To Stay in the White House, Biden Needs To Confront Trump and Murdoch*

Fox’s owner has been conspiring to praise and sabotage governments for decades, but there is an especially nefarious scenario in 2024.

On Jan. 16, a New York jury will decide on damages that Donald Trump must pay to the former columnist of Elle magazine, E. Jean Carroll.**

Last May, Trump was found guilty of sexual assault and defamation of the journalist in a civil judgment. But only Americans who don’t consume the restricted media diet of the Trumposphere, that of dominant Fox News, One America Network, Newsmax and other digital sewers on the fringe of disinformation, were informed of the details and gravity of the accusations.

The American two-party system had its origin at the end of the 18th century, but objectivity as a guide for political coverage is a much newer phenomenon. It’s only a century old.

More than in any recent election, this year in the United States will be marked by a significant imbalance: a media conglomerate is campaigning for the Republican Party, no matter the candidate.

If President Joe Biden were to be nominated as the Democratic presidential candidate this year, he will have a powerful adversary beyond Trump or whoever the Republican competitor is, and that’s Rupert Murdoch. The decrepit, semi-retired 92-year-old Australian owner of Fox, the most watched TV network on American cable news, has been conspiring to praise and sabotage governments in his native country, in the U.K. and the US for decades. However, there is an especially nefarious scenario in 2024.

After the attack on the Capitol in 2021, Murdoch wanted to abandon Trump, but the former president’s cult remained the audience contributing to Fox’s revenues. The difference between the candidate of chaos defeated in 2020 and the unabashed Mussolini wannabe in 2024 is the ever greater radicalization of Trump voters and the normalization of lying by Fox News and its imitators.

There is no fact that merits an objective description if it is favorable to Biden. The federal government’s report about new jobs being double what had been predicted? The popular Fox News anchor characterized the report as “a scandal.” There’s no distinction between the coverage of economics, politics or science. It’s all propaganda.

Since the grotesque orange businessman descended the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015, still an underdog pre-candidate, neither the Democratic Party nor liberal Americans have managed to articulate an ecosystem of information to stand up to the Murdoch bulldozer.

Words have weight. The writer Jeff Sharlet criticizes the taboo on using the term “fascist” and object to journalists opting for the words “crisis of democracy” because “crisis” suggests a narrative with a beginning, middle and end.*** But fascism, he added, is the precise term for defining a cult of personality in a political movement that offers a strongman as the solution for everything, a leader who is above the law and, especially, celebrates violence.

In November, the Columbia Journalism Review reported a negligible number of articles analyzing coverage of national politics in the 2022 election. It is impossible to report on the aberration that is Trump with just the facts.

If a center or left-leaning media business had treated the candidate Ronald Reagan with the criminal negligence that Murdoch does, the government would have taken away its broadcasting license. It is way too late to confront the Frankenstein that successive federal regulators have ignored.

*Editor’s Note: This article is available in its original language with a paid subscription.

**Editor’s Note: On Jan. 16, a jury began hearing evidence in the damages phase of the E. Jean Carroll case.

***Editor’s Note: These phrases, though accurately translated, could not be independently verified.