The Brooklyn Rail

How will the mainstream media respond to the assault on reality of the second Trump presidency? Early indications are not encouraging. Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press on December 9 was a test of just how journalists will deal with an autocrat who insists on repeating falsehoods that have been thoroughly debunked. Welker hazarded a few corrections but generally let the lies pass. If Trump can get journalists to let the lies pass, he will have fundamentally changed the rules of journalism and paved the way for a regime that makes up its own reality and then imposes it on the media and through them, on the people.

Heather Cox Richardson ties this reality-bending directly to the influence over the past thirty years of Australian Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News:

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.

Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.¹

Prime-time viewership at MSNBC fell 53% after Trump won, while viewership at Fox News jumped 21%. Right after the election, among viewers under the age of 54, the highest-rated news program on MSNBC, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” aired their least-watched episode since April 2022. CNN also lost viewers after the election, about 43% in prime time. But even in previous times, Fox had twice as many viewers as CNN (10 million to 5.1 million) and 40% more than MSNBC. And generally, many fewer people watch cable and broadcast TV now than they did seven years ago. So “the liberal media” in terms of broadcasting is definitely in decline.

Heather Cox does report, however, that the future of the Fox political empire is uncertain, with the Murdoch family locked in a struggle for who will control the media empire when the 93-year-old patriarch is gone. Will it be his eldest son Lachlan, or the other three of his children, at least two of whom do not share his right-wing views? Rupert Murdoch has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to favor Lachlan, but this week a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him, calling his effort to change the trust a “carefully crafted charade.” Rupert and Lachlan are appealing the decision.

But almost everybody agrees that the free press in the U.S. as a whole—in print, online, and otherwise—is under attack and in dire straits economically and existentially right now, and things are bound to get worse over the next four years, when what’s left of the liberal news media, or what Kash Patel calls “the entire fake news mafia press corps,” is also going to be under intense pressure from Patel’s FBI and Pam Bondi’s Justice Department and others in the form of direct federal investigations and indictments.

Timothy Snyder has offered a new name for the new regime in America: Trumpomuskovia.² The new name emphasizes the dual rulers, Trump and Musk, and also invokes Putin’s Russia. The Ukrainians call Russia “Muscovia.” As Snyder points out, Musk is a Putinist, who communicates frequently with Putin and has repeated Putin’s propaganda about the war in Ukraine for the last two years. And the turn of Trumpism toward full-bore oligarchy introduces a tremendous instability to the regime, as happened in Putin’s Russia in the 1990s. Dictatorships are inherently unstable. But this one is going to do a tremendous amount of damage before it collapses.