(Image: Private Media)
Crikey politics editor Bernard Keane (Image: Private Media)

This article is part of a series about a legal threat sent to Crikey by Lachlan Murdoch, over an article Crikey published about the January 6 riots in the US. For the series introduction go here, and for the full series go here.

Approaching the two-year anniversary of his election defeat, Donald Trump still has the Republican Party tightly in his grip. After FBI agents searched his Mar-a-Lago property recently, the GOP collectively went berserk. From senior senators to lunatic fringe congresspeople, allegations of politicisation, persecution, dictatorship and even threats of civil war flew thick and fast.

And among Trump’s media supporters? One veteran media analyst described the coverage on Fox News as “downright sycophantic”, saying: “Just like when he was in the White House facing scandal, the network’s top personalities have rushed on air to portray Trump as the victim of shadowy, deep-state forces who are corrupt enough to use the levers of governmental power to damage him.”

The FBI search related to serious allegations that Trump — who remains the favourite to seize the 2024 Republican nomination — had retained top-secret documents from his time in the White House, including signals intelligence and nuclear weapons information, a clear violation of the law.

The reaction was even more febrile outside the Republicans. Calls for armed attacks on the FBI and civil war were widespread online. One Navy veteran, a man long convinced the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump, was killed after trying to attack the Cincinnati FBI field office. As we saw with the deaths that occurred during the January 6 insurrection, propaganda and misinformation lead to people getting killed.

How has America arrived at a democratic cliff-edge, from which civil war or widespread terrorism is not impossible, nor the reelection of a discredited, criminal authoritarian?

The reasons are complex. I’ve been writing about them for years now — including a book on the circumstances that gave us Trump, Brexit and widespread disillusionment with democratic politics, and another book on the lies of Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Trump. They include the continuing fallout from the financial crisis; the impacts of neoliberal policies on employment, inequality and community bonds; the endless wars following 9/11; and the social changes that have undermined — to a degree — the once pre-eminent social status of white heterosexual men.

But in that toxic mix is another cause: the Murdoch family and their “media” companies.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Fox News is an existential threat to US democracy. Its entire business model has been to stoke, amplify and feed a perverse sense of victimhood among its target audience of older white Americans — the most privileged people on the planet — and convince them they and the values they hold dear are under threat.

The source of that threat? “Liberals”, people of colour, migrants, feminists, LGBTIQA+ people, the “woke”, Democrats, climate scientists, and moderate Republicans, among others. The mechanism of the threat? An amorphous plot by these “elites” to destroy the American way of life and freedom.

Fox News was present at the creation of the Tea Party movement. It was a vehicle for its bastard offspring, the birther movement. Then it went all in for Trump. Inevitably, it became a vehicle for pandemic and vaccine denialism. This pandering to grievance and promotion of division meant it commanded the biggest cable TV audiences in the US and made billions for the Murdochs.

Support for the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump was an inevitable next step, especially when it became clear that angry Fox viewers would move to even more extreme platforms if Fox wouldn’t deliver. As one US media observer wrote, having radicalised its audience, Fox then became radicalised by its audience.

And this was all done, as so many critics and commentators in the US have observed, with the full knowledge of and encouragement by the Murdochs. If anything, Crikey was decidedly late to pointing out something plenty of American media figures — and the voting machine company Dominion — have been pointing out since January 6 2021.

This isn’t the only issue on which the Murdochs pose a significant threat to the public interest. Not merely in the US, but in Australia as well, News Corp has been the speartip of climate denialism, working assiduously with right-wing politicians and fossil fuel companies to deny the existence of climate change, demonise climate action, and discredit those who have called for action. Just ask James Murdoch, who expressed his disgust on the issue after the Black Summer bushfires.

The Murdochs, their staffers in the propaganda outlets they own, and their supporters will all insist they merely support free speech. As we’ve seen demonstrated over and over in Australia, the News Corp idea of free speech is free speech for them and their allies and for the views they endorse. But should anyone use free speech to express a viewpoint News Corp disagrees with, or to attack News Corp’s allies, then they risk becoming the target of a torrent of vicious public attacks. Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Roz Ward. Gillian Triggs. Robert Manne. Paul Barry. Julian Disney. Just to name a few.

At News Corp, free speech is for punching down, never for punching up. It’s for speaking power to truth, not truth to power.

Now, to repeat the fact that the Murdochs, via Fox News, encouraged the rise of Trump, supported him directly during his disastrous presidency, peddled over and over the Big Lie of the stolen election, sought to downplay the January 6 insurrection and even now to give succour to him, is to offend the sensibilities of Lachlan Murdoch.

Crikey’s mission has always been to hold the powerful to account and to call out those who do not act in the public interest. It’s in ready fulfilment of that mission that we called the Murdochs Trump’s unindicted co-conspirators in relation to the events of January 6. And fulfilling that mission has never been more important, not with the United States teetering on the brink.

If the Murdochs don’t like being associated with the direct results of the propaganda spewed out by their outlets, the solution is simple. Rather than suing, they should return those outlets to being genuine vehicles for journalism, not division and propaganda.