MURDOCH MONEY FAKE NEWS

The night was long, the stakes were high, and inside a gleaming New York skyscraper, some of the biggest, best-paid names in television were going into meltdown. On the walls of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News headquarters, banks of flickering monitors were showing that Donald Trump, the candidate heavily backed by Fox, was losing the 2 020 presidential election.

- WILLIAM LANGLEY

“Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people.” – From the film Network (1976).

As Rupert, his co-executive son Lachlan, and Fox’s glamorous, $12 million-a-year chief executive Suzanne Scott watched the results roll in with anxious faces, a palpable air of nervousness hung over the network. A Trump loss, noted observers, might not be entirely bad for the world, but it could be very bad for Fox.

For years Rupert and ‘The Donald’ had enjoyed a mutually rewarding relationship. A lifelong admirer of mavericks and outsiders, Murdoch prided himself on having spotted Trump’s voter appeal when virtually the entire US political establishment saw the gaudy Manhattan real estate tycoon as a joke. In response to Rupert’s backing, Trump had steered his millions of loyal followers towards Fox – “the only channel you can trust,” he would say helping to make it the most watched and profi table TV network in America.

But at 11.20pm on election night, November 3, 2020, the relationship crashed to earth. Leaping ahead of other networks, Fox made an audacious prediction that Trump was losing the key state of Arizona, and with it, most likely, the election, and from that moment began a fateful chain of events that has left the most prized asset in Murdoch’s multibillion-dollar empire facing a battle for survival.