Without Trace of Irony, Rupert Murdoch Blasts Media Elites ‘Peddling Political Narratives’ Over the Truth

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Rupert Murdoch announced Thursday morning that he is stepping down as chair of Fox Corporation and News Corporation, the two companies that form his international media empire. He will serve as “Chairman Emeritus” of both, a position that will allow him to give backseat directions to his son Lachlan Murdoch, who will now sit on his throne.

The news of a 92-year-old stepping aside should never be surprising, but Murdoch’s decades-long reign’s unmatched power and length make this announcement serious. No single individual is more responsible for the current state of political media than this man. His legacy will be felt for decades.

Much has been and will be said about Murdoch’s role in shaping political discussions and the future of his prized asset, Fox News. It rakes in billions of dollars in annual revenue but now finds itself, for the first time in its history, without Rupert Murdoch at the top.

The most significant challenge facing Fox News, as I see it, is the shifting populist landscape that has put Fox News opinion influencers on the backheel. Fox News rose to power with a simple argument: The news media has a liberal bias and there are millions of Americans being ignored by elitists in Manhattan and DC telling them what to do and how to think.

Roger Ailes, a former Republican communications expert, envisioned Fox News as a political arm of the GOP. In the first 10 or 15 years of the network, Fox News and the Republican party worked hand in glove, but the elected politicians still held most of the power.

Then something strange happened. As political voices became weaker and Fox more powerful, its well-paid hosts filled a vacuum — to the degree that it often felt like Fox News was not an organ supporting the Republican mission, but rather, that Republican politicians were working hard to support Fox News. Just watch Senator Ted Cruz grovel before former Fox host Tucker Carlson for his forgiveness over a press release that called out the violent rioters of Jan 6.

But as Michael Wolff writes in his new book on Murdoch and Fox, which was just excerpted in New York magazine, Murdoch saw his political power and sway drastically limited with the rise of Donald Trump. Murdoch has, according to multiple reports, long considered Trump a “loser,” an “a-hole,” and a bit unhinged. But all of his efforts to diminish or dismiss Trump fell short. The failure to crush Trump proved costly: Murdoch was forced this year to pay nearly $800 million to settle Dominion’s defamation suit over election claims Trump and his supporters pressured Fox to parrot.

The raft of internal memos and emails that emerged from discovery in that case revealed a network so fearful of losing the audience of viewers committed to the former president — and to his lies of a stolen election — that they refused to call out those lies. As Murdoch admitted in his deposition, in some cases, Fox hosts actually endorsed those lies. Fox was no longer controlling the audience — the audience was controlling Fox. The tail was wagging the dog — which could very well be the reason Murdoch decided, at the age of 92, to finally pass the torch to his son.

Perhaps the nuttiest part of Murdoch’s retirement from the top of Fox and News Corp. was revealed in a paragraph of his internal memo announcing that he was stepping down. Murdoch wrote:

My father firmly believed in freedom, and Lachlan is absolutely committed to the cause. Self-serving bureaucracies are seeking to silence those who would question their provenance and purpose. Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.

The fact that Murdoch called out some “rarefied class” of elites without any self-awareness is stunning. The bigger joke is that he calls out the media for being “in cahoots with elites, peddling political narrative rather than pursuing the truth.” Has he watched Fox News?! Did he notice the damning revelations of the Dominion suit, which found Fox was firmly in cahoots with Trump, peddling a false stolen election theory it knew to be false?

If you didn’t know any better, you’d think this was an admission of fault, a lead into an apology for the pernicious nature of his political operation that consistently tells its viewers what it should be aggrieved about or fearful of, never in the name of truth, but always in the name of peddling political narratives.

I’m unsure if Rupert Murdoch will continue to have a voice in the network’s future direction, but I mostly doubt it. Sources have long told me he’s been checked out for the past few years. And Lachlan has long signaled he will follow his father’s and Ailes’s playbook.

Rupert Murdoch’s vision will surely endure, regardless of the changing landscape. And the fact that his legacy will endure is proof that there has never been, and may never be, a bigger media elite than Murdoch himself.

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

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