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Fox News is Bankrupting America

How Murdoch’s Media Empire exacerbates America’s Crisis of Value

B Kean
9 min readAug 15, 2020
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

On October 7, 1996 the seeds of today’s endemic crisis of value, planted in 1980, were fertilized: the Fox News cable channel went on the air providing a right-slanted news interpretation 24/7.

Fox News is exacerbating income inequality by ensuring strict adherence to a corporation-first status quo.

A 2017 American Economic Review study conducted by economists Gregory Martin and Ali Yurukoglu of Emory University and Stanford respectively showed that watching Fox News “directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewer’s attitudes.” (See Fox is Powerful here)

In a world where the creation of Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch never hit the airwaves, Al Gore would most likely have become president; 9/11 would not have happened as well as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The two economists estimate that in a world with no Fox News, the Republican presidential candidate’s share would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 — John Kerry would have won; and 6.34 points lower in 2008 meaning Barack Obama would have likely received enough Republican support enabling him to pass a more beneficial health care act — like the one the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation supported during Bill Clinton’s…

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B Kean
B Kean

Written by B Kean

The past holds the answers to today’s problems. “Be curious, not judgmental,” at least until you have all the facts. Think and stop watching cable news.

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