Russell Brand is Wrong: The Fox News Scandal is Different

Russell Brand railed against MSNBC in an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher last week, accusing the network of “propaganda” on the same scale as Fox News.

Brand’s ruthless criticism of the cable news network came in response to fellow guest John Heilemann, an MSNBC analyst, who called out Fox News over revelations in the Dominion defamation lawsuit. You can read their full exchange here and watch it above.

“It is disingenuous to claim that the biases that are exhibited on Fox News are any different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC,” Brand said.

Heilemann challenged Brand to point to a time when MSNBC was revealed to have told its audience something it knew to be untrue.

Brand said he was describing general “biases” and pointed to “ludicrous, outrageous criticisms of Joe Rogan around ivermectin.” Rogan has promoted ivermectin as a Covid treatment. While some reporting on Rogan wrongly dismissed the drug as a horse dewormer, it is approved for human use. US officials have warned against its use for Covid, however.

Brand has been relentlessly celebrated across conservative media and social media for his passionate rant, solidifying his status as a left-wing iconoclast.

But he’s wrong. There is a stark difference between the behavior of MSNBC and other news networks, and what Fox News did in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

The latter has been exposed as an operation that knowingly aired lies about the election to its audience because it was terrified of losing that audience. Those shocking revelations have been made public as a result of a $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News by voting company Dominion, which was the subject of a torrent of election conspiracy theories.

The unprecedented scope and abominable nature of this failure by Fox News is what led conservative writer David French to declare it “one of the worst media scandals of my lifetime.”

Maher said Brand made a fair point on the coverage of ivermectin, and it’s true, some reporting on Rogan’s use of the drug falsely described it as a horse dewormer not used for humans. (Though CNN was the primary culprit here, not MSNBC).

Still, the ivermectin debacle pales in comparison to the stolen election crusade of Fox News. The network’s top hosts pushed that lie for months on end, despite privately admitting the claims were untrue.

You can point to unfair narratives, biases and misleading claims made on news networks every day. Media criticism is a thriving industry for that very reason.

The Fox News election debacle is different. It’s different in scope, it’s different in quality. Trump’s pervasive lies about the election and the same denialism that continues to air on Fox News to this day, helping to convince most Republicans of the fantasy that the election was stolen, is an astounding scandal. It’s no ordinary example of corporate media bias.

The proof lies in the legal pudding. MSNBC does not find itself on the business end of a $1.6 billion dollar lawsuit which has been allowed to proceed through exhaustive discovery. A lawsuit which major legal analysts believe, despite the strong protections media outlets enjoy in this country, Fox News could actually lose.

What’s more, Brand’s contention that cable news networks exist only as “mouthpieces for their affiliate owners in Black Rock and Vanguard” calls to mind another shocking revelation from the Dominion case.

In the evidence released by Dominion, Rupert Murdoch was shown to have repeatedly pushed the network, mostly in messages to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, to support Republicans and Trump in any way they could.

“We cannot lose the Senate if at all possible,” Murdoch told Scott in one message urging her to give Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) favorable coverage.

“Trump will concede eventually and we should concentrate on Georgia, helping any way we can,” Murdoch said in another message to Scott ahead of a the 2021 Georgia runoff elections. “Everything at stake here.”

There was a mandate from the very top of Fox for the entire network to support one political party and do anything in its power to ensure that party’s success.

If that’s not the strongest evidence for what Brand claims is a destructive bias poisoning the news business, I don’t know what is. And before you argue that other networks are the same, they aren’t.

In a recent exchange on his SiriusXM radio show, I asked Dan Abrams (my boss, a NewsNation host, a former MSNBC host and exec, and most importantly an equal opportunity critic of all cable news networks) whether Murdoch’s push for Fox News to support the Republican Party was the kind of thing he has seen at cable news networks in his career.

“No way,” he said.

In his years in the business, where he has served as both on-air talent and a network executive, Dan had never heard of a news network having a top-down mandate to serve one political party.

“Now, you could argue that some of the hosts on MSNBC, for example, are going to do everything they can to help Democrats win,” he said. “But that’s different than there being an edict from above, from the owner of the company, saying this is what we need to do and it needs to be to help this particular party win.”

Every outlet, including MSNBC, has biases. But not like this.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.