Given the crap his newspapers churn out in the UK (and Australia) as well, I think he just has a thing against the whole human race...
Or maybe there is someone giving him money to destabilize the english speaking world....
It doesn't work the way he wants it to. In fact, much of the world doesn't. So...
If that was the case then Murdoch could have hired any of a thousand candy men media execs to run Fox News Channel. Bringing in someone like Roger Ailes had very little to do about serving up what the public only wants to see.
It's more about making money than politics. He identified a segment he could sell more ads to if he told them what they wanted to hear. So he bought the Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and set up Fox News and pushed them more to the right than other media.
Murdoch makes money by spotting gaps in the existing media market for infotainment and filling them with a product that hasn't been there previously.
I don't really care how he makes money. I don't find him to be any particular genius at it, merely effectively ruthless and focused in regards to acquisitions. He's had a number of misses along with his hits when it comes to setting off into new areas of media and communications.
I'm not particularly familiar with US cable news, obviously, so I don't know how Fox developed, but certainly after Murdoch acquired the ailing Sun newspaper in 1969, it was a not-particularly-successful Labour-supporting paper whose transformation into what eventually it became only really began ten years later in 1979, when it supported the Conservatives in what became Margaret Thatcher's first election victory. The transformation didn't really take hold, though, until 1981, when Murdoch appointed Kelvin MacKenzie as editor, and he turned it into the fearsome commercial and political force that it remained for many years, as the voice of the populist Thatcherite xenophobic right.
