In just a few decades, Fox went from being ‘the fourth network’ airing The Simpsons and baseball to being a leading voice in U.S. politics

Every four years, Americans oscillate between sports and coverage of the presidential election, and outside of trash talk between competitors, many overlook the commonalities between the two.

The media corporations responsible for covering both sports and politics are the same, and as we experience increasing polarization, it’s important to highlight the direct link between the partisan media and sports media rights—which has existed for 30 years, since for the broadcast rights. That winning bid helped legitimize the nascent broadcast network and establish the partisan cable news environment we are familiar with today.

Fox owner Rupert Murdoch is now known for overseeing one of the largest media empires in the world, but through the early 1980s he was known as a publisher of newspapers, specifically tabloids. He inherited a news publication after his father’s death in 1952, .

Jared Bahir Browsh is the Critical Sports Studies program director in the Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

He expanded his news empire to New Zealand and the United Kingdom through the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although he became known for his ownership of tabloids, his corporation also oversaw more traditional broadsheet newspapers,

By the 1980s, Murdoch had set his eyes on electronic media, particularly television. He struggled to break into the British broadcast market, so he focused his energy on pay TV, buying a controlling stake in . After being excluded from the consortium overseeing British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), he launched his own satellite-based service, circumventing British ownership laws by using the Astra satellite operating in Luxembourg.

Sky launched in 1989, 13 months before BSB’s launch in March 1990.  The two competed for the rights to the FA Premier League, with Sky’s bid, nearly double that of any competitor, seen as overpaying. However, Murdoch saw sports as a , helping to attract viewers who might otherwise balk at spending money for scripted shows and news.

During this time, Murdoch and News Corporation set their sights on the United States, purchasing after Rich became a fugitive for tax evasion and selling oil to Iran during the hostage crisis. He bought the stake from oil magnate and investor Marvin Davis, and 20th Century Fox was considering buying Metromedia, which owned broadcast stations. Davis opposed the purchase while Murdoch and executive Barry Diller pushed to expand the media reach of the troubled studio. Davis sold his stake in 20th Century Fox in 1985, incorporating Davis Petroleum in Denver the next year. Murdoch gained American citizenship, since legally he could not own a broadcast network as a foreign citizen, and in fall of 1986 the Fox Broadcasting Company launched with

The six original stations purchased from Metromedia were in major markets including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Fox Broadcasting Company, or FBC, was renamed , and it officially launched on April 5, 1987.

The fourth network

Fox was considered the fourth network, if people had access to its programming at all. Network programmers purposely scheduled just below the minimum number of hours required for network status to avoid federal regulatory restrictions, including .

As it built its affiliate base, Fox took lessons from רC to boost its visibility, building a young audience through its programming, prime-time teenage and young adult soaps like and reality television, . However, following the precedent of BSkyB leveraging sports to accelerate growth, Fox made a bid for after רC hesitated in renewing its contract with the NFL. Fox met the NFL’s asking price, but רC came back and matched, due to רC’s more extensive reach. The NFL renewed with רC.

In November 1995, Fox obtained a partial contract for Major League Baseball. (Photo: Ryosuke Yagi/)

At the end of the 1993 season, however, both the NFC and AFC contracts were up for renegotiation, and Fox ultimately outbid . As a result, Fox executives made a major push to gain affiliates with stronger broadcast signals in major markets, since the network was still using lower-quality UHF frequencies in many markets. This led to a major realignment of affiliations, with stations in markets like Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Detroit and Cleveland switching from CBS to Fox.

In November 1995, Fox obtained a partial contract for Major League Baseball, airing 16 Saturday games as well as the By the end of the decade, Fox would also agree to air the Cotton Bowl and NASCAR.

Taking risks

Sports and risk-taking in its entertainment programming boosted Fox’s profile, and the network entered the cable market with as an interactive network embracing the then-emerging Internet. FX rebranded in 1997 as the network dedicated to Fox’s largest demographic, men 18-49, while also serving as a platform for its expanding sport portfolio and a place to rerun popular Fox series.

Throughout Fox’s early years, several other segments of the media were also quickly expanding. CNN had launched as the first 24-hour news network in 1980, but coverage of the helped Fox grow into a major news source on par with other national outlets. In 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was officially repealed, leading to an explosion of conservative radio personalities like . Lastly, the continued deregulation of the media—which was further formalized through the —consolidated the radio market, allowing for more nationally syndicated shows like Limbaugh’s and motivating the major media corporations to further expand, including into cable.

