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Executives who helped create Fox News say network has become ‘disinformation machine’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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That seems disingenuous because according to multiple accounts I’ve read about the founding of Fox News, it was specifically designed as a disinformation machine.
The author of the blog post is being sincere; he speaks on behalf of three key executives that helped found the Fox Broadcast Network, in the early 1990s, not the spinoff channel Fox News. They are repentant about how the actions they took to breathe life into Fox eventually led to the creation of a disinformation machine that’s been at the jugular of American Democracy for the better part of the past decade.
I will say, it’s easy to excoriate these guys for having their lame mea culpa this late in the game. Their original motivations for creating the Fox network are unclear at best, and they were all almost certainly more concerned with making money over anything else moralistic. But if you think about it, in the early 90s it was kinda easy to underestimate Rupert Murdoch’s amorality and tenacity when it came to pursuing a right-wing audience. Yes he had a bias in his media empire at that point, but Fox News very quickly became a platform for petty name calling, denialism, and outright hate beyond anything we’d seen before in a television network with significant reach.