The Press Box - Emergency Podcast: Rupert Murdoch Retires

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Bryan and David react to the news that Rupert Murdoch will be stepping down as chairman of both Fox and News Corporation. They talk about the Murdoch era of journalism, how he went from kingmaker to answering to Donald Trump, and what will happen to the Fox properties, including Fox News. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Producer: Eduardo Ocampo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yo, this is Jason Gough from the full go podcast. Me and the crew, we like to entertain you. And we're going to do more of that this football season because the bears should be more intriguing. There should be more fascination. Justin Fields. Is this the make or break year? Is DJ Moore the piece that's going to put them over the top? You can catch us on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, or when we have an emergency podcast,

when we have breaking news. Make sure you follow the full go on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to this emergency edition of the press box. Ryan Curtis, David Shoemaker, producer Eduardo Ocampo here. David, we have some huge news this morning from Fox. WWE Smackdown is leaving to go to the USA Network. I kid.

Rupert Murdoch is retiring, David. Yeah. Rupert Murdoch. He says in a statement, I am writing to let you all know, have decided to transition to the role of Chairman Emeritus at Fox and News. He is still going to be a counselor as his son, Lachlan, becomes the sole chairman of both companies. And thus ends the active career, at least for now,

I suppose we can't rule out a Rupert comeback at some point, of the biggest arch villain in American media until Elon Musk made a run at the crown. This is kind of the mother of all where do we starts, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I guess this is where real life veers away from succession, right? It doesn't, it ends not with a bang

but with an emergency press box podcast. By the way, you're ready to go ahead and declare the overworked Twitter joke of the week. I saw like 900 Logan Roy tweets already. Well, I mean, this could come 20 minutes into this podcast, but I'll just say it now. It's funny when you're rereading

all of the Rupert Murdoch profiles after the news today, you realize just how much of it creeped into succession in various forms, you know, over the seasons. Wouldn't it have been better, by the way, if he had given the pop of his retirement to succession in its

final season, a thing everybody loved rather than to Michael Wolf on the week before his Rupert Murdoch Fox News book release? Yes. Just seems like a really, really poor choice. Yeah, yeah. Not as many people paying attention. Yeah, I mean, I think that the reporting that comes out of this stuff, you know, today by Wolf and others is going to be interesting because, you know, the reporting up to this point seems to be that Murdoch is, and I guess we should say Rupert Murdoch because there are other Murdox involved.

that Rupert Murdoch has been, you know, decreasingly involved in day-to-day operations, decreasingly engaged in several senses of the word, and that Lachlan's been running the show for a while. So it'll be interesting, I guess, to find out how they actually came to the decision where it was important, significant from the step back. And how recently the step back happened

because you and I were just looking at Dominion lawsuit texts from the 2000 election and from January 2001. Yeah. That's not that long ago. No. Where it was very clear that Rupert Murdoch was exerting control or let us say attempting to exert control over the network. Mm-hmm. And how they covered Donald Trump.

And we can get to the whole point about Rupert and Donald in just a minute. It seems like his decline has been pretty, I mean, you know, has come on quickly in the year since then. and who knows, I mean, listen, his most significant skill for decades, but particularly in the era in which his son or sons have been active participants in the empire has been the weight that he can throw around, you know, the influence that he peddles. So you can imagine that in the Dominion case, just him making kind of defiant or definitive decisions,

had a real impact, even if he wasn't, you know, day-to-day running the ship, steering the ship, running the show. Sure. Steering the yacht. Let's just go with that. Definitely doing that. So, yeah, it's a significant day that,

that, you know, anytime one of the greatest monsters in world history decides to retire, we have to get together and talk about it. There's one story I just absolutely love from his newspaper proprietor days. For his days when he was mostly a newspaper proprietor, went from Australia to the UK. He bought the London Times, which was this wrenching event in the UK that Rupert Murdoch owns the London Times. And I went down this rabbit hole a couple of years ago

that there was a guy in Germany who forged phony Adolf Hitler diaries. Forged them. They said they had been found decades after the end of World War II, and these would purport to show the thoughts of this man and this moment of world history.

