Who Is Fox News?
Who Is?
iHeartRadio + NowThis
4.1 • 803 Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2019
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Who Is, host Sean Morrow explores the backstory of Fox News and its founders: media savant Roger Ailes and Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch. A sophisticated mix of media and politics, what we know as Fox News is the result of a decades-long conservative effort, and has become a defining force in American politics and presidential elections. Featuring scholars who study conservative media and movements--A.J. Bauer, Reece Peck, and Khadijah White--as well as Caroline Heldman, who appeared on the network hundreds of times, and whose harrowing recollections of the behavior of major personalities echo in contemporary dramatizations like Bombshell and The Loudest Voice, among others.
GUESTS:
- A.J. Bauer, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University
- Reece Peck, Assistant Professor at the City University of New York, Staten Island
- Khadijah White, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University
- Caroline Heldman, Professor of Politics at Occidental College
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The question is power. Well, most journalists have more power than most congressmen. |
| 0:06.4 | The point is that it's a very powerful branch of government today, which our forefathers didn't foresee. |
| 0:12.7 | That was Roger Rails in 1989, then working as a political consultant. |
| 0:35.7 | He would soon be hired by Rupert Murdoch, an Australian billionaire and newsbaran, to lead the Fox News Channel, which itself would go on to become the most watched TV news network in America. |
| 0:44.7 | I'm Sean Marrow, correspondent at Now This, and this is Who Is, the podcast where we examine power by looking at the people who have it. |
| 0:48.3 | We're doing something a little different this week. |
| 0:50.6 | Rather than talking about one person, we're talking about a few people and |
| 0:55.5 | an idea, an idea that has had a symbiotic relationship with conservative power since the |
| 1:01.7 | Nixon White House. It's liberal America's biggest boogeyman, accused of corroding our government |
| 1:08.3 | and brainwashing our friends' dads, spreading hate and reporting |
| 1:12.7 | from an alternate universe, and acting as America's first state news agency, both parroting and perhaps |
| 1:19.5 | even inspiring White House policy. That seems dogmatic truth to the left, and growingly the |
| 1:27.1 | center, but we don't want to just bash Fox News. |
| 1:30.3 | We want to examine how Fox has altered American democracy forever. |
| 1:35.3 | This is, who is, Fox News. |
| 1:39.3 | I spoke with a panel of three top thinkers who study how Fox News works on psychological, cultural, and |
| 1:46.5 | political levels, and got on the phone with a Fox News contributor who appeared on the network |
| 1:52.4 | literally hundreds of times and experienced firsthand the toxic behavior that would end up |
| 1:58.4 | taking down some of Fox's biggest names. We'll get to that. |
| 2:02.9 | But first, I want to talk about how we got to Fox News. You can go through the lives of Murdoch |
| 2:08.5 | and Ailes and kind of see where the ideas for the future network came from. Murdoch is born into |
| 2:14.6 | a wealthy family in Australia. His father, Keith, is at the helm of a newspaper empire. |
... |
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