In 1994, NBC spun the news network America’s Talking off from CNBC; it was created by former Republican strategist Roger Ailes, who was . Ailes left America’s Talking under controversy, after allegedly making antisemitic comments to NBC executive David Zaslav, who is now the CEO and president of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Fox News launched Oct. 7, 1996, and has become a significant voice in U.S. politics. (Photo: Steve Bott/)

Ailes was hired by News Corp as founding CEO of Fox News, which launched on Oct. 7, 1996. Three months earlier, NBC had replaced a collaboration between NBC and technology company Microsoft. MSNBC sought its approach through programming with several conservative commentators, including Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson. MSNBC would not find its identity until after Microsoft divested, becoming the left-leaning alternative to Fox News and abandoning the balance it previously tried to find along the political spectrum.

Unsurprisingly, Murdoch and News Corporation took a more heavy-handed approach, paying cable companies to carry the network. Three days after Fox News launched, Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting, which owned CNN. Because of an antitrust consent decree (in which the government sues a company and the defendant agrees to stop alleged illegal conduct), Time Warner Cable was forced to carry a second news station and selected MSNBC, with News Corp claiming that this broke an agreement to carry Fox News.

Citing the fact that its U.S. headquarters were in New York, and leveraging connections, News Corp convinced Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration to pressure . Although Time Warner ultimately won the initial battle, Fox News won the war when Time Warner began carrying Fox News. The ordeal displayed Murdoch’s willingness to leverage his close relationships with the Republican Party to support his media empire.

This relationship is at the core of the seemingly real-life , as Murdoch attempts to rewrite his trust to ensure his more conservative son Lochlan takes over Fox Corporation upon his death and maintains the network’s current place on the political spectrum. Even as the media giant sold off some of its assets in the sale of , Murdoch retained Fox’s national sports and news entities—including Fox News, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, along with its cable and broadcast networks—as he continues to leverage sports as a battering ram to protect his international media empire.

Jared Bahir Browsh is an assistant teaching professor of critical sports studies in the Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies.

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Low levels of inorganic arsenic, thought to be safe, might be harming American Indian communities in the western United States, according to new Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder research.

Long-term exposure to low levels of inorganic arsenic, or the "poison of kings," through drinking water is linked with deteriorating motor skills and neurological processing speed of American Indian elders, according to new research by Clint Carroll, an assistant professor in ethnic studies at the University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ Boulder, and a nationwide team of scientists.

This research builds on an existing body of findings, and is the first of its kind looking at both the impact of arsenic on this specific underserved and under-represented segment of the population and the effects on neuropsychological health, which, Carroll asserts, have large-scale cultural implications.

Clint Carroll, an assistant professor in the ethnic studies department, studies indigenous governance and environmental perspectives. Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Å·ÃÀ¿Ú±¬ÊÓƵ.

"When you think about who are the sources of traditional knowledge or of ancestral knowledge, elders are the subset of the population who contain a lot of this generational knowledge and language," Carroll, who is also a citizen of the Cherokee nation, said. "And so, that knowledge is often conveyed through the language, and so when you’ve got impacts on neuropsychological health from this long-term, low-level exposure to arsenic, it raises concerns, at least in my mind, about the transmission of that knowledge to future generations."

"What is implicated is the cultural element of things — cultural transmission, knowledge transmission."

Arsenic is a naturally occurring mineral that can in food, water, soil and air in either an organic or inorganic form. Inorganic arsenic, when compared to its organic counterpart, is much more toxic and was once a , as it gives off no smell or taste and can exist in the body with little to no side effect for years.

Inorganic arsenic is created in a variety of ways, through volcanic eruptions, the erosion of arsenic-containing rocks, runoff from mining (including gold mining), and the use of arsenic-containing pesticides — all of which disproportionally of the western United States.

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency limits the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water from the tap, the mineral can still leach into ground water from naturally occurring and man-made sources, significantly affecting those (such as rural American Indian communities in the western United States) who rely on well water for their drinking water.

To study the effect of this exposure, the authors analyzed data collected via the Strong Heart Study and the Strong Heart Stroke Study. For more than 20 years, these two studies gathered data on thousands of American Indians in three regions: the American Southwest (or, an area near Phoenix), the Central Plains (or, the southwestern area of Oklahoma), and the Northern Plains (or, western and central North and South Dakota).

The Strong Heart Study data, which served as the baseline information, was collected in three different chunks (1989-91, 1993-94 and 1998-99) and included objective measurements regarding participants' health. Of these metrics, which included everything from familial history to BMI measurements, inorganic arsenic levels in the body were measured from the urine samples.

What is implicated is the cultural element of things — cultural transmission, knowledge transmission."​

This information was then statistically combined with additional data collected between 2009 and 2013 (the Strong Heart Stroke Study), examining the surviving Strong Heart Study participants' vascular and structural brain disease risk factors. These data included, among other tests, a neuropsychological test that measured cognitive functioning, mental processing speed, verbal fluency and memory and fine motor skills (such