They were not real at all. He had literally written them himself. He peddles them to a German publication, and then they get peddled to Rupert Murdoch's London Times. And on the night before they are set to publish these phony diaries, Murdoch's own historical

who wrote a column for the paper gets cold feet and I was like, oh my gosh, I think these might not be real. I think we are about to publish this giant fraud, or at least there was this tingling sensation. And when this is reported to Murdoch, when these fears are, his quote was, I'm only paraphrasing slightly, fuck him, publish. Now, is there any quote that sums up the Murdoch era of journalism? More than that, right? And his thinking was, it's entertainment. It's, you know, so what? It's entertainment.

We'll get a big pop out of this. And then if we have to crawl it back and apologize and have egg on our face, we'll probably get a lot of attention out of that too. How much does that remind you of the New York Post, of Fox News, of all the various Murdoch properties? If you don't recoil in fear and panic when you make a giant mistake,

then you can get as much publicity on the back end as you do from publishing the fake thing. Or, you know, it doesn't even have to be fake for publishing the super problematic thing. And yeah, I mean, it's entertainment, it's business. It's kind of all the, you know, capitalized words except for news. But that was Rupert Murdoch's genius.

and, you know, that'll be what history sort of tarzan with as well. There are the newspapers, the New York Post here in the U.S., and then later the Wall Street Journal. But I think so much of his legacy in our lifetimes, especially as it relates to politics, is Fox News, which went on the air October 7, 1996. I think I first latched on to Fox News in full on Election Day, 2000. thousand. Yeah. Actually, the day after the election, because I remember falling asleep with that strange,

uncertain result, Bush v. Gore, and I woke up, and for some reason in my apartment, Fox News was just playing and had been playing all night. Yeah. And I wake up to these anchors talking with certitude in my memory about how Bush was definitely the winner of the election, that there could be no ambiguity. And this is still when Fox News is kind of sneaking up on people. Yeah. Not the force it would later become.

Bill O'Reilly, I think, was already a thing. But I just remember being like, wait a minute. They're not talking like those dispassionate guys on network news where it's like, oh, let's just hold on here. Let's let's let's let's let's not make any rash determinations. It was just a completely different tone. Yeah. I mean, how, you know, when you just talk about fiendishly clever bits, where do you rank

we report you decide? Oh. Yeah. I mean, it goes hand in hand with all the catchphrases from the early O'Reilly days, right? The no spin zone, all that kind of stuff. But, uh, looking out for you. Yeah. Um, yeah, it's really smart.

It's, I mean, it's, it's, uh, it is the entire presentation of Fox News, though. I mean, they could be, they could be. they could be and have at numerous times reported abject lies as fact. You know, and that's to say nothing of the daily kind of obfuscation of what actually merits conversation in favor of whatever they choose to talk about. But, you know, you get your Windsor nights,

winds or nots tied up just right. And, you know, you sit behind the desk and the camera angles just right, whatever. I mean, it just looks like news. It feels like news.

Uh-huh. the content is sort of secondary. Or, I mean, the content is actually primary. It's just in terms of the perception, everybody out there watching is like, yes, I'm watching the news. And you're kind of trained in a Pavlovian way to take what is said as fact. The aesthetics of Fox News are always fascinating to me

because there's probably a reality where it would have been more slickly produced and better, at least, as a sensory experience than old network news. But it really wasn't. You know, the graphics were punchier maybe. The sound was turned up kind of on the sort of, you know, interstitial music and stuff a little bit. But it was actually just kind of more bolder than network news or punchier than network news.

Louder. Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. But I think that's the point. I mean, I think that's deliberate. it hasn't even evolved to the extent that like fox sports graphics have evolved over the years you know and and and NFL football in particular um but we've talked about this from the opposite side when you see networks like cnn trying to break out of the mold of television news trying to

innovate and not and getting stuck in doing the exact same thing because they're trapped in those things but i think for fox it was a little bit of the inverse it was you know they wanted to look as familiar as possible so that nobody would question the stuff that came out of their collective mouths. The Roger Ailes branding of Fox was unbelievable because if you go back to 1996, you have conservative media criticism, which is now a giant industry in and of itself, in much smaller form. But one of its planks was that the newspapers and the TV networks were liberal. They were liberal in nature, which, if we look at it from 10,000 feet, was true in certain aspects. But what Roger Ailes told every reporter that would listen, and if we remember in the old days,

Roger Ailes was a guy who was given interviews, who was a great question. quote, who loved attention, was we here at Fox are going to create a down the middle news network. Not like those left-leaning newscasts you see on ABC and NBC. We're going to do it right down the middle. Yeah. And then, of course, what they do in practice is create something that is far more slanted than even what they are claiming network news is. So whatever their fantasia of what you were seeing from Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings was the actual product of Fox News was even wilder than that.

But it had this slogan. Oh, it has the slogan. And I always wondered how much viewers, especially in those early days, were in on the bit. Do you think they were watching this and like, finally something that tells it down the middle? or were they like finally a conservative news network. It's impossible to say, although you do feel, I mean, it did feel watching like O'Reilly in those early days that he was winking, certainly a little bit more winking than Hannity is now, you know, than some of the other hosts are now. That's a low bar, but okay. I mean, even, you know, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson is another one in both people who have sort of ideologically.

move towards the, you know, combative end of the spectrum. Yeah, I mean, there was, it seemed like there was a little bit more of a, of a smirk in the early days, but who knows? Who knows what the, what the audience thought? I don't think that was the point. I do think, too, that catchphrases aside, I mean, it must be said that we have these conversations about to what degree the hosts themselves really believe the stuff that they're peddling or whatever.

I mean, Rupert Murdoch, ideologically, is very far wrong. right. And so is his son Lachlan, maybe even more so. Ailes may have been non-ideological to some extent, but sure, but he was, but he was or motivated by things above ideology, but he

worked for Richard Nixon. No, but I'm saying, but he worked for Nixon. He was incredibly, he was a conservative guy as well. Whether or not they, whether or not they were self-aware in their in their, you know, production meetings, they did believe that the news was skewed to the left and they believed that

they were, or at least they convinced themselves that they had a mission and that justified every choice that they made. That, I think, mixed with the idea that news is entertainment. Yeah. The fuck it published mentality. There is

an ideological underpinning here, but there's also this greater idea that what we're doing every night is an entertainment show. Remember, this is before the days when just having a kind of ideologically inclined, host in primetime was something that every network was doing.

CNN still had Larry King on the air in the early days of Fox News. MSNBC was trying out was like Phil Donahue and all those other things like that. They were just very, very strange, right? It wasn't, it wasn't what it was today. And they very much created that grammar of ideologically inclined entertainer is giving you an hour every night. Yeah. Which would later become the norm in cable news.

Fox News became this incredible franchise. Every time a very, very popular host left the network, all the reporters say, is this the end of Fox News? Yeah. Oh, David, the ratings went down on Tuesday. Anderson Cooper won the night. Chris Hayes won the night.

They may never recover from losing, Bill O'Reilly, Greta Van Sustern, Tucker Carlson, Alan Colmes. All right, nobody said that about Alan Colms. But they always did because the Murdoch created brand and Ailes created brand was way bigger than the hosts themselves. Maybe that will end at some point. Maybe the fact that that is an older audience and that the cable bundle is withering in front of us.

Maybe that will change. But it was all, it hasn't changed. changed yet. And now they've got Jesse Waters and Greg Gutfeld doing prime time. This was not the A team a couple of years ago. But those guys are still doing huge numbers because people are tuning in for the brand. And you know, you have to mention newsmax and the various other far right competition. I use the term very loosely here. I mean, part of that's just an inevitability, right? I mean, you become big enough,

you become successful enough. There will be pretenders to the throne or at least minor league imitators that realize they can, they can, you know, eat around the edges. But, you know, there's a larger conversation that we could say for another day, I guess, just about to what degree Fox created this ecosystem,

that then they weren't willing to go, or that spiraled out of control, basically. Like there's an element of it that they couldn't, they either didn't have enough space or the ideological want to pursue. And, you know, the Trump years obviously really exacerbated that issue. That's where I want to go next. Because you mentioned Rupert as an ideologue. He is also, to an extent, somebody who's very, very practical, both about conservative politics and about. the future survival and

thriving nature of his own media enterprises. When Mitt Romney loses in 2012, he is, if I remember correctly, one of the guys saying, hey, we need to moderate this party on immigration reform. When Donald Trump comes in peddling

what would become the MAGA movement in 2016 during that presidential election, Murdoch is not on board at all. He does not see that as a good way for Fox or the Republican Party to go, then Trump captures the nomination and the entire conservative movement, and Rupert Murdoch is like, all aboard, at which point, then there's a flip, right?

Yeah. And to whatever extent, Rupert had become a conservative kingmaker, and I think that's an interesting topic too that my spiritual advisor, Jack Schaefer, has pushed back on over the years, whether Republican voters were actually listening to him at every step. he then finds himself answering to Donald Trump.

Yeah. Which leads us to the Dominion lawsuit, which causes a panic inside Fox when they see those conservative imitators. You talk about Newsmax eating away at their audience because they are more loyal to claims about the 2000 election and to Trump himself. And then you get this weird thing here at the end of his career where he's like, we don't have a choice, right? We've tried to up in this guy in 2016. We tried to do it again with Ron DeSantis in 2023 as this presidential campaign started, and we can't do it, at least not yet. Well, just like every other anti-Trump force on the, you know, right, if you don't go all in, there's absolutely no hope. And they, you know, I would say they learned it the hard way, but they, you know, they acclimated themselves, right?

They adjusted. What you're talking about is what we were talking about before. It's the intersection of ideology, entertainment, and money, right? I mean, and business. And I think the moments in Murdoch's career where he was at a quandary where those two things were butting heads, I think are probably the most informative and interesting points, right? Because it seemed to be, for so much of it, it seemed to be a pretty effortless journey as far as those things go. And then, you know, you're right, when there was something he could not abide politically or a person like Trump who he could not abide.

That was the real test. Now, I mean, I agree, I believe, with Jack Schaefer on the Kingmaker point. But I do think that's a little bit beside the point, too, because, you know, when someone is running for office on the Republican side, there's only one ring to kiss. You know, there's not someone, there is not a, there is not a bigger ring that you could go, that, you know, that you could be smooching. Yeah. It's a Super Bowl-sized ring. And especially, yes, and especially in those sort of DC circles, uh, I think he probably

even has an outsized reputation as being someone of that sort of significant. But yeah, it's, the, the Trump stuff has obviously, you know, affected Fox negatively. To the extent of several hundred million dollars in the Dominion lawsuit. And I think that probably, you know, if anything, it will probably look back and learn that that delayed his retirement or whatever you want to call this, right? I mean, you can see a pretty straight line where he said, well, I have to stick around until this blows over. But I also have to leave before I pass on so that Lachlan can have his chance to really

steer before I'm gone. I mean, that, if I had to guess, I would guess that's the arithmetic. Rupert Murdoch's ring is the ring to kiss. I totally agree and I also think in a way, Fox News becomes the

country club, the theater of Republican Party politics. I saw a semaphore article the other day talking about how Nikki Haley's numbers have crept up. Even though she's only talked to the press, as in like a gaggle with reporters twice.

but she just goes on Fox News. Yeah. And there's a forum there to do very positive, uh, nearly pushback free interviews. Mm-hmm. About the Republican issue of the day. Yeah.

That's where it's, that's where it's happening, right? That's where that discussion is happening is within the biosphere of Fox News. Mm-hmm. Not anywhere else. And they're happy to do it. You know, they've done the same with Vivek Ramoswamy.

They've done it obviously with Ronda Santis. True. They've done it from time to time with Trump. But that's, I mean, obviously a more subtle. I mean, that's a, that is a relatively low-fi subtle advantage, I mean, ability that they have to push those people. And it could be very significant. But it goes to your point about like, this is where we come, right? Yeah. Whether they're the kingmaker or not, this is where it's happening. This is the establishment. And I, and I fully agree

with that. I just think, uh, you know, it's almost like when Iiger left Disney the first time, uh, before his return. And it every, and a lot of the, a lot of the, um, you know, a lot of the analysis was that he was leaving at a good time. He was going to get out before all these, like, you know, existential problems were fully, like fully swallowed the business. Then he had to get back in, and now he's trying to deal with those, and it's not a lot of fun. But there's, but I think that the problems that we saw, that Fox saw through the Trump years, uh, are only going to get bigger, right? I mean, it's, it's just, listen, it's one thing to go out there and say, you know, we report you decide. We are the, we are the sole purveyors of truth,

in this skewed liberal world. But they've created a whole industrial complex of people of mimics and wannabes. And if you are interested in a subject, if you hear something on Fox News and you Google it, you're likely going to find a site that is further to the right or more reactionary than Fox News is. And they don't have the sort of, you know,

they don't, they're not the only voice in the room anymore, even if they are the biggest and the most significant, even if they are the institution. At some point, institutions kind of, you chip away at them and it ends up doing a whole lot of damage, which is, you know, the institutions like the institutions that Fox News went after in the beginning. All those guys who have 700,000 Twitter followers

and a blue check mark and some podcast that you and I have never heard of, they are the children of Fox News and now the competitors. Yeah, there's a real, there's a real, I mean, there's a real practical version of this, right? Where we're like a lot of the folks that you see on newsmax, a lot of the talking heads are people that appeared on Fox News. But, you know, at some point we're probably like, can I get one of those full-time contributor deals? Or like, can I come on every day? Could I get my own show?

