Rupert Murdoch's long nudge towards authoritarianism
Murdoch is retiring, but the ideological climate he engineered is in full bloom.
In Rupert Murdoch's memo to staff announcing his retirement, he made it clear that he was stepping down but not walking away: "For my entire professional life, I have been engaged daily with news and ideas, and that will not change.” Which ideas is he talking about?
Much has been said, after considerable effort and with much lucidity, by many writers, academics, and analysts about how Fox News embodies those ideas. I’ll provide just two examples. You can find an entire publication on Substack dedicated to decoding Fox News, run by Juliet Jeske, who is brave enough to watch Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. You can read Chapter 5 of The Elements of Journalism, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, which reminds us how Murdoch’s hodgepodge of journalism and propaganda refined a “news” model that effectively murdered the idea that journalism should be independent from faction.
More modestly, I’d just like to share two Murdoch quotes from the mid-90s. I share them because they eliminate any doubt about Murdoch's real intentions since the inception of Fox News. They articulate, in his own malevolent words, the openly authoritarian bent of his project.
The first one comes from Kovach’s and Rosenstiel’s book1:
Singapore is not liberal, but it’s clean and free of drug addicts. Not so long ago it was an impoverished, exploited colony with famines, diseases, and other problems. Now people find themselves in three-room apartments with jobs and clean streets. Material incentives create business and the free market economy. If politicians try it the other way around with democracy, the Russian model is the result. Ninety percent of the Chinese are interested more in a better material life than in the right to vote.>
Not loud enough for those in the back? Here’s another quote from the mid-90s that shows his brazen contempt for democratic values:
In April of 1994, Murdoch removed the BBC from the Star network in China and replaced it with Chinese-language films. “The BBC was driving them nuts,” Murdoch says. “It’s not worth it.” The Chinese government is “scared to death of what happened in Tiananmen Square,” he says. “The truth is—and we Americans don’t like to admit it—that authoritarian countries can work. There may have been human-rights abuses in Chile. But that country under Pinochet raised living standards. And now it has a democracy. The best thing you can do in China is engage the Chinese and wait.”
There’s no room for ambiguity here. The man himself articulated out loud what some would call “Murdoch’s authoritarian model for the ideal laissez-faire economy”. Or, as I would call it, “Murdoch’s model to get three bedroom apartments while political prisoners are thrown off helicopters.” Who cares if Pinochet executed thousands of prisoners of conscience and threw thousands of political opponents in internment camps, when you can get four different tea brands at the supermarket or get rid of regulations you don’t like? Americans shouldn’t be so coy about it.
If you’re like me, you will demand, “Show me what the Human Development Index looked like in 1995. Show me that Singapore was delivering the best standard of living a government can create for its citizens.” You can check for yourself. In 1995, Singapore ranked 26th on the HDI. Which country held the top spot? Well, The United States. One year after the Gingrich Revolution kick-started the era of “politics as warfare”2, the U.S. remained at number one, just as it had for the previous five years. Only healthy democracies made the top ten. You had to go down to number 23 to find an absolute monarchy, Brunei, still three spots ahead of Singapore.
What about measures of “economic freedom” painfully prepared by conservative think-tanks enthralled by the Friedman Doctrine (“The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”)? Did Singapore come out on top3? Not in 1995. It was third, behind Switzerland — a solid democracy — and barely ahead of The United States, whose tail end Singapore couldn’t even see in the HDI. Today, the Heritage Foundation (Murdoch’s ideological bedfellow) makes sure Singapore gets the top spot. But, of course, the metric doesn’t really “showcase countries that are reducing the democratic deficits of the global economy by giving people more control over their economic lives and the institutions that govern them.” It mostly awards governments for allowing corporations to do whatever they please in the countries they control4.
But it doesn’t matter if his “model” can’t survive a cursory check against the available evidence. Murdoch doesn’t care if his authoritarian doctrine of laissez-faire survives scrutiny; he believes what he believes. He’s simply engaging in motivated reasoning; his conclusions will fit the ideological make-up of his premises, whatever data you throw at his face. In 1995, as now, he thought authoritarian governments create the conditions for wider profit margins with less regulation. He also had just won television rights to Singapore, and needed to suck up to the autocrats who were helping him make money.
It’s been said that Murdoch looks down at Fox News hosts and even its audience. It’s been said he cares more about profits than about his ideological agenda — even though he’s spent millions propping up “financial losers.” But even if the profits-over-ideas argument holds true, it overlooks the core belief guiding his profit mission — that authoritarian governments will serve his money-making ventures better than democracy ever will. Even if he prioritizes profit over ideas, or precisely because he does, he is still in the fight to promote the kind of society that, in his darkly convoluted mind, will maximize his bottom-line. If his media business needs to give aid and comfort to autocrats or wannabe dictators to realize his vision of the ideal business environment, it will.
His intent has always been to bend his audience towards authoritarianism. With Fox News, over the course of 27 long years, he’s been able to nudge its audience’s fears and resentments towards a greater contempt for democratic values. Initially, it didn’t feel like a push, much less a shove. It felt like a sustained nudge towards the abyss. The January 6th insurrection makes it feel like we are now sliding towards it at a higher rate, perhaps because the abyss is now closer.
Yes, he’s retired, but the ideological climate he intended to engineer is in full bloom. Now that his professional life has ended, we can perhaps write an obituary for his life’s work. In a future he’s made possible, it might read something like this:
Here lie the ruins of a man’s morality, along with the ruins of the democracy he poisoned.
I’ll leave it to others to improve my style.
Kovach and Rosenstiel found the quote in Ralf Dahrendorf, After 1989: Morals, Revolution and Civil Society (London: Macmillan, in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1997), p.98. They don’t pinpoint the exact date of the quote, only pointing out he said it shortly after gaining television rights in Singapore. I estimate it’s from 1994-95. It has been omitted in the 4th edition of their book.
“According to Democratic congressman Barney Frank,
“‘Gingrich transformed American politics from one in which people presume the good will of their opponents, even as they disagreed, into one in which people treated the people with whom they disagreed as bad and immoral. He was a kind of McCarthyite who succeeded.’”
How Democracies Die. Kindle edition, p.148.
Take a look at the The Economic Freedom of the World, 1975-1995, whose Foreword was penned by Milton Friedman himself.
I’m taking the argument and the quote from John Miller’s article: “Free, Free at Last: Economic freedom for corporations has little to do with either political freedom or economic growth”:
In the hands of the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, Washington's foremost right-wing think tank, however, an economic freedom index merely measures corporate and entrepreneurial freedom from accountability. Upon examination, the index turns out to be a poor barometer of either freedom more broadly construed or of prosperity.”