of them will take off, and they will build self-sustaining, reinforcing echo chambers reinforcing stories.
One illustration of that. Air America, which went off of the air 15 plus years ago, the talent from Air America, that one investment that liberals and Democrats made, we're still living off the fumes of that. Rachel Maddow is an example of what happened at Air America, and a whole bunch of other prominent figures. They started there, they built audiences, and then they moved on. And I think that's the first step. Obviously, we shouldn't try to build a parallel ecosystem, we should first focus on capturing audiences, and that starts by just dumping money into the landscape.