“. . . what the Fox competitors offer is a different vision: One where any fact that gets in the way can be dismissed out of hand, and “truth” is whatever the right-wing audience wants to believe.”
Salon writes that when Rupert Murdoch announced his upcoming departure from Fox News, all eyes landed on Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son who is taking over from his father as the official head of the right-wing media empire. Questions arose about his father was actually stepping down — or whether he was secretly controlling his son.
“For years now, there’s been a growing network of well-funded GOP propaganda outlets that, using social media to expand their reach, have positioned themselves well to cannibalize the Fox News audience. . . . . This should alarm everyone, because as god-awful as Fox News is, the competitors are worse: They lie more often and more boldly. They’re more explicitly racist, homophobic, and sexist. And they worship Donald Trump like a god “
From Media Matters, “In just the last few years, the movement’s founding fathers, including Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Rush Limbaugh, have died or stepped away, leaving conservative media without a center of gravity. Lachlan Murdoch and other rising right-wing media figures are jockeying to lead the hate and misinformation machine into the next generation.One of these figures is Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk.
Additional bad news is that Joe Rogan is one of the most successful contenders for the Fox News throne. He gets an estimated 11 million listeners an episode. Others attempting to cash in on the Fox audience are Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck and Ben Shapiro. ”
These opportunists want to take advantage of the RW viewer anger at Fox News that has emerged. “Bluntly put, the perception in the GOP base is that Fox News is too hamstrung by facts to be an effective purveyor of right-wing propaganda..”
Fox alternatives know that their relative freedom to lie is a selling point to right-wing audiences. Earlier this year, the New York Times published a story about which podcasts are the worst purveyors of disinformation, and Bannon’s “War Room” topped the list. His response? To brag about it openly and praise his audience for “helping us spread misinformation.”
