Paul Ryan, analyst: “Fox was trying to navigate this dynamic between a core group of Trump loyalists who were ignoring the truth and the truth itself.” The truth as a pitfall, a hazard to be avoided in the functioning of a news operation—that’s a nice way of looking at things. The former Speaker of the House now sits on the board of Fox Corp. As a result he had to testify in the prelims to Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox. So did Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox, and Murdoch offered much the same take on Fox’s news goals in the aftermath of the 2020 vote: “to straddle the line between spewing conspiracy theories on one hand, yet calling out the fact that they are actually false on the other.”
I’d say this middle ground approach outraged extremists on both sides, those who want lies and those who want truth. Often enough it got brushed aside, with Rudy and the others getting plenty of airtime to smear the election results. In general Fox kept its trousers clear of the row of dirty urinals known as the truth, but it toppled over into the toilet known as Sidney Powell. The audience wanted the toilet: no election lies, watch everyone switch to Newsmax.
For decades Murdoch fed viewers lies he found convenient. Now he found he had to give them the lies they found convenient, not to say psychically necessary. He had to do so without regard to his resulting legal liability. Waiting for court, he wonders what hit him. He comes off as a complex figure, in some ways Shakespearean. Well, no, not really. He seems like Wile E. Coyote, someone who has run very energetically in one direction and then discovered that the ground stopped a while back. He thought he could keep whipping the folks up, and he did so until the folks became ravening marauders indifferent to truth. Stop whipping them up now and they’re gone; keep whipping them up and you’re sued for $1.6 billion. Next the ravine’s rushing up toward you while your lawyers try to grab branchlets hanging from the cliff face.
Twisted values. Fox’s chairman puts news gathering a few rungs below audience manipulation and political maneuvering. When the 2020 returns showed that Biden had won at last, the channel’s election team wasn’t allowed to make the call. “We should and could have gone first but at least being second saves us a Trump explosion,” Murdoch texted his son. But you notice that he regretted the necessity. Murdoch doesn’t resent news.
By contrast the person he put in charge of Fox Business News has little tolerance for the gathering and reporting of accurate information pertaining to crucial national events. “[D]on’t know how we work here. Honestly,” she texted a colleague, her professionalism appalled. “We are going to look back at this week and know this was when we lost a significant part of our audience who won’t come back.” Fox News had beaten everyone by calling Arizona for Biden, and what was that going to do to market share?
Damp trousers. Paul Ryan’s always been demure; under oath, he’s very demure. Fox’s board met after the election. Probably it discussed how the channel was covering the election fallout and Trump’s lies. Almost certainly. But Ryan wouldn’t testify to that effect. His replies stuck like glue to a bland, elaborately casual unhelpfulness: “wouldn't surprise me” featured, as did “Not that I can recall, but it’s not implausible at all” and “This is November 11th, so it would surprise me if we were not talking about the news today.” I don’t know what row of dirty urinals the ex–national leader was avoiding, but I wish him luck.
In his congressional days, Ryan had to deplore or demur Trump and his presidency. Now he’s stuck as the in-house deplorer and demurrer regarding Fox’s coverage. Another parallel with his old career: trying to sell Murdoch on dumping Trump, Ryan pretended the move would unleash prosperity. “I see this as a key inflection point for Fox, where the right thing and the smart business thing to do line up nicely,” he said implausibly. That was early-December, when figures on pro-Trump audience flight were already known. In the middle of cataclysm, Ryan has to go into one of his high-minded con jobs.
