Three former executives at Fox tis week said that they regret helping Rupert Murdoch build the high-rated network into what they called a “disinformation machine.”
Preston Padden, Ken Solomon, and Bill Reyner worked for Fox Broadcasting Company in the 1990s, at a time when Fox News was not “on the horizon.”
Kolomon was a lobbyist for Fox, Solomon was executive vice president of network distribution, and Reyner was lead outside counsel.
The three men said in a blog post that they “wish to express their deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox Television that came to include Fox News Channel.”
Fox News was officially launched in 1996, and the three executives said that it has become a “disinformation machine.”
“We genuinely believed that the creation of a fourth competitive force in broadcast television was in the public interest. We never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become,” they wrote.
The three were not directly involved in the actual creation of Fox News, but argued they were instrumental in laying the foundation by navigating FCC regulations and more.
“Many other veterans of the historic effort in the 1990’s to break the strangle hold of the Big 3 Networks and to build a fourth competitive force in American television share our resentment that the reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news,” they wrote.
The good news is that after nearly half a century, 1.1C of global heating and countless natural disasters, people for the most part finally accept the basic science of human-caused climate change. The bad news is that they still don’t seem willing to do very much about it.
A new study of TV coverage of the 2021 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found few expressions of doubt about the basic science of anthropogenic global warming — almost all of which were confined to right-wing media such as Fox News. And even Fox has mostly morphed, relative to coverage of previous IPCC reports, from questioning the reality and causes of climate change to doubts about its severity and the need to take action.
Old-school climate skeptics still show up with depressing regularity in social-media feeds, of course, but they are probably over-represented in such fever swamps. The rest of the world has apparently moved on, which is a moment to celebrate.
Below, long time God foresaken climate denial douchebag Marc Morano gives a preview of Big Denial’s evolving fallback – “The Gummint is modifying weather to victimize y’all about climate change”.
5 thoughts on “Former Fox News Execs: Sorry We Built This Shit Show”
The language “this smoke isn’t bad” pivots to China…why? Is pollution bad or isn’t it? Make up your mind.
It’s like the conflict in talking points with COVID-19 being at the same time (1) “merely a bad case of flu” and (2) “released by a scary Chinese virus lab”.
To them, both points are valid at the same time. They aren’t interested in critically examining their arguments but in scoring points rhetorically. Their motivations aren’t for rational truth – they are defending their own beliefs and trying to convince others to side with them to build their own power.
An examination of their arguments can easily rip them to shreds – but how many people actually do that? And the people already on their side of any particular issue already have built-in motivations not to do so.
The language “this smoke isn’t bad” pivots to China…why? Is pollution bad or isn’t it? Make up your mind.
It’s like the conflict in talking points with COVID-19 being at the same time (1) “merely a bad case of flu” and (2) “released by a scary Chinese virus lab”.
Of course, it wasn’t convenient to mention how many people in China have worn masks on a daily basis
To them, both points are valid at the same time. They aren’t interested in critically examining their arguments but in scoring points rhetorically. Their motivations aren’t for rational truth – they are defending their own beliefs and trying to convince others to side with them to build their own power.
An examination of their arguments can easily rip them to shreds – but how many people actually do that? And the people already on their side of any particular issue already have built-in motivations not to do so.
I recall seeing people in both China and Japan wearing masks more than a decade ago.