The blog Crooks and Liars records Rupert Murdoch's latest appearance on Neal Cavuto's Fox News business show. C and L is decidedly liberal, albeit always interesting, so C and L tries to highlight the disconnect between Fox News and billionaire Fox moviemaker James "Avatar" Cameron, who seems himself as an environmental champion--and environmental expert--because he made a movie about 11-foot-tall blue people. That's an interesting point for Cable Gamers, but not very important. What matters is how Murdoch regards Fox News, because Murdoch, of course, runs the parent company of Fox News. And so just as one must look to GE--and soon Comcast--for clues about the status of MSNBC and CNBC, it's always wise to monitor Murdoch, who is, after all, one of the most consequential figures in the world today. So here's C and L:
Rupert Murdoch believes Fox News is handily winning the cable ratings wars because all the rest of the media are so liberal.
He was on Neil Cavuto's show to brag about his newest reports on quarterly profits, and explained his company's success can be explained thus:
Murdoch: Well, I think as far as Fox News goes, it's very simple. You know, ah, it's very powerful, it's very good, and it's very balanced. And everybody else, every newspaper other than ours, and every -- it may be an overgeneralization, but by far most newspapers -- and certainly the other television networks sort of are, um, on one side, the liberal side of things, we're -- I think the population of this country is pretty worried about its direction, and you know, they turn to Fox News.
The Cable Gamer can't help but remember how liberal operator Michael Wolff wrote a whole book two years ago about Murdoch and the News Corp., The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, the gist of which was that Murdoch was embarrassed and pained by Fox News, because Fox was so disliked by the bicoastal liberals whom Murdoch allegedly was trying to suck up to. The book caused a stir, because Wolff had interviewed Murdoch many times, and so it seemed to many eager-to-believe liberals that Wolff had discovered an inner liberal in Murdoch.
Well, that lasted about two seconds. Murdoch denounced the book at the time, disputing Wolff's characterization, and to show just how wrong Wolff was, he promptly signed Roger Ailes to a new five-year contract. And a couple of those bicoastal liberals working inside NWS, Peter Chernin and Gary Ginsberg, soon departed the company--in part because, in the case of Ginsberg at least, he was such an overt champion of Murdoch's cooperation with the Wolff book.
And now, in these words from from Murdoch--uttered on Fox News, of course--Murdoch further demonstrated how much he appreciates the contribution Fox makes, not only to the NWS Corp. share price, but also to America and to the world.
