ICYMI: Meat is Murdoch - Fox’s History of Lies
It’s not just getting caught in the Big Lie - it’s the culture of lies that should damn Murdoch Inc., who - like his anchors - have blood on their hands
***This report was originally published February 28, 2023. Thank you for supporting independent investigative journalism with a paid membership.***
Author’s note: I am republishing this report today as I was tasked with offering my reflections for Byline Times on the phone hacking scandal and the news that a Murdoch cover-up goon is now CEO of Washington Post. In my ponderance, I realized that there was a likely sequence of events that occurred when Tucker Carlson was handed off to Elon Musk like a dirty baton.
I reached out to my podcast partner and asked him to locate the dates of those momentous events, and he sent the following:
2/23 — Musk and Murdoch meet
4/23 — Tucker fired
6/23 — Tucker interviews Musk
9/23 — “Tucker is now bigger than before” says Musk
12/23 — Tucker starts new network where interviewing genocidal criminals normalized
As HiFi says, billionaires continue to align against democracy.
Below, one of my reports from the Thank You For Not Smoking Fox series, originally published February 28, 2023.
Meat is Murdoch
In Confessions of a Fox Blonde, I wrote about the first time I quit Fox. I wrote a punk song called ‘Meat Is Murdoch’ - a riff off the Smiths’ ‘Meat Is Murder.’
In Thank You for Not Smoking Fox and Fox Is a Shithole Country, I wrote about the Industrial Outrage Complex, and the masses of outrage junkies created by Fox News. Fox Fürhers Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch had addicted their audience to right-wing victimhood, which is a fascist trope.
CNN founder Ted Turner once equated Fox propaganda and its popularity to Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany.
“Adolph Hitler was more popular in Germany in the early 1930s than people that were running against him," Turner said in 2005, explaining ‘why it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing CNN was behind Fox in the ratings’.
Further evidence presented Monday by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News and Fox Corp. reveal that Rupert Murdoch testified under oath that he knew Fox anchors ‘endorsed’ lies about the 2020 election fraud, and he did nothing to stop it.
This is part of the fallout from the Dominion’s court filings - but there is a far bigger story that needs to be told.
Fox has been lying to the American public for years - Fox is the real Lügenpresse.
Fox stars have blood on their hands, according to a study conducted by economists at the University of Chicago titled Misinformation During a Pandemic. According to the study…
“Media outlets often present diverging, even conflicting, perspectives on reality — not only informing, but potentially misinforming audiences…Through both a selection-on-observables strategy and an instrumental variable approach, we find that areas with greater exposure to the show downplaying the threat of COVID-19 experienced a greater number of cases and deaths.”
‘Pandemic Coverage Gap’
“Our evidence suggests that higher viewership of Hannity… is associated with a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths during the early onset of the coronavirus pandemic,” the authors wrote.
They concluded, their “results indicate that misinformation on mass media can have significant social consequences.”
It seems an obvious point - my tragic thread presented without comment that documented Covid deaths by those who sold right-wing talking points or who watched Lügenpresse stands frozen in time - and it appears we are doing exactly what the fascists want us to do - forget.
In another study, this one by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Fox News’ Covid-19 lies were documented, and the study determined Fox watchers were more likely to believe Covid lies than people who take in other sources of news.
Recall, all those times Laura Ingraham was shilling for unproven treatments, while bashing Dr. Fauci?
“You never hear Fauci talk about that, or D3 or ivermectin, because they haven’t even given emergency use authorization for ivermectin—haven’t even put out anything about that. They’re way behind all these other countries,” Ingraham said on a 2021 edition of her show, The Ingraham Angle.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson was busy promoting lies about Covid making men more feminine - recall, sexual anxiety is a specific fascist trope.
Consider this - as Fox News hosts downplayed and politicized a global pandemic while knowingly upselling election lies promoted by Trump flunkies Powell and Giuliani - what else did they lie to their American viewers about?
You might recall they made a cottage industry out of getting people to think President Obama’s desire to ensure Americans had access to health care was a bad thing. You might recall they made a cottage industry of making Americans think that Michelle Obama’s desire for children to have access to nutritional food was a bad thing. You might recall that climate change-denying Fox News’ has an audience that thinks climate change isn’t real.
“Fox Weather Doesn’t Deny Climate Change. They Just Ignore It,” ran a headline in the New Republic.
You might recall Fox News built an entire wing dedicated to disparaging Senator and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - the most qualified presidential candidate of modern times.
It was not lost on me that Fox News aired 1,100 segments on Benghazi - which amounted to Kremlin propaganda - but refused to air the January 6 Committee hearings.
In Unhappy Rabbits, I intentionally linked Putin, Prigozhin, and Murdoch together. These are the men who are trying to destroy our world - and Murdoch promotes Putin propaganda in primetime, as his hosts spew anti-Ukraine talking points, which then watch their stories get promoted on Russian-state TV.
As Kyiv reporter Paul Niland said in an episode of RadPod, if you’re being celebrated on Russian state-TV, you’re on the wrong gaddamn side.
“You have to know your enemy,” he said. “They're not just the people who planned and financed and created the orders and the battle plans for what happened on January 6, but the people who have attempted to excuse it, and downplay it, and and talk about it as if it was not actually a very serious major set of crimes against the United States of America.
