Murdoch Dumps Trump! OAN & Jones Sunk! Truth Wins Over Lies! Don't Get Your Hopes up Folks

Are we seeing the decline of right-wing rant media? Don't bet your cable subscription on it.

Off-the-rails far-right “InfoWars” fabulist Alex Jones tremulously awaits a multi-million dollar defamation penalty that, by most accounts, will bring him to financial ruin. Well deserved too. In a twist of sweet karma, his ruination is being brought about by the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, who have successfully sued Jones after years of his spreading conspiracy lies on how 20 school children and six teachers were murdered by a deranged AR-15-wielding teen.

More good news:

One America News network faces collapse in face of multiple defamation lawsuits and the imminent loss of 35 million viewers as Verizon and AT&T, under public pressure, have canceled their contracts to carry the Big Lie megaphone channel.

Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch is pulling his support for Donald Trump. Last week, Murdoch-owned New York Post said in an editorial, “Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again,” and his Wall Street Journal echoed, “Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his.”

And Murdoch’s powerhouse Fox News is now also shunning the ex-president — not having interviewed him in over 100 days, displacing him with fawning coverage of Florida governor and rising right-wing star Ron DeSantis.

Right-wing rant broadcasting has had unfettered run of the air waves over the years, with outsized influence over our political discourse just as it has shirked journalistic integrity. Frankly speaking, I’m still delighted Rush Limbaugh is no longer among the living. But plenty of equally rabid blowhards have taken his place, notwithstanding the toll COVID has taken among their vaccine-denying numbers.

Moreover, Murdoch’s constellation of conservative mouthpieces continues strong, irrespective of whatever politicians the outlets support. His using that power to pull the rug from under Trump is actually fun to observe.

Don’t, however, get your hopes too high. Flushing the media sewer of a handful of Alex Jones’s and OAN’s does not necessarily bode for a bright future of restored normality in the media sphere. Walter Cronkite is not coming back. And Edward R. Murrow’s spirit these days shines only in the best graduate journalism schools. Nope. Early 21st century America, in some key respects, more resembles 12th century Europe than a millennial hyperpower, awash as it is in widespread belief that Democratic leaders are pedophile infantivores, Kim Jong-un was installed by the U.S. Secret Service in order to keep the world in fear of nuclear war, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel is Adolf Hitler’s granddaughter, and Trump backs the Ukraine-Russia conflict in order to destroy “secret labs” run by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Up to a fifth of the U.S. population wallows in Dark Ages caliber superstition as believers in QAnon.

As embracing of conspiracy theories rises, trust in traditional news media goes down. The Pew Research Center reports that 35 percent of Republicans, compared to 78 percent of Democrats, say they trust the mainstream news media. “Overall, about six-in-ten U.S. adults (58 percent) say they have at least some trust in the information that comes from national news organizations. While still a majority, this is the smallest share over the past five years this question was asked,” according to Pew.

But the disparity in the range of news sources between Democrats and Republicans is stark. According to a recent poll, Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents identified CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, NYT and The Washington Post as their main sources of news, while Republicans specified only two: local television and Fox News.

Here’s the rub: viewed objectively (based on the data) and speaking bluntly, Republicans are falling for bullshit. Many Fox fans assert the only difference between MSNBC or CNN and Fox is opinion. This is patently false.

“To equate what MSNBC does or some of these other outlets do with what Fox does is nonsensical,” media reporter Oliver Darcy said in a recent interview. “There are outlets that have opinion hosts, but they’re playing in the real world — in the world of facts and reality. Fox is spinning its own reality. To suggest there’s an equivalence between the two I think is not accurate and something we should really be careful to avoid.”

The Poynter Institute, a nonpartisan journalism research organization, states:

Much of what we see on Fox News, especially in primetime, is not based in truth. For example, take the lie that the election was rigged and stolen from Donald Trump. Many on Fox News either told that lie, perpetuated that lie, or didn’t shoot it down — as was their journalistic duty.

Misleading the public, not giving the full story, endangering the public, causing dissension and welcoming dangerous and irresponsible guests is far too common on far too many Fox News shows.

And that’s what separates them, and not for the better, from MSNBC.

Moreover, Fox employs much more incendiary language in its broadcasting compared with other outlets. In an analysis of how various media outlets use language, Curd Knüpfer of the Freie Universität Berlin and Robert Mathew Entman at George Washington University, found that Fox News is up to five times more likely to use the word “hate” in its programming than its main competitors, and that hosts like Hannity and Carlson are more likely than other Fox commentators to use “they hate” in in their presentations. In fact, “they hate” permeates Fox’s programming, depicting Trump critics not as legitimate adversaries but as hate-filled enemies acting in bad faith.

Finally, in another study in which arch-conservative Fox TV viewers were paid to watch CNN for a month, UC-Berkeley’s David Broockman and Yale’s Joshua Kalla found that the network engages in “partisan coverage filtering” wherein it cherry picks what to report based on the network’s partisan agenda, and ignores everything else. The upshot is that “Fox viewers aren’t just manipulated and misinformed — they are literally being made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear a lot of ‘news-like’ things, but they don’t learn about what’s really happening,” writes Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch.

I recently tweeted: “As an MSM journalist, I honestly don't get the record low confidence in the news media (particularly among Dems). And…spare us any false equivalency between MSNBC/CNN & Fox.” I think I get it somewhat now, based on all of the above. One sector of our citizenry consumes its news from a broad range of media sources; and another large section has its collective head buried in manure. In doing so, the latter is not only blinded from many facts, but their minds are poisoned by outright lies.

Sad, because, to quote one purveyor of what Trump falsely calls “fake news,” The Washington Post, “Democracy dies in darkness.”