CNN host Abby Phillip tore into Rupert Murdoch and “the mess left behind,” describing the legacy of the 92-year-old Australian billionaire who announced Thursday that he is ending his run as chairman of Fox News’ parent company, Fox Corporation, as “outrage porn, partisan red meat, stoking relentless culture wars.”
What followed was a six-minute compilation of cringey video clips of current and former Fox hosts like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Brian Kilmeade spouting off about a variety of topics. In one Fox & Friends clip from 2010, for instance, Kilmeade says, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
The montage also includes several instances of bogus election-related conspiracies being floated on the network after the 2020 presidential election—comments for which Fox paid dearly, as the network ended up shelling out $787.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems earlier this year.
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“That is Fox News—25 years of it,” Phillip summarized.
“Now you can cherry-pick any outlet’s blunders, mistakes, embarrassments, but the difference here is that what you saw are not anomalies. They are features, not a bug. One of their tricks of the trade is repetition—daily, even hourly. If you say the talking point consistently enough, Americans become addicted to the outrage,” she continued, citing the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Phillip then pointed to Murdoch’s admission to Dominion’s lawyers in a deposition that he let false election claims occur on his network. According to court documents, he agreed that his decision was “not red or blue, it is green.”
Philip continued: “Murdoch… accelerated this idea that if someone called out a lie and called it a lie, you are a liberal stooge. You’re a hack not to be trusted. You are woke, whatever that means. And there is no doubt that it’s working—for his bottom line at least,” the CNN host concluded. “But the question is, tonight, at what cost? At what cost to America, and at what cost to all of us?”
