I've no idea how Fox News once forgot its axiomatic guidance, but it did. For a few days in November, the network flew with the wings of a snow white dove by reporting — the news. Of Joe Biden's Arizona and general election victories. Regular viewers promptly shotgunned the dove and abandoned the network in throngs, cratering its ratings.
What were you thinking? asked the ghost of Joey Goebbels, horrified by Fox News' flippant neglect. You must always pander to ignorance and petty prejudices, intoned the hovering apparition, and eschew reality by all means possible — which, praise Satan, just happen to abound. Such is the creed, the doctrine, the whole goddamn premise of perfervid, fascist fundamentalism, rattled the Beelzebub of Big Lies in Jacob Marleylike cries. By reporting November's actual events, he shrilled, you have sinned. Now repent!
And by Joey, they did.
Fox News' executives have since scurried to cleanse the network of all grotesque realities and the personalities who have voiced them. Juan Williams, described as the "lone liberal voice" on some Foxy chat show, is now gone. Donna Brazile has also split: "last week, she quietly started a new job at ABC," reports the Times. (What, did she sneak into work in soft-soled shoes?) White House correspondent Kristin Fisher, who "aggressively debunked lies about election fraud," is Fox toast, CNN bound. The network's politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, who had the gall to report accurately on Arizona's returns, was sacked in January, and same month, Washington bureau chief Bill Sammon "resigned … after internal criticism over his handling of election coverage." (The Washington bureau has hired a former Bill Barr spokeswoman, sans any journalistic background.)
The Murdochs' purge of rational voices and gutter intensification of the crackpot corral have paid off. Fox News has regained its cable-news ratings supremacy, it's projected to trounce CNN's primetime audience this month, and its ad revenues have never been better. All that in profitable service to Trump and, more so, the millions of lobotomized lowlifes who adore him. Trump is, of course, repaying the network with his traditional gratitude. Yesterday he grabbed his Crayon kit and scrawled: "It was the day that [Paul] Ryan went on the board of Fox … that Fox totally lost its way and became a much different place."
But the Murdochs don't care, as long as they rake in the dough.
Were I not an agnostic, I'd assert with churchly confidence that the family has made a Faustian bargain. Regrettably, and much more likely, they have simply made another fortune. And unlike their aforementioned, hellish Virgil, who along with his wife and children met a ghastly end, the Murdochs will perish peacefully — and quite happily.