Carlson’s influence over the Republican Party was enormous. He was like Joaquin Phoenix in “Gladiator,” asking the crowd to give a thumb’s up on whether someone, in this case a politician, lived or died. Stelter tracks the long list of reasons (ad boycotts, sexist and racist texts, the dislike colleagues felt for him, his smug sense that he was bigger than his network) that led to his firing.
Carlson and Fox News changed conservatism. Together, they put the wedgie into wedge issue. And they helped erode, Stelter writes, “some Republicans’ commitment to the basic tenets of democracy.” Alongside Trump, Fox changed the tone of American conversation. This is what “trickle down” has come to mean: We live in a stupider, more bellicose world.
Democrats are led by the brain, the old saw goes, while Republicans are led by the gut. This has, by and large, been a healthy balance in America. But what happens when the Republican gut becomes merely colon, rectum and anus, this book asks, and hot filth pours from it? Reading Stelter I was reminded of a tweet that made the rounds a few years ago: “Fox News did to our parents what they thought video games would do to us.”
Stelter’s book never takes its eyes, for a long time, off Rupert Murdoch, the family patriarch. He is 92 and, not to be ghoulish about it, the death watch is on. Stelter quotes a conservative media insider who tells him, “Rupert’s death will change politics more than Trump’s descent down the escalator.”
Nearly a century ago, the British journalist CP Scott is said to have predicted that no good would come of television because the word is half Greek and half Latin. On television these days, cards are being shuffled in the run-up to the 2024 election. Stelter’s excellent book makes one fear that no ace will rise to the top of the deck.
Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
NETWORK OF LIES: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy | By Brian Stelter | OneSignal | 384 pp. | $30