Rick Wilson Likens Fox News Viewers to a ‘Monster’ That ‘Breaks Out of the Lab’ the Network Made Them In

Republican strategist Rick Wilson compared Fox News viewers to a Frankenstein-style monster that the network has created but can no longer control.

New York Times Magazine published a lengthy profile on Fox News and its founder, Rupert Murdoch on Thursday titled “How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole.” The piece centers on the lawsuit Fox is currently embroiled in at the hands of Dominion Voting Systems.

In the weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Fox News hosts and guests claimed Dominion’s voting machines helped rig the election against Donald Trump, who made a series of baseless claims about why he lost the contest. According to internal communications at Fox, employees were concerned that viewers were migrating to more fringe networks such as Newsmax and One America News, which were delivering a steady diet of election conspiracy theories.

Dominion is suing Fox for $1.6 billion. Fox denies wrongdoing and says its programming is protected by the First Amendment.

On Friday’s edition of The Beat on MSNBC, guest host Jason Johnson asked Wilson to essentially answer a chicken-or-the-egg question.

“I want to ask you this question because it’s something I am conflicted with as a professor of journalism at Morgan State University,” Johnson said. “How much of this is Fox-created, this sort of racist audience, created this sort of appetite for tabloid journalism and divisive tops? How much did they create and how much of this was Rupert Murdoch just tapping into what’s always been about 35% of America anyway?”

Wilson replied by calling Fox News the most powerful force in Republican politics, but said it is extremely beholden to its viewers:

Yes, there was always a baseline there. But this is like a laboratory experiment where they’re trying to give a monster super strength, and it keeps growing and growing. Then it breaks out of the lab. And so, what you have now is an audience more powerful than the network. They had this arrogant idea that they could always move the audience back into the stall, back into the box. They could make them go back to sleep. But they can’t. And now they realize, if they try to educate the ineducable, reform the irreformable, they will be destroyed themselves by the audience.

Wilson called Murdoch “too old and stubborn to understand he’s lost all of this power over” Fox’s viewers.

“They control Fox,” he concluded. “Not the other way around.”

Watch above via MSNBC.