Former Fox Executives Apologize For Helping Birth ‘Bile-Filled Network’ That ‘Has Had Many Negative Impacts On Our Society’
AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura
Three former Fox Broadcasting Company executives apologized on Wednesday for inadvertently helping to create Fox News’ “disinformation machine.”
In a blog post titled, “How Our Efforts to Bring Competition To Television Unknowingly Helped Create the Fox Disinformation Machine,” former Fox Broadcasting Company executives Preston Padden, Ken Solomon, and Bill Reyner issued a formal apology for their part in the company’s rise to success:
For what little it may, or may not, be worth at this point, Preston Padden, Ken Solomon and Bill Reyner wish to express their deep disappointment for helping to give birth to Fox Broadcasting Company and Fox Television that came to include Fox News Channel — the channel that prominently includes news that, in the words of Sidney Powell’s counsel, “no reasonable person would believe.”
The executives stated that while they never had a part in the creation of Fox News specifically, they had “greatly admired Rupert Murdoch and his vision” and had “genuinely believed that the creation of a fourth competitive force in broadcast television was in the public interest.”
“We never envisioned, and would not knowingly have enabled, the disinformation machine that, in our opinion, Fox has become,” they claimed, arguing that Fox News “has had many negative impacts on our society.”
The three men cited Fox News’ “role in promoting Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ about alleged widespread fraud in the 2020 election” and its “role in contributing to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that undermined our democracy” as just a few of the issues which had troubled them in recent years.
They also claimed that Murdoch had “made it very clear to Preston that he understood that the 2020 election had not been stolen,” despite claims to the contrary from some of Fox News’ personalities.
The post concluded by expressing “resentment that the reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news.”
One of the executives, Preston Padden, previously condemned Fox News in a 2021 article for the Daily Beast.
“He owes himself a better legacy than a news channel that no reasonable person would believe,” wrote Padden, who claimed that Fox News had transformed from a “truthful center-right news network” to a “bile-filled network.”
