The Day by day Beast, one of many media’s most fervent bashers of Fox Information, discovered an outdated Murdoch government to pen a really Stelteresque hit piece of opinion titled “Former Murdoch Exec: Fox News Is Poison for America.” The subhead was “The Rupert Murdoch I labored for was good, brave, optimistic, and a gentleman. Which makes his bile-filled community all of the extra confounding.”
The exec is Preston Padden, a Washington lobbyist who hasn’t labored for Murdoch since 1997, and then labored for the liberals at Disney from 1998 to 2010.
Padden utterly aped the Fox-is-poison speaking factors of Stelter. “Fox Information is now not a truthful center-right information community. The channel (particularly the main prime-time opinion programming) has contributed considerably and on to: the pointless deaths of many People by disparaging the wearing of life-saving COVID masks.”
Padden hyperlinks to Tucker Carlson mocking out of doors mask-wearers on April 26, 2021 — after 94 p.c of COVID deaths had been counted.
He additionally claims Fox brought about “the pointless deaths of many People by fueling hesitation and doubt in regards to the efficacy and security of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines,” however admitted “Fox Information offered me examples of pro-mask/vaccine on-air feedback, however for my part, they had been closely outweighed by the adverse feedback of the extremely rated primetime opinion hosts.”
This one’s an actual hoot: Fox makes “divisions in our society by stoking racial animus and fueling the completely misunderstanding that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are engaged in nightly, life-threatening riots throughout the nation”. As a result of all the opposite networks by no means stoke racial animus? As a result of BLM and Antifa riots are rare and “largely peaceable”?
Fox Information was additionally liable for “former President Trump’s ‘Huge Lie’ that the election was stolen from him by offering a steady platform for wild and false claims in regards to the election.” This overlooks that Fox Information referred to as Arizona early, earlier than all the opposite networks.
He additionally blamed Fox for the January 6 riot on the Capitol by regularly selling Trump’s “Cease the Steal” rally that day.
Padden concluded: “Over the previous 9 months I’ve tried, with rising bluntness, to get Rupert to know the true injury that Fox Information is doing to America. I failed, and it was smug and naïve to ever have thought that I may succeed. I’m at a loss to know why he is not going to change course. I can solely guess that the damaging editorial coverage of Fox Information is pushed by a deep-seated vein of anti-establishment/contrarian pondering in Rupert that, at age 90, is just not going to alter.”
Naturally, all this delighted Brian Stelter, who put it close to the tippy-top of his newest publication, full with quote by CNN’s Oliver Darcy: “There isn’t a turning again for Fox. Considering in any other case is fantastical. The community made the choice way back to move down a one-way avenue seeking revenue. And its core viewership is now so radicalized that it is not possible for it to revert again to its former self with out alienating them.”
