We all wish Wendi Deng had finished the job, and with good reason. But this story shows why our media crisis can’t be boiled down simply to the existence of News Corp.
In an immediate sense, all the worst things about 2020 can be traced to the evil alternate reality that Fox News enables. If outlets like Fox didn’t exist, the respectable media would collude to ensure most people never heard of QAnon, or covid denial, or absurd claims that Turmp is somehow not a criminal. (They’d collude in lots of other ways, too, but on balance, that doesn’t sound nearly as bad as it used to).
So Fox is a key ingredient, yes; but what we see here is that the media’s obsession with itself is just as instrumental, and Murdoch isn’t to blame for that. Respectable media can ignore dumb stories, but they can’t ignore anything that gets attention from another media outlet, no matter how dumb. The Times and CNN and network news all agree the Hunter Biden stuff shouldn’t be news, but they just physically can’t stop themselves covering the fact that the Post picked it up, which makes it news.
If Fox disappeared today, this would still happen. Anything that went viral on Twitter or Facebook would still end up as a mainstream news story, because no one in the “serious” media knows how to stop doing this. If they could, it wouldn’t matter what Fox News did.
