Thanks to internal email messages recently made public in a court filing, we now know that Fox News hosts and executives privately doubted and even mocked Donald Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But in public they accepted his wacky narrative anyway because, Fox’s stars told each other, they didn’t dare alienate their huge audience.
When a Fox reporter publicly tweeted that, contrary to Trump’s assertions, no evidence of election fraud had been found, Fox host Tucker Carlson tweeted his colleagues Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, “Please get her fired. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down.”
Meanwhile, Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott was stressing to her boss Rupert Murdoch about their need to “keep the audience who loves and trusts us,” and “to make sure they know we aren’t abandoning them and [are] still champions for them.”
You might say Fox brings new meaning to an old business maxim: “The customer is always right.”
Serving one’s customers is the first rule of any business, from the corner grocer to a National Football League franchise. But how, exactly, does a news organization serve its customers? By validating their fantasies? Or by telling them the painful truth?
My devil’s advocate days
I grappled with a similar challenge back in the 1960s when I was editor of the Commercial Review, a daily newspaper in the county-seat town of Portland, Indiana. As the only paper in town, we didn’t have to worry about losing our readers to a competitor, the way Fox does. But as I discuss in my recent memoir, The Education of a Journalist, I did confront an ethical choice about how best to serve my captive audience.
In those days, monopoly newspapers large and small often portrayed themselves as the “voice of the community”— that is, they served their readers by speaking up for them, sort of the way Fox News does. There’s surely some value to this concept of a newspaper as “spokesperson for the less articulate,” but to my mind this philosophy really amounted to reinforcing people’s prejudices. Our readers spent their waking hours in shops, factories, schools, and offices; we at the newspaper were the only folks whose full-time jobs involved covering and thinking about public issues. I figured the least we could do for our readers was give them the benefit of our honest insights.
During my four years in Portland, I applied this concept even to the writing of editorials. Since there are at least two sides to every issue, I reasoned, a monopoly newspaper best serves its readers by exposing them to a side they’d rather not hear— even if I didn’t agree with that side myself.
As a Jewish urban Eastern liberal in a predominantly conservative and Christian rural Midwest county, I was of course ideally suited to play the role of communal devil’s advocate. From my instinctively contrarian perspective, the real enemy of truth was certainty. So my task as I saw it was to shake my readers out their certainties, whether about local topics like the need for a modern high school and a reorganized police force, or national issues like Civil Rights. “Our readers are no dummies,” I tried to argue in one editorial.
“They know better than to let a newspaper— or any single source— tell them what to do. And we know better than to try. Our sole motivation for writing editorials is our hope that, every now and then, we might make a point which hadn’t occurred to you before, and in so doing we might help you understand why you feel the way you do on a certain matter. There is, in short, no such thing as an offensive idea.”
In a town where Martin Luther King was widely viewed as a troublemaker, I took the bold step of comparing him to Jesus Christ.
“As the leading organizer of non-violent Negro protest gatherings, King has been punched, wrestled, spat upon and bitten by dogs… Correct me if I’m wrong, but a fellow named Jesus of Nazareth made more enemies than he made friends, and was pretty badly treated by some of those enemies…. Just as most American cities today shudder when they learn that King is coming, so the cities of ancient Israel must have shuddered in anticipation of the coming of Jesus.”
Murdoch’s lament
But of course there were limits to my role as communal devil’s advocate. As I look back now at my editorials about America’s misadventure in Vietnam, for example, I find myself referring to the Communist Viet Cong as “the enemy.” In effect, I was pandering to what I thought was the local majority view on this issue in order to maintain my effectiveness on local issues where my voice might actually make a difference.
My reward for sticking my neck out on sensitive issues came in the gratifying discovery that now and then I had emboldened other people to do the same. In the process, I came to see that public opinion in Jay County, Indiana, wasn’t as monolithic as I had imagined. Most rewarding were letters from readers like this one:
“I have criticized Mr. Rottenberg many times for his articles in the Commercial Review, but I am beginning to understand, I think, why he writes as he does…. He makes people think, and I guess that’s what a good writer does. So keep up the good work.”
I wonder: Has Rupert Murdoch ever experienced such a gratifying reward in his 92 years? Murdoch is an immensely wealthy and supposedly powerful man. Yet in 2020, when his network promoted an election narrative it knew to be false if not nutty, all he could do was express his disgust and embarrassment privately. Fox News, Murdoch told his son Lachlan, “is pivoting as fast as possible.” But he added: “We have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem.”
What’s going on here? The great French film actress Jeanne Moreau provided the answer, spoken long before Fox News existed: “It is not the rich who are powerful. It is the people who feel themselves free.”