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April 30, 2023

With their decision to take Tucker Carlson’s show off the air, Fox News’s Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch have failed to account for media and political dynamics that have, over a period of years, shifted under their feet. The Murdochs’ decision will inevitably prove catastrophic for Fox News and will likely be an inflection point that marks a wholesale change to a media landscape that, to paraphrase Matt Taibbi, has calcified in progressive concrete.

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The philosopher George Santayana famously opined that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That is not quite true—just ask the French, who, circa 1940, were fully prepared to refight World War I. The real lesson of history is that anyone who ignores history in context is doomed to failure. Such is the situation with Fox News.

Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News in 1996. The late Charles Krauthammer, often a guest on Fox News, once quipped that Murdoch saw a “niche” market opportunity in the U.S. for conservative news, with the niche amounting to “half the country.” Over the past 27 years, Fox News lucratively occupied that niche as the only viable broadcast media source for center-right news and opinion. It grew to be the dominant news source in the cable market.

The world has changed dramatically since 1996, though, and no more so than in the last seven years. Trump’s election in 2016 tore off the last vestiges of moderate camouflage shielding the progressive cancer that infects America.

Image: Wrecking ball generated by DALL-E.

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John Adams said that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” That implies good faith as the glue holding the republic together. Today, there is not a scintilla of morality or good faith among our progressives, a narcissistic and historically illiterate group of people who have far more in common with Karl Marx than George Washington.

Today’s progressives are intent on manipulating our systems to take power, whatever the cost. These progressives used Covid-19 to war on religion, aberrant sexualization of children to war on families, post-modernism to war on objective truth, and politicized education to teach children corrupted history that identifies America as an evil nation.

Progressives have criminalized ideological opponents, making conservatives out to be domestic terrorists. Progressives have silenced speech to a degree never before seen in our country. They have denied conservatives the most fundamental protection of due process and equal protection. And progressives are fundamentally altering our nation through hard-left regulations issuing from an unconstitutional bureaucracy operating outside of the ballot box. This is truly evil, and our nation has not been in such dire straits since 1861.

Lastly, progressives have been openly advocating for a de facto coup since 2019. Progressives are within two votes in the Senate—and now a few votes in the House—to enable vote fraud throughout America. They would create new, reliably progressive states to give Democrats permanent power in Congress. They would get rid of the electoral college, turning our nation from a republic into a democracy of the type our Founders feared, and they would pack the Supreme Court to allow a progressive judiciary, unconstitutionally and unilaterally, simply to declare amendments to our Constitution. The world of 2023 is cosmically different from 2016, let alone 1996. We teeter on the precipice of disaster no one could possibly have imagined on New Year’s Day 2016.

Technologically, the world has changed as well. In 1996, broadcast and cable were the only real means of mass news communication. That changed with the internet and then the growth of social media sites—sites that years ago grew to be the nation’s dominant means of news access. Since about 2018, every single one of these social media sites—with the recent exception of Elon Musk’s Twitter—criminally conspired with the government to censor conservative speech on a scale never before seen in history.

Thus, the world Fox News now inhabits is very different from everything that came before. It is beyond dispute that Fox News built a very loyal viewing audience over the years because it was the only significant media site that gave conservatives a voice. As noted at Wikipedia, “[i]n 2019, it was the top-rated cable network, averaging 2.5 million viewers in prime time.”