Another chapter in Carl Trueman’s 2010 book Republocrat deals with Fox News and many people’s uncritical support of it. You’ve heard some of this before; it’s a common complaint that people are not more discerning of their news consumption, just as it is common to praise someone’s wisdom when they agree with you. Trueman begins his critique from a more British angle.
He says he grew up conservative in the British sense and began to question that when conservative leaders showed themselves to be just as self-servingly corrupt as the opposition party was supposed to be. Then the UK had to turn Hong Kong over to the Chinese in 1997. The last governor of Hong Kong as a British colony was Chris Patten, and he pressed as hard as he could to move the region into safe, democratic territory before he left. Everyone knew it was an uphill struggle, and Patten intended to publish his thoughts in a book (entitled East and West when finally published).
His contract was with HarperCollins, a publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man Trueman believed to be a champion of free speech and the free world. His news empire would help guard the world against the Soviet Union and all the evils therein. But Murdoch got Patten’s book cancelled under the guise that it was substandard and boring. That caused what The New York Times called “a week of relentlessly bad publicity” and provoked the publisher to issue a public apology.
The apology represents an unusually public embarrassment for Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman, who ordered that the book be canceled because of its highly critical stance toward China, a country in which Murdoch has considerable business interests and even more considerable financial ambitions.
The top brass ordered Patten’s editor to make excuses and cancel the book, because it could threaten Murdoch’s relationship with people Rush Limbaugh calls “the Chi-Coms.” Editor Stuart Proffitt was already on record praising the book, calling it a upcoming bestseller, so a public 180 would embarrass him personally. He refused and was suspended.
This event and others like it caused Trueman to question what the good guys were up to. Were they really standing up for freedom or their business interests? As we’re seeing in the NBA and Disney Studios today, Trueman writes, “Freedom, it seems, was only important so long as it did not do damage to profit margins.”
This is the man behind Fox News and many other news organizations, including Britain’s popular tabloid The Sun, which delivered nude photos to its readers daily on Page 3 and spurred its competitors to do the same. That’s enough to raise serious questions about Fox’s moral authority and general objectivity, particularly to those who think it is the one unbiased news source on the air.
Photo by Martin Sepion on Unsplash