Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is cynically promoting “extraordinary ... dangerous lies” that are triggering violence as well as death among their unvaccinated disciples, said a disgusted Malcolm Turnbull, former prime minister of Australia.
“Rupert got himself vaccinated as quickly as he could; he’s not a fool. He knows the vaccines work,” Turnbull said Friday on Peacock’s “The Medhi Hasan Program.”
“But he’s making billions of dollars out of a news channel, a news platform, Fox News, which is promoting and enabling all of this vaccine hesitancy,” he warned.
Anybody who is “promoting these conspiracy theories about vaccines, and anyone who is discouraging people from getting vaccinated is contributing to death and disease. There’s no question about that,” Turnbull insisted.
And those who have “promoted that vaccine hesitancy,” who have contributed to the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” must be “held to account,” he demanded.
Unfortunately, Turnbull noted, the 90-year-old Australian-born media mogul “has the biggest megaphone in the English-speaking world; certainly by far the biggest megaphone in the United States.”
His media outlets all over the world have always “leaned to the right,” said Turnbull. “But it was still reality-based. But it has now become a vehicle for propaganda. There are no limits now.”
And it’s not only the COVID-19 toll that Murdoch and Fox News share responsibility for in the U.S.; their lies have also triggered political violence, Turnbull said.
“We are, in fact, drowning in lies,” he said. “And the threat to liberal democracy is real because you have a majority of Republican voters [in the U.S.] who believe that Joe Biden stole the election. This is just completely untrue.”
It’s “one thing for people to believe that Elvis is still alive, right? That’s crazy, but it’s perhaps not consequential. But what you have here is a lie, with devastating consequences.”
Fox News and the Murdoch family “certainly have contributed to blood being shed. Jan. 6 could not have occurred without the ‘big lie’ about the election having been promoted and pumped out ... by Fox News,” he said.
Check out the full interview in the clip up top.
