There’s an art to the put-down, but it seems to be vanishing. You know, if you say someone’s brain is the size of a pea, you get the point across, but it’s not as memorable as, say, the approach taken by Will Rogers, who once said of a politician that “if his brain was gunpowder, he wouldn’t have enough to blow the wax out of his ears.” That, folks is rhetorical art.
Nowadays people mostly grab for the unimaginative shortcut of hyperbole — Donald Trump calling the news media “the enemy of the people,” for example, or Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claiming that Nancy Pelosi was guilty of “treason.” In 21st century American politics, reckless overstatement has become the coin of the realm.
Maybe that’s what was going on when, some time back, President Biden described the right-wing media titan Rupert Murdoch as “the most dangerous man in the world.” I think the president would agree that there are a lot of contenders for the title of Worst Living Human. You might prefer to start with Vladimir Putin, say; I might suggest a political figure from our own country.
But exaggeration isn’t the same as untruth; hyperbole works because it’s based in reality. So we may better appreciate Joe Biden’s comment about Rupert Murdoch if we note that the president also offered a strong opinion about Fox News, which is Murdoch’s prized creation. Biden called it “one of the most destructive forces in the United States.” That’s a judgment that many of us consider precisely accurate. So maybe Biden is right about Murdoch, too.
Consider, for example, Fox’s commentary that regularly stokes skepticism about vaccines – which during the pandemic may have encouraged people at risk to skip that demonstrably lifesaving option. Or what about Fox’s continued support for Donald Trump’s attacks on the American system of justice: What impact is that having on our democracy? And consider Fox’s wild and shameful anti-gay coverage: It has aired commentators referring to parents of LGBQ+ youth as “perverts,” and leaders of diversity efforts as “sex offenders”– that is, suggesting that anyone addressing the fact that some people aren’t heterosexual is a child molester.
People say they don’t like this sort of talk. A Pew poll released halfway through the Trump term found that a majority of Americans consider the nation’s more heated political rhetoric to be both inappropriate and dangerous. Yet hyperbole feeds upon itself: People indulge in intentional overstatement to try to stand out in a cacophonous marketplace of argument – which only makes even greater hyperbole a necessary evil, if you hope to be heard.
Rupert Murdoch played a unique role in the creation of this unwholesome ecosystem. He founded Fox News in 1996 with an intent to present news that would appeal to conservatives — an intentional bias that was novel on the national media stage. Before Fox, major news organizations tried assiduously, if sometimes unsuccessfully, to be “fair and balanced” — which became the slogan that right-leaning Fox used to market itself, with Orwellian cynicism.
There are plenty of journalists who believe Fox thus tore an irreparable hole in the fabric of American journalism, making fairness an unmarketable anachronism, and requiring journalistic storytelling, at least in electronic media, to be biased toward one end or another of the marketplace. That divvying up of the information community contributed mightily to the political polarization that has emerged as the dominant force of contemporary American politics.
Would our political debate have grown so ugly, and our divisions so stark, if Fox News hadn’t closed out the 20th century with a brilliant strategy to generate revenue by playing on our fears and resentments? Would America be thus weakened by our discord if Rupert Murdoch hadn’t brought his enterprise of estrangement to our shores? I don’t think so.
What makes this especially tragic is that America has long been, truly, the hope of mankind. We remain the leading nation of the only world we know. If our democracy is weakened, democracy everywhere winds up in retreat; if our national resolve falters because half of the nation doesn’t trust that our leaders are trying to do the right thing, then the world won’t be able to stand up squarely to injustice and oppression.
Mind you, Murdoch is no Putin: He isn’t ordering armies to kill civilians by attacking hospitals and schools, nor imprisoning his detractors until they die. So is it hyperbole to say that Rupert Murdoch is “the most dangerous man in the world,” as Joe Biden did? Sure. Did Biden’s words convey truth, though? Yes, they did.
We can only hope that the era of overstatement and the division it engenders might somehow go the way of the Pleistocene epoch, and yield to something better. Maybe then we can return to being the kind of nation that Will Rogers knew a century ago. This was a guy, after all, who said he never met a man he didn’t like. And he said this about Americans: “We can get hot and bothered quicker over nothing, and cool off faster, than any nation in the world.” Yeah – if only.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.