Fox News was always partisan, but now it is rudderless and "anti-democratic"

Building on her excellent work in 2017's Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Jane Mayer takes to The New Yorker with a deeply researched, lively and alarming 12,000-word longread on the radical shifts at Fox News that have taken place since the Trump election, as #MeToo has claimed the organization's senior leaders, leaving it rudderless and under the nominal command of an ailing Rupert Murdoch, whose main management contributions have consisted of purging the minor dissenting voices at Fox, leaving behind a kind of Hannity-and-Co version of Lord of the Flies.

Mayer traces the current state of Fox to the disgraced departure of Fox's top brass, starting with CEO Roger Ailes (who promptly dropped dead) and then Bill O'Reilly, both implicated in a string of grotesque, longrunning sexual abuse scandals that also claimed Bill Shine, abettor of these abuses, who quickly took over as Trump's communications director, where he serves while collecting millions of dollars from Fox.

The departures left Fox rudderless, for while Ailes was a monster who raped a female subordinate for decades (she was eventually paid off for $3.1 million) and kept a "Black Ops" department that performed oppo research on a long list of his enemies (including his biographer!), he also represented (incredibly) the voice of reason and balance at the company, punishing on-air talent who campaigned for and provided cover to Republican politicians.

With Ailes gone, Murdoch himself took over, purging the company of those dissenting voices who had kept things somewhat in check in Ailes absence. Read the rest