“What the US has to do is to know your enemy. You have to look at Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson. Russian media was showing clips of Carlson and what you have to understand is that if Russia is on your side, you're on the wrong goddamn side, Russia means absolutely no good to the United States of America. Russia is your enemy.”
Malcolm Nance once called Fox News the media arm of ISIS.
“They might as well start sending them royalty checks,” he said, after a Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot was burned to death by ISIL in February 2015, and Fox News included the full ISIL video on its website.
Nance’s comment that ‘Fox News was literally…
literally working for al-Quaida’ might explain why Fox News hosts continually do segments disparaging Nance.
‘The Masses Have to be Won By Propaganda’
My studies of Hannah Arendt give me a keen eye on propagandists and totalitarian tactics - among them, “One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
That is one of Fox News’ core tactics.
And another: “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”
“And that’s Murdoch’s job, whether he admits it or not,” says High Fidelity, my RadPod cohost. “He is a general in this class war, running the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment.”
I do not believe our First Amendment was written so foreign goons like Murdoch could steer our country into becoming a totalitarian hellscape ruled by foreign and domestic oligarchs - but if that image of him with Elon Musk at the Super Bowl was any indication, that appears to be the aim.
We are never without the ability to change the channel - as we discussed with award-winning filmmaker Jen Senko on RadPod. Her film The Brainwashing of My Dad revealed that when the Fox poison was taken away from her father, he came back to his original, kindly self.
“Literally thousands of people have sent me their own heartbreaking stories about them losing their loved one to Fox ‘News’ or some other bloviating angry right-wing host,” she said. “I firmly believe there would not even be a Trump if not for Fox ‘News’.”
Of the Dominion reveals, Jen said:
"Why did it take so long for some kind of action to be taken against Fox? I think of all the harm Fox has done to families, individuals and our country. They played their part in instigating the January 6 insurrection with their stochastic terrorism. They were responsible for so many deaths as they downplayed and lied about Covid and the vaccines. They drummed up racism and downplayed police violence against black people by blaming black people, resulting in this pushback against ‘woke-ism’.
“And corporate media should have called out Fox more. Wasn’t the harm they were doing and the lies they were telling obvious? To many of us it was obvious. I am beyond grateful to Dominion for suing Fox. I think to myself, what took so long for someone or some entity to do this? But like all the media focused grassroots groups I’ve seen spring up of late, I am grateful for the action. I just pray that we frogs can still get out of the boiling water in time."
The irony is that it should be Rupert Murdoch who feels the heat rising - and his anchor hacks, who knowingly sold lies - according to Dominion - that resulted in real deaths and who still have primetime shows.
Incidents of domestic terrorism in America jumped 357% between 2013 and 2021. Simultaneously, Fox News was selling white victimhood - is still selling white victimhood, playing a very dangerous game.
‘What Ailes America’
I recall being up on Christmas morning in 2016, I always woke up around 4 am to get a jump on the fight. I was a member of the real Resistance to Trump - not the prefab one created by chaos agents working for Kremlin cutouts and Fifth Column traitors. I had been to multiple underground Resistance meetings in Los Angeles - we did not know how quickly fascism would come take over our shores, but we weren’t taking any chances. It was at one of these meetings I learned about the anti-slavery Wide Awakes, and what being ‘woke’ meant - it meant being against racial injustice, having empathy, and love for our fellow humans, and defending those who defended justice for all - as the Wide Awakes who bodyguarded Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration did.
So I fought on the frontlines of Twitter - one of the key territories where the battle was being waged for the minds of our citizens.
I was trying to fight with my wit, trying to fight the best way I could - using my pen, my knowledge, and my guilt for having been a part of a local Fox affiliate for too many years. I was taking part in memetic warfare - trying to use my skills as an investigative reporter for good.
I knew it wasn’t normal to be hiding in my home creating memes of Trump, Putin, Roger Ailes, and Abraham Lincoln weeping at what his party had become. But that’s how I saw the war. What Ailes America - what Roger Ailes brought to our shores - a media arm for right-wing extremism, a true Lügenpresse, selling white victimhood as patriotism. Exploiting people’s vulnerabilities, selling outrage by bad actors, willing to sell lies for power, lead by a general in a class war, running the ministry of propaganda and enlightenment.
Conscious decisions are made daily to lie to the American people - in the Dominion deposition, Murdoch tried to distinguish between his anchors and ‘commentators’ - tried to explain away why he would continue to run ads by QAnon-promoter Mike Lindell.
“It’s not red or blue, it is green,” Murdoch said.
Charmed, I’m sure.
Millions of Americans may find life after Fox healthier for their hearts - some may discover that their loved ones might still be alive if they watched a different channel.
Detoxing from the Industrial Outrage Complex can be done - as we discussed with the Bette Dangerous community when Jen Senko spoke at our latest ‘Speakeasy.’ Families can be reunited. Channels can be changed.
One member of our community said he ingested right-wing poison for 50 years before finding Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose grace and calm and intellect brought him out of his extremist stupor. Through her, he found me. He is now actively participating in defense of democracy.
He gave me the gift of these words, which I often share with you:
“Something Sacred never dies in almost all of us, that can hear the invitation of Truth…”
Allow truth to be the lyrical music that lures loved ones away from outrage - allow empathy to be what wins this war.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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Thank u for your kind words
Great work Bette. Like thunder!