Fox News: GOP-TV
Fox News launched in 1996, bringing to cable television the same combative, populist programming that populated conservative talk radio. It excelled as a megaphone for Republican talking points, soon garnering more than one million viewers a night on its way to becoming the reigning ratings winner among news channels on cable TV.
Owned by conservative publisher Rupert Murdoch and founded by Roger Ailes, who devised distinctive communication strategies to propel Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush to electoral victories, Fox News was, in the words of Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone magazine, “a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion.”
In a revealing exchange during a 2004 interview on PBS, Richard Viguerie, introduced as “a founding father of the modern conservative movement”, explained to journalist Bill Moyers that facts don’t matter. Moyers had pointed out to him that a claim made by Fox News’ Sean Hannity was not “fair” because it had “no fact to back that up. There’s no effort to substantiate that with documentation.”
Viguerie argued otherwise, responding, “That’s what journalism is. It’s just all opinion. Just opinion.” He went on to tell Moyers that the Right was no longer going to “play by the liberal establishment’s rules”. It’s a comment very reminiscent of Gingrich’s 1978 exhortation to the college Republicans in his audience to ignore political norms and abandon the civility that he viewed as the party’s weakness.
And it’s a perspective that little more than a decade later led Republicans to try to impose the ideas of “fake news” and “alternative facts” on a “post-truth world”. Though it didn’t work – a court ordered Fox to pay $787 million dollars in a 2021 defamation lawsuit for not telling the truth about Dominion Voting Systems’ voting machines – Fox is still reported to be the most profitable unit in Murdoch’s media empire.
