NETWORK OF LIES: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy, by Brian Stelter
It’s easy to be blasé about a new exposé of Fox News. There have been many, going back at least as far as Al Franken’s best-selling 2003 book “Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” Fox News, at this point, resembles a car whose windshield is thickly encrusted with traffic citations. Yet this car (surely a Hummer) manages to barrel out anew each day, plowing over six more mailboxes, five more crossing guards, four elderly scientists, three communal enterprises, two trans kids and a solar panel.
Two new Fox books are out. Michael Wolff’s “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty,” which was published earlier this fall, has already been reviewed in this newspaper. Now comes Brian Stelter’s “Network of Lies: The Epic Saga of Fox News, Donald Trump, and the Battle for American Democracy.”
The authors and their books make a study in contrasts. Wolff strides onto the page like the Devil’s ambassador, a man who has cut his own share of bargains, one who has an intimate understanding of what Sun Tzu called “the strategic disposition of power.” He appears to have the soul of a pirate. His book is laced with innuendo. It reads at times like a brash, wised-up monologue, something Eric Bogosian might deliver.
Stelter, a young fogy who once worked at The New York Times, has a wonkier disposition. He uses words like “shenanigans.” He wrote his book, he says, to help readers feel “empowered” to push back. He’s like a Canadian Mountie who has stumbled upon a gerbil-stomping ring. For Stelter, journalism might be a humble calling, but it is a patriotic and noble one. It burns him to see its ideals perverted.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
