Is Telling Lies The Remit of The News?

Fox News knowingly spread lies about the 2020 US election being rigged. Can you call yourself a News station and deliberately peddle misinformation? Is telling lies the remit of the news? America is going to have to make that call at the judicial level, probably via the Supreme Court eventually. Rupert Murdoch sees Fox News as an entertainment platform. He provides a visual medium for the Republican party to push their point of view and does not maintain any semblance of Fox News being a source of objective information in the US political sphere.

News or Entertainment? The Responsibility of Telling The News

One could say that all of the Murdoch media platforms on screen, radio, and in print are preaching from the right wing. In Australia, The News Corp newspapers, radio network, and TV presence are all deeply conservative in their editorial stance. Murdoch was instrumental in introducing opinion journalism over investigative journalism. The News Corp operatives begin with a bias and gather arguments on that basis. The dumbed down media gives dyed in the wool conservative readers and viewers more of what they already espouse themselves. Indeed, they take these folks further to the right with emotive beat ups about migrants taking their jobs and transexuals invading their sports and schools.

Telling Lies For A Living To Make More Money

Murdoch has successfully influenced the political sphere in the UK, Australia, and America for many years. Despite Murdoch’s 90+ years his minions are carrying on his ghastly reputation across the western world for divisive dog whistling.

Murdoch has built an empire on the back of these key ingredients in the human condition. A corporate army of soulless minions have toed the right wing line for decades to reap material rewards and job security. This is the world we live in where corporations have grown into powerful stake holders at the expense of governments and those not aligned to a corporate tribe.

America is a dollar driven nation, which is why Rupert Murdoch became a US citizen back in the 1990s.

They would lose their audience and their advertisers if they reported the truth about the Trump lies. The Fox anchors knew that the Trump lawyers were telling lies and that there was no evidence for the claims about rigged voting machines. Emails between them and management confirms that.

Large sections of the American population would sell whatever for a bunch of money. Looking out for number one is the Libertarian credo, as the world clearly saw during the Covid pandemic. Murdoch’s Frankenstein, Donald Trump, fumbled and bumbled his gross way through his presidency. Incompetence reached new levels and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands through a complete lack of leadership. Murdoch helped, along with Putin, to put the Trump puppet on the throne. The billionaire who wasn’t really a billionaire. The compulsive liar. The cheat. The epitome of the ugly American.

Except, he is, of course, no longer an Australian. It would be great to see his evil empire removed completely from these shores. The News Corp influence has waned considerably, as seen from the results of the most recent federal election but his minions and family are still peddling fascist muck. Divisive narratives designed to stir up trouble to sell advertising space. Filthy muck rakers employed by a nasty individual and those who have been trained under his auspices.

Is telling lies the remit of the News? Fox News is attempting to defend this libel suit on the grounds of their first amendment rights.

“Fox attorneys argue that when voting-technology companies denied the allegations being made by Trump and his surrogates, Fox News aired those denials, while some Fox News hosts offered protected opinion commentary about Trump’s allegations.”

• (https://www.cpr.org/2023/02/16/fox-news-claims-dominion-defamation-suit-is-assault-on-first-amendment/)

Legal commentators remain sceptical about this defence, but it is America. The Dominion libel suit against Fox News for a billion dollars may succeed on this basis. We can only wish that, if it is so, that the ramifications take down the whole company. America and the whole world needs to decide if the News is about truth or entertainment. Fake news on our screens means a loss of the middle way. If there is no centre, no line of truth, we are all lost in the end.

Postscript – It did succeed and in this writer’s view it makes Rupert Murdoch & News Corp unfit to be in the business of telling the news.

Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of Money Matters: Navigating Credit, Debt, and Financial Freedom.

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