The Factivist Project
Evidence. Proof. Confirmation. Verification. Corroboration.
Fox News Channel (FNC)
Fox News Channel is the propaganda outlet that
Roger Ailes and
Rupert Murdoch built
To refer to Fox as a "news" outlet is a gross misrepresentation of reality
Fox News was launched on October 7, 1996. Rupert Murdoch is given credit as the "founder" of Fox News, but the idea for Fox goes as far back as the Nixon administration to Roger Ailes, a Nixon operative who presented the concept to the worst president on the planet until Donald Trump came to power. Fox would not be here without Roger Ailes.
Since its inception, Fox News has never won a major award, let alone the Pulitzer Prize, and there's a reason for that. It is not, even on its best day, a legitimate news source. It is a propaganda juggernaut for the GOP and now for the far-right wing faction of that party. It is built on tenuous sources (when any are presented at all), innuendo, hysteria and outright lies. Its so-called expert guests are people like Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and a host of other unsavory characters.
Who is Roger Ailes?
Roger Ailes is the mastermind behind Fox News, not Rupert Murdoch. Ailes actually presented the entire idea for Fox to Richard Nixon back in 1970. Incidentally, Ailes was the political operative who repackaged Tricky to make him more palatable back in 1968. The whole idea behind the plan was to put the GOP on the media map. It didn't happen then, but it did in 1996 when he teamed up with Rupert Murdoch. Ailes didn't care about truth. He cared about giving the GOP a voice, and he cared about ratings. To achieve those goals, he stoked fear, hired bombastic "news" personnel, and churned out misinformation at a frenetic pace, a practice that continues today. You can read a copy of the plan here or you can download a copy of the original plan for Fox, presented to Tricky, below.
If Fox News were a country, its major exports would be fear, loathing, and lies
Ailes claims he quit politics to start Fox because he hated politics; in truth, he created a new style of politics based on fear, loathing and lies
Read about Fox News' most dangerous lies about COVID-19 from 2021 here.
Roger Ailes is not only the man who made Richard Nixon palatable to the American people and the media, he also managed to help cover up the fact that Ronald Reagan had Alzheimer's back in 1984, dealt the Willie Horton card against Mike Dukakis in 1988, and shut down health care reform in 1993 on behalf of Big Tobacco. His vast experience in political chicanery made him the perfect architect of Fox News.
Fox News reporters are not expected to be accountable for their reporting. The have one responsibility: To keep the ratings up and to keep the salivating right-wing sycophants enthralled with the latest conspiracy theories that demonize anyone and anything their audience doesn't understand.
Fox adheres to zero journalistic standards. Reporters like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, and Laura Ingraham routinely serve up bombastic assessments of the state of the
nation (particularly when the Democrats are in power), demonize minorities, and either misrepresent or lie about current news events. Fox News' reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of a news source built around the character of its architect.
Caring nothing about its own viewers, Fox was a virulent spreader of COVID misinformation, including that the virus itself is a hoax, and that the vaccines are dangerous, even though its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is fully vaccinated and mandated vaccines for his employees. Fox also chimed in with its own attacks on Anthony Fauci, with Jesse Watters using violent rhetoric to describe how antivax activists should "ambush" Fauci with questions.
Fox News promoted Ivermectin as an alternative treatment for COVID-19, but has remained eerily silent now that a large, definitive study has proven that it is utterly useless against the virus on all levels. Fox knows it's avid viewers won't look for this information on their own, and Fox certainly isn't going to report on this fact...because Fox doesn't deal in facts.
Fox News was a major supporter of The Big Lie; legitimate news sources do not traffic in conspiracy theories
Please click here for an excellent forensic examination on the power and influence of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and his sons published by the New York Times.
Yes, the texts to Mark Meadows from the Fox News enablers are legendary. Messages from Hannity and Ingraham begging Meadows to get Trump to call of his dogs. But perhaps America needs a refresher course on the role Fox News took in promoting The Big Lie.
“This is disgusting. And we cannot allow America’s election to be corrupted. We cannot,” said Maria Bartiromo, during an interview with Trump after the election.
“While the very frail, the very weak, cognitively struggling Joe Biden is probably fast asleep in his basement bunker, dreaming of picking out drapes for the Oval Office, well, investigations continue in multiple key states — where hundreds now of sworn affidavits are being filed, lawsuits are being filed, alleging serious election misconduct.” This is Sean Hannity on his November 11 show.
It should be noted that every single lawsuit was tossed, and many by Republican-appointed judges. Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and others were also held accountable for their frivolous lawsuits. Accountability is something Fox News is not familiar with. However, Smartmatic is moving to hold Fox accountable.
“Stop letting people tell you that we don’t have the evidence, because we do. And this is only going to continue. This fraud will continue and America will be doomed for the next 20 years,” said Fox host Jeanine Pirro on the December 1 airing of "Hannity."
Of course, the Fox audience that wakes up to these bombastic lies every day and spends the day being brainwashed never questions anything from the source. In fact, they reward these hosts for their outrageous lies by becoming even more loyal and entrenched in this perversion of truth.
Make no mistake about this, the line from Fox to insurrection is a straight line. Yet, when the shit hit the fan, it was all on Trump. The rats were scrambling to their cell phones to try to convince Trump's handlers to stop talk his rabid dogs down. He never did, and the rest is history.
