Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone cited a report from a fringe conspiracy theory website, InfoWars, to complain that Google was "changing its algorithm to bury stories like the 'Clinton body count' story," which is “a story that talks about a list of people tied to the Clintons who have died under mysterious circumstances.”...
CHERYL CASONE: ... Well Google is being accused of hiding negative stories about Hillary [Clinton] and her campaign by changing its algorithm to bury stories like the "Clinton body count" story. That's according to website InfoWars. If a Google user types in "Clinton body," they get car repair shop results instead of a story that talks about a list of people tied to the Clintons who have died under mysterious circumstances over the last three decades. Now, the latest story was the death of DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered last month in an apparent robbery....
Fox is being tugged in many different directions now. As Michael Wolff has noted, Papa Rupert Murdoch doesn't want to fix what he thinks isn't broken, while his sons James and Lachlan, who were given nominal control of Fox a while back, want Fox to moderate and modernize (James wants Fox to be more like CNN, while Lachlan wants it to remain conservative, though less rabid). The sons think Fox would make more money, especially interntionally, if it were more digitally sophisticated and actually broke some news once in a while. But Fox as it exists now earns profits of more than $1 billion a year. So should it continue to serve its core audience the way it always has? Now, in the Trump era, that audience is gravitating toward full-on InfoWars conspiratorialism and Breitbart alt-right racism -- a combination of which might be the tone of a possible rival to Fox started by Trump and Breitbart's Steve Bannon after the election.
What to do, what to do? Well, Rupert made himself "acting CEO" of Fox after Ailes's departure, as Wolff reminds us, and gave an Ailes loyalist, Bill Shine, the job of running Fox day to day. The content is as bad as ever -- or worse. And I suspect that will be true until Rupert is no longer among us.
