Former Fox executive rips network over ‘false’ Trump claims

A former top executive at Fox Broadcasting is criticizing Fox News for what he says is a blind loyalty to former President Trump and a “dangerous” effort to back his unfounded claims regarding voter fraud and the 2020 election. 

“In recent years things have gone badly off the tracks at Fox News,” Preston Padden, a former executive who left the company more than 20 years ago, in 1997, wrote in an op-ed published Monday in the Daily Beast. “Fox News is no longer a truthful center-right news network.” 

Padden, who served as the president of network distribution before leaving, said Fox News has contributed to “divisions in our society by stoking racial animus and fueling the totally false impression that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are engaged in nightly, life-threatening riots across the country.” 

He blamed Fox News for causing “unnecessary deaths” during the coronavirus pandemic as a result of its broadcasting segments critical of lockdown measures and mask-wearing.  

Padden, now a lobbyist for Disney, wrote that the network has also backed what he called “Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ that the election was stolen from him by providing a continuous platform for wild and false claims about the election — claims refuted by more than 60 judges, Republican State election officials, recounts in numerous States and Trump’s own Attorney General.” 

“Fox News has caused many millions of Americans — most of them Republicans (as my wife and I were for 50 years) — to believe things that simply are not true,” Padden wrote. 

The former executive said in recent months he has tried “with increasing bluntness,” to get Chairman Rupert Murdoch to understand “the real damage that Fox News is doing to America.” 

“I failed, and it was arrogant and naïve to ever have thought that I could succeed,” he said. “I am at a loss to understand why he will not change course. I can only guess that the destructive editorial policy of Fox News is driven by a deep-seated vein of anti-establishment/contrarian thinking in Rupert that, at age 90, is not going to change.”