Succession on HBO
Warning: Spoilers
Look no further than the title of Sunday night’s new episode of HBO show Succession to see how the show, about a family media empire inspired by the Murdochs, would take on Fox News.
“America Decides,” a nod to Fox slogan “We Report, You Decide,” tackles a fictional election between and Democrat Daniel Jimenez and Republican Jeryd Mencken, whose authoritarian instincts and penchant for conspiracy theories inspires terror in the show’s less cynical characters. The election is shown through the cameras and malfunctioning touch-screens of ATN, a conservative news network that looks a lot like Fox.
The theme of the episode, of course, is that America does not decide. The higher powers at ATN, led by Roman Roy, the co-CEO of parent company Waystar Royco, push the network to call the race for Mencken. Beyond their partisan sympathies, the right-wing demagogue promised to impose regulatory hurdles that would tank an acquisition of Waystar that Roman secretly wants to sabotage.
In furtherance of that narrow goal, Roman successfully pushes ATN to follow fringe right-wing networks in calling Wisconsin for Mencken, despite a fire at a voting center that destroyed 100,000 ballots that would have likely secured the state for Jimenez.
Roman then gives free rein to ATN’s firebrand opinion host Mark Ravenhead, whose on-air conspiracy-mongering was no doubt inspired by ex-Fox News star Tucker Carlson, to raise questions about the destroyed ballots.
“You just stay quiet, and we’ll guess what we think was on those ballots! We’ll decide, yeah? They know best, right?” Ravenhead bellows. “SHUT UP, INNUMERATE RESIDUUM!”
But the Michigan call created an awkward problem for ATN: when it came time to award Arizona to Mencken, ATN would be the only serious news network to call the entire race for the Republican, even though Jimenez, after a court fight, would likely be elected the next president.
The saga funhouse-mirrored the nightmare that Fox faced in 2020 after calling Arizona for Joe Biden: following that decision, Fox had to hold off on calling other states, lest they call the entire race for Biden ahead of every other outlet.
All of those decisions at Fox News were carried out by the network’s “decision desk”, which is headed up by a bespectacled nerd named Arnon Mishkin. He, along with a few other nerds, was responsible for making the Arizona call and defending it on air. While Mishkin remained at Fox after the Arizona debacle, several of his decision desk colleagues were dumped by Fox News to sate viewer anger.
That anger at Fox News was misplaced. The network calling Arizona for Biden — a state all networks would eventually call for Biden — did not do anything to change who won the 2020 election. On Succession, a similar delusion plays out, wherein the characters seem to believe that ATN can help decide who ends up president after the polls close. “We give it to Mencken,” Roman proposes at one point. Thankfully, even on the show that delusion is occasionally punctured by the reminder that courts, not cable news networks, will ultimately decide the victor.
But Succession’s haunting election episode doesn’t just take inspiration from the last election. The plot also harkens back to Fox’s handling of 2000, when the network’s decision desk, led by George W. Bush’s cousin, was the first to call Florida for the Texas Republican. Moments later, a slew of other major networks followed Fox. The call was wrong, and the networks retracted it within hours.
These days, the decision desk is supposed to be insulated from the influence of the Republican Party, and indeed, in 2020 the network called the election for Biden despite Trump’s claims it was rigged.
On Succession, the political influence is overwhelming. ATN’s number cruncher is a nerd named Darwin, played by Adam Godley, whose insistence that the network faithfully follow the numbers is steamrolled by Roman’s commands that the race be called for Mencken.
The power of the viewer, which infamously led Fox News to air lies about the 2020 election that landed it in two billion-dollar defamation lawsuits, is felt at ATN, too.
When Shiv Roy argues the network should be covering voter intimidation at the polls, ATN chief Tom Wambsgans says the network must remain true to its “unique perspective” and “respect our viewership.”
Shiv shot back: “By not telling them anything that they don’t want to hear?”
The exchange is eerily prescient in capturing the internal debate that went on at Fox News in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which only spilled out into public view months after the Succession episode was filmed last December.
Throughout the texts made public as part of discovery in Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, which the network settled for $787 million, Fox leadership and its top stars spoke regularly about the need to “respect” the audience. In practice, that meant entertaining, and even promoting, Trump’s false claims about the election, even when Fox knew those claims to be false.
At ATN, it meant ignoring reports of voter intimidation at polling locations. While some of the details of Succession’s election episode are unrealistic parody (Lachlan Murdoch did not march around Fox News HQ on election night commanding the network to call the race for Trump), others are a disturbing reminder of how the most powerful cable news network in the country does business.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
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