Of course, after the events of January 6 had ended and the smoke somewhat cleared, Fox News was up to its old tricks. The same people who implored Mark Meadows immediately moved into damage control mode, downplaying what happened and how five lives were lost. They not only downplayed Trump's culpability but their own.
Roger Ailes
We've already focused a bit on Ailes and his dubious accomplishments on several fronts (see above). He successfully blurred the line between journalism and politics, as he moved from conservative political operative (a polite word for his job) for Nixon, Reagan, old man Bush and others to creating the world's largest right-wing propaganda outlet.
When Ailes died in 2017, of course his minions at Fox News lionized him as some kind of hero. Others saw things differently:
“Ailes was a monster who was pushed out of the network he founded because dozens of women who had worked for him came forward and reported that he had sexually harassed them,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog. “And the legacy he leaves behind is a propaganda machine he created in his own image that has done incalculable damage to the country.”
Like so many others at Fox News, Roger Ailes was a sexual predator on many levels and was forced to step down in light of several allegations during his tenure at the organization.
Rupert Murdoch
Let's just stop with the nonsense that Rupert Murdoch and his family run a legitimate news outlet. Real news outlets operate on real journalistic standards. Legitimate news outlets employ editors and lawyers to ensure that journalistic standards are being followed prior to anything being published. Fox's lawyers are there to get them out of trouble after the fact because they rarely, if ever, deal in real facts and they almost never have corroborating evidence. They are in the right-wing propaganda and misinformation business. There's a difference.
While Murdoch has told Trump to "move on," it was his propaganda outlet that continued promoting The Big Lie even after the insurrection. In addition, Murdoch has a lot of chutzpah to criticize social media and its algorithms. Murdoch employs real people, and they lie like a rug, as my grandmother would say.
Tucker Carlson
“Our leaders have no right to encourage foreigners to move to this country in order to change election results,” he said, and said this of Democrats: “Demographic replacement is their obsession because it’s their path to power.”
These are the words of Tucker Carlson, who also insists he's not a white supremacist. I don't know. The above statement sounds like The Great Replacement Theory to me. Carlson has also been caught making racist and misogynist comments in the past. He hasn't apologized yet, and it's unlikely he will. Racists and misogynists don't apologize.
One of his finer moments was when he stated that white supremacy isn't a problem in America. Rather, it was a lie made up by the Democrats to help them during the election cycle.
Here's another infamous quotation from Carlson, where he combines both racism and misogyny in one sentence:
“Ilhan Omar is living proof that the way we practice immigration has become dangerous to this country.”
A great website called JustSecurity has done an in-depth analysis of Carlson's communications strategy which you can access here.
I could continue writing, but Media Matters for America has a great timeline of Carlson's racist comments that you can download below:
Sean Hannity
Sean Hannity has been with Fox News since its inception in 1996. On the surface, Hannity seems more rational than many of the other hosts, particularly if you look at his texts to Mark Meadows regarding Trump's behavior regarding January 6, 2021. But his "rational" approach to news only goes so far.
Hannity was a spreader of the birtherism bullshit, and he found new and creative conspiracy theories to protect Trump from his many investigations. He exploited the death of Seth Rich for political purposes, and he continually amplified the notion that the "deep state" was engaged in a plot to take down Trump.
For the record, in spite of his texts regarding Trump, he was only too happy to promote conspiracy theories to help cover up for his president hours after the Capitol had been breached. He teamed up with Josh Hawley to smear SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson before the vote.
He's also historically challenged, claiming that Biden was the first president to prioritize race and gender in choosing a SCOTUS nominee, in spite of the fact that both Reagan and Trump did so before him.
In conduct unbefitting a "news" man, he played the role of unofficial adviser to Trump, and even stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him at a campaign event.
Laura Ingraham
It's hard for me to pinpoint a more loathsome female than Laura Ingraham. The things she claims are fake are real, and she invents doom and gloom where it doesn't exist, like most of the Fox News talking heads.
On the same day she was texting Meadows to tell him to send the insurrectionists home, she was back on the air blaming antifa for the Capitol attack, ever the loyal Trumpian. Except that's not how the news actually works. You expose leaders, not collude with them. Fox News has an issue understanding that.
In criticizing the anti-lynching law, she equated it with laws against witch burning and cannibalism. Seems to me any decent society might consider those laws as well if the need arises.
And in keeping with Fox medical misinformation tradition, she has claimed that the COVID vaccine is still in the investigation phase.
Ingraham also loves to blame the liberals for "grooming" elementary school-aged children with absolutely no facts or evidence to back up that claim and to routinely takes aim at the transgender community based on ignorance and lack of knowledge. Sounds about right for Fox.
Media Matters for America has put together a collection of Laura's greatest hits here.
Maria Bartiromo
For a CNBC alum supposedly hired by Fox for her financial reporting expertise, Maria Bartiromo has proven to be one of Fox's most fluent conspiracy theorists, claiming that Democrats infiltrated the crowd on January 6, donned MAGA clothing, and stormed the Capitol.
She has routinely and continuously pushed Trump's Big Lie both from her own lie hole and from those of her special guests, such as Newt Gingrich and Steve Bannon. Need I say more? These are the entities that qualify as "expert witnesses" on Fox.
Bartiromo has also praised Exxon and its then-CEO, Rex Tillerson, for financing an "accurate" report on climate change (snark), all the while ignoring evidence of deception in those reports.
We've also included Media Matters for America's collection of Bartiromo's greatest hits here.
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