3 Former Fox Network Execs Say Murdoch ‘Unfit’ To Own Stations

Three former high-level Fox executives blasted their old boss Rupert Murdoch for turning Fox News Channel into a “disinformation machine” that has negatively impacted the country in many ways.

“Arguably the worst has been Fox’s role in promoting Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ about alleged widespread fraud in the 2020 election and, in our opinion, Fox’s role in contributing to the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that undermined our democracy,” say Preston Padden, Bill Reyner and Ken Solomon in a joint statement released to the press today.

Although none worked for FNC, they helped give birth to the Fox broadcast network in the early 1990s, which paved the way for the news channel later in the decade. Reyner was an outside counsel to Murdoch’s media corporations, Padden was the chief lobbyist for Fox and Solomon headed distribution for the broadcast network.

The statement comes as Padden and an upstart watchdog group called the Media and Democracy Project are seeking support for their campaign to convince the FCC to revoke the licenses of Fox’s owned stations on the ground that Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are unfit to be broadcasters because of how they have managed Fox News Channel.

The three say they now look back with “deep disappointment” on the work they did for the broadcast network. At the time, “we all greatly admired Rupert Murdoch and his vision and bold efforts. We genuinely believed that the creation of a fourth competitive force in broadcast television was in the public interest.

“Indeed, the development of Fox Broadcasting Company broke the hold that the Big 3 Networks had on U.S. households and opened the gates to unlimited competition for many new sources of programming.”

Through email exchanges in 2020 and 2021, the statement says, Padden gained first-hand knowledge of Rupert Murdoch’s thinking about former President Trump and alleged fraud in the 2020 election, the statement says.

“Murdoch made it very clear to Preston that he understood that the 2020 election had not been stolen. Nonetheless, during the same time period, Fox continued to perpetuate the ‘Big Lie’ and promote the Jan 6 ‘Stop the Steal’ rally in D.C.”

Many others who worked to build the Fox broadcast network “share our resentment that the reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news,” the executives claim.