The “public” broadcasting elite loathes Fox News. When news broke that 92-year-old media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Fox News founder and chairman of News Corp, is stepping down in favor of his son Lachlan, that encouraged tax-funded PBS to trot out Murdoch-bashing journalist David Folkenflik of tax-funded National Public Radio on Thursday evening to lament the chairman’s “corrosive” right-wing influence on the media landscape.
PBS knew what they were getting. Folkenflik is the author of a hostile 2013 biography of Murdoch and delights in Fox News scandals (CNN and MSNBC ones? Not so much).
Reporter John Yang asked Folkenflik about the elder Murdoch’s legacy.
FOLKENFLIK: The legacy that endures is sort of the success and the fun at times of his right-wing populism, but also the punitive and pugilistic nature of it that has been ultimately quite corrosive, not only to our sense of what fair play is in journalism in this country and in some of the others, like the U.K. and Australia, in which he was so dominant.
But even throughout our body politic, where the — this asymmetrical influence he had over the Republican Party and the degree of, in a sense, business and political power he obtained as a result has left him serving an audience that wanted rawer and rawer red meat, t …