Chelsea Clinton claimed during a recent interview that her family was “the reason that Fox News was created,” arguing that the network’s founder Rupert Murdoch had seen an opportunity and a market for attacks against them.
Clinton and her mother, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, spoke with entertainment magazine Variety about their new Apple TV+ venture, “Gutsy,” in a wide-ranging feature interview that was published on Tuesday, and the topic eventually turned to Fox News.
“Your family was the first great target of Fox News’ approach,” the interviewer prompted.
“We were the reason that Fox News was created. Because Rupert Murdoch recognized a great market opportunity,” the younger Clinton replied.
The interviewer then asked the Clintons both to explain whether they felt their move into the media space — albeit a much smaller space than that occupied by Fox News — was an effort to fight back in some small way.
“Climate change illuminated where Fox News was willing to go and its destructive impact,” Chelsea responded first, saying that it was not solely Fox News, but multiple right-leaning outlets.
“I’m 42, and when I was in junior high, two-thirds of Americans knew human activity is partly responsible for climate change,” she said. “The right proved to themselves, ‘We can hit people with relentless misinformation and every night pipe into their homes to disbelieve scientists — what else could be possible?’ Today, with COVID, it’s the same playbook.”
“There’s an element to this which is quite frustrating, because they get away with it,” Hillary added then, arguing that progressive media had failed to do enough to fight back against right-leaning media.
“The so-called mainstream media, even the so-called progressive media, is just not as relentless in rebutting, refuting and making clear that this is nothing but a play for profits at the cost of truth,” Hillary Clinton says of Fox News. https://t.co/sFfOieG82G pic.twitter.com/25Pw704Ndp
— Variety (@Variety) September 27, 2022
“The so-called mainstream media, even the so-called progressive media, is just not as relentless in rebutting, refuting and making clear that this is nothing but a play for profits at the cost of truth,” she said.
The former Democratic presidential nominee went on to suggest that tech companies should also be doing more to curb outlets like Fox News, saying, “Tech companies, the rest of journalism, ordinary people with platforms, we haven’t done enough to point out the dangers, point out the falsehoods, point out the hypocrisy. There is a path to limit the damage they’ve done, but it requires leaders on the side of facts and evidence. We now have that with Biden, and he’s making slow progress in trying to open people’s minds and eyes to what reality actually is.”