And Fox was like, now we're good with you once a week. And they're like, but I have all this time on my hands. And I like doing this. And this is, you know, this is a great way to get the order to. Yeah, I have more to give. So where can I go? Well, I'll go to this other platform. I'll start my own podcast.

I'll start my own web show. I'll do whatever. I mean, that's a practical part of it. And then... I'll run for president. And when you... Vakramuswamy. I'll choose that as my non-Fox gig.

You talk about Donahue on MSNBC. I mean, there was a point in time where it was just... Where all of these channels were just like, do you have experience talking with a microphone in front of you? Okay. You're in. Yeah, you're in. And now, you have literally generations of people who grew up saying that would be a cool job to have, right?

And, and those people are all going to, you know, or a lot of those people are going to try to find a way to work. And the ideology, such as it was, I mean, I think that the learned ideology, what Fox News gave to its viewers over the years was not a philosophically sound one. It was a, it was an ideology of reactionaryism, you know, like it was, it was an ideology of, of, uh, aggrievement. and of, well, you know, racism and sexism and a lot of other things too.

And that is harder to control than a governing philosophy. If they were strictly about taxes and borders, then competition would be, it would be harder for the competition. But Fox News doesn't get to call the plays, you know. I mean, this whole thing has gone, has just sort of spiraled away. from them. And you can't just be like, no, no, no, no, but here's the rule book. I mean, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they come in. Because part of making an entertaining news product is that you kind of

make people mad every night. And if people are mad all the time, online or offline, not mad at you, mad at some, mad at some, mad at something, right? Mad at, at, at, at, at, at, at, at light, mad at Biden, Matt at Hunter Biden, whatever they're mad at, then that is harder to control. And that gets them into the state where it is, as you say, not a stable

political movement, but an inherently unstable political movement. I want to hit two things before we go. Michael Wolf, God bless him, has been talking a lot about in interviews, this idea of what's going to happen to the various Murdoch media properties.

Now, this is usually talked about in the event of Murdoch's death. But there's also an element we can talk about today with his retirement because a lot of these properties rely on Murdoch we know for their marching orders. And some of them, like the newspapers, probably rely on Murdoch for their very existence. I don't think that's an overstatement. The New York Post, for instance, right? Like the New York Post exists in his present form or exists, you know, which is to say not the daily news, right?

Something that's still slugging away there in New York City because Rupert Murdoch wants it to exist. He likes it. He likes what it does for him. He likes the pulpit it offers him. He likes what the wood, the front page can do, both to attract attention and probably to influence politics. That is going to be a fascinating conversation. going forward. Same with Fox News because there's this whole thing of like, well, when Rupert leaves this mortal coil, there'll be this big battle between his heirs to either

keep Fox News and change it in some way or just sell it off at which point somebody else would probably change it. And change could be anything, right? Change doesn't necessarily mean make it a more reasonable conservative network or make it into a liberal network. Just do something with it. Yeah. But it just underscores the point of how much these properties rely on Murdoch, the elder. Well, we see that across the media landscape, right? I mean, there's so many publications that have been sold off, shut down, the mass layoffs, the, the, the, the, the, the, cuts. And, you know, there's a, there's a piece of every conversation where you say, I mean, if only a billionaire would swoop in, a right-minded,

billionaire would come in and just understand that, you know, making one dollar a year and keeping the fill in the blank newspaper afloat is a worthwhile investment. I think the numbers of billionaires who are invested in, and that old-fashioned sort of status, that, you know, that's that sort of glory, or it's a dwindling number. And that will be part, that will certainly be part of the conversation. Yeah, I guess, I mean, and purely practically, I guess the question is to, does, do the, do those institutions drop in value quickly enough that selling them is not necessary, there's not as much upside to, you know, offloading them, to ignoring them. But that's, that's a, that's a much different conversation. Yeah. It's like Fox News is this incredibly valuable thing, this moneymaking

thing, but it's also a cable news channel. Which, which, we know here in 20, 2023 is shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink, at least in terms of the number of people in the cable bundle. Yeah. So what is that worth? What is it worth without Rupert Murdoch making it Fox News? Well, I mean, Tucker Carlson got canned and, you know, very little of that conversation turned on, well, what does this mean for their over the top investment, right?

