Biden Called Fox News 'Destructive' and Rupert Murdoch 'the Most Dangerous Man in the World,' Book Claims
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Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty President Joe Biden
A new book claims that President Joe Biden has called Fox News "one of the most destructive forces in the United States" and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, "the most dangerous man in the world."
That detail comes from New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns in their forthcoming book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America's Future, which will be published next month.
The Democratic president has occasionally swiped at Fox News — which takes pains to note that its conservative opinion hosts are separate from its news division — and Biden has repeatedly butted heads with the network's White House correspondent Peter Doocy, whom he was caught on mic calling a "stupid son of a b----" in January. He later apologized.
According to Martin and Burns' book, Biden has been critical behind closed doors, too. (The White House did not comment.)
A 2020 Pew poll found that 65% of Republicans said they trust Fox News for political coverage, with six in 10 Republicans saying they got their political and election news from the network.
While Fox News often highlights its journalism separate from its talking heads, even some of the networks own former staffers have publicly complained about its political coverage, particularly for how its opinion personalities have spoken about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.
In December, Chris Wallace announced that he was opting not to return as host of Fox News Sunday, ending his run with the network after 18 years for a new deal with rival network CNN.
Speaking with The New York Times in an interview last month about his decision, Wallace said he felt things began to change at Fox after Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election and Trump attacked the results as fake. Trump's supporters went on to riot at the Capitol last year.
"I'm fine with opinion: conservative opinion, liberal opinion," Wallace told the Times. "But when people start to question the truth — Who won the 2020 election? Was Jan. 6 an insurrection? — I found that unsustainable."
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He continued: "Before, I found it was an environment in which I could do my job and feel good about my involvement at Fox. And since November of 2020, that just became unsustainable, increasingly unsustainable as time went on."
Wallace also confirmed reports that he had complained to the network's management about Tucker Carlson's documentary Patriot Purge, which falsely claimed that the Jan. 6 attack was a "false flag" operation meant to demean conservatives.
Wallace is now hosting a new show, Who's Talking to Chris Wallace?, on CNN's new streaming service, CNN+.
