It’s not every day you see a former employee condemn the media company they helped build as a malevolent force in American public life. But for Fox News, it sometimes feels that frequent. A slew of Fox veterans — out of genuine remorse, a desire to rehabilitate their reputations, or a combination of both — have sounded the alarm in recent years over the network’s unhinged demagoguery and virulent pro-Trump propaganda.
Last week, three onetime Fox executives who helped plot Rupert Murdoch’s rise became the latest veterans of his media empire to denounce the network he founded. Preston Padden, Ken Solomon, and Bill Reyner apologized for having “unknowingly helped create the Fox disinformation machine” in a joint statement published Wednesday.
Padden, Solomon and Reyner join a growing list of former Foxers who came to similar conclusions.
The trio had not worked for Fox News — they helped Murdoch launch Fox Broadcasting Company in the 1990s as an alternative to ABC, CBS and NBC — but nonetheless felt compelled to speak out given the right-wing propaganda channel’s “many negative impacts on our society.”
“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,” they continued. “The reputation of the Fox brand we helped to build has been ruined by false news.”
Padden, Solomon and Reyner join a growing list of former Foxers who came to similar conclusions in recent times. For years, these people cashed Murdoch’s checks, willfully blind to Fox News’ role since its inception as a Republican Party megaphone. But as the network became increasingly unhinged, aided Donald Trump’s ascension to the leadership of the GOP, and then reinvented itself as his personal propaganda apparatus, they became increasingly uncomfortable with the network’s role, called it quits, and spoke out.
The result is that you no longer need to take the word of the network’s many critics that Fox News is a dangerous cesspool. You can hear it from the people who know the network best: the longtime staffers who helped turn it into a political force, “news side” stalwarts who participated in Fox’s fiction that it operated like any other outlet, right-wing commentators who also happened to be Trump skeptics, and executives overseeing its operations have all come forward warning about their former employer.
Carl Cameron, Fox’s former chief political correspondent, was both one of the network’s earliest hires and among the first to see the writing on the wall when he retired in 2017. He later explained that he had left because “over the years, the right-wing hosts drowned out straight journalism with partisan misinformation.” Those hosts, he pointed out in a 2019 interview, were “allied” with Trump, and had access to the then-president that was “questionable, if not dangerous. It’s not normal.”
The result is that you no longer need to take the word of the network’s many critics that Fox News is a dangerous cesspool.
Ralph Peters, the former Fox strategic analyst, is no soft-headed lib — he’s a Islamophobe whom Fox once suspended for calling President Barack Obama a “total p—-” on-air. But in 2018 he left the network, writing in a blistering op-ed that he was unwilling to continue working for a network that was “propagandizing for the Trump administration” and engaged in an “assault on our constitutional order.” He later told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “with the rise of Donald Trump, Fox did become a destructive propaganda machine” that was “doing a great deal of damage” to the United States and whose hosts were “knowingly attack[ing] our Constitution, the bedrock of our system of government, the bedrock of our country.”