Because he was basically it, you know, they spent. Documentary filmmaker Tucker Carlson? No, and he did his like. Like, the show without the tie on, you know, like, is more free-flowing conversation. But he did a lot, he did a lot of work for them. And I, and it's, you know, that's all to say, you're absolutely right. It's a cable. It's a cable channel.

And today, this week, this past couple of weeks has been a particularly sort of terrifying time to be a cable news channel. Last part of Murdoch's legacy I want to hit on because this hits us straight in our childhoods. Dave and I grew up in a universe where there were three broadcast networks, ABC, NBC and CBS. Murdoch comes along and says, I want to create a fourth one. And there was a time back when the number of the television station on your TV dial mattered that Rupert Murdoch's Fox, and this is not Fox News, but what they call

Big Fox over on Pico Boulevard, was located in a very high place. I believe it was Channel 33 in Dallas, Fort Worth, where I would go find this network. And part of creating a pirate fourth network was he was allowing his programmers to take chances on shows like The Simpsons and in living color that the big broadcast networks never, ever would have touched. Yeah.

were just not interested in. There's a lot of Drek on early Fox, but there was also a lot of really good shows and really shows that changed television in their way. Yeah. From those years. And then what happens is around 1993, Rupert Mardog decides,

you know what, if I want to become the real fourth network, I need one thing. And that is NFL football. Yeah. And he goes out and he outbids CBS for the NFC rights. He hires John Madd and Pat Semmerall. And that is an amazing story in itself.

And I always find this so funny coming from somebody who mostly writes about sports media. But, you know, the impact of Fox in that world is very, very, very different than it is in the impact in news. You can have the harshest possible assessment of FS1, the programming that's on that network. and you still look at football games and the money they pumped into the NFL, the way they changed the way football is shown on TV from everything from the score being on the screen all the time. Well, that decision too at that point in time

was either a Harbinger or just a crystal ball moment for him because he didn't go out and say, and he certainly, well, he might have, I don't know, but he went for the NFL and not like the Olympics. You know exactly what he was doing. He knew that was the product. Yeah. And what follows from that is so funny because when I was doing this oral history

a years ago, there's a guy named Preston Padden, who was a Fox executive from those days, who is now, by the way, warring with Murdoch about Fox News. But at the time, Murdoch went to this guy and said, here is a pot of money. We just bought the NFL. I want you to go to every city in America with this pot of money and see if their CBS affiliate, which used to have the football games, will change to a Fox affiliate.

And we can pay them to do this in some cases. Remember, these are all owned by different people. Yeah. So they would go to, let's say Dallas Fort Worth and say, hey, Channel 4, you just lost the Dallas Cowboys. Yeah.

But if you become a Fox affiliate, you can have the Cowboys again. So guess what happens in Dallas? And again, this sounds very old fashioned, but it was a huge deal at the time. Fox went from Channel 33 to Channel 4. They did the same thing in Boise, Denver.

They just go to Detroit was a big one. Everybody suddenly they were in the single digits. And Fox became a real network. The fourth network. So whatever he had spent on the NFL suddenly comes back to him by the idea that his network is not worth way more because it's a collection of stations that you could actually find. on your old-fashioned TV dial rather than one

that you would go like, wait, is that the second dial that goes into the 30s? Mm-hmm. On my TV and comes in fuzzy. It was a brilliant gambit. I mean, it really worked. It was mind-blowing. And then he launches this whole, you know,

sports network. They later get the NHL and the glowing puck. Baseball, which they still have. Mm-hmm. They've kept those NFL rights for 30 years now. Mm-hmm. It's been a huge part of it.

Whenever we talk about like, what is network television right now, the answer is it is sports. And more specifically, it is pro football. Yep. That's Fox. Joe and Troy,

Pat and John. Now Kevin Burkhardt and Greg Olson, last year's Super Bowl. A very, very interesting part of his legacy that is very, very different than the Fox News stuff. All right, David,

much more to say on this subject. We can tackle some more of this on Monday. we should dive into more of the entertainment stuff. We can look forward to the future of Fox News. But for now, he is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Eduardo Ocampo, Shoemaker and I back Monday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See then, David.

See you later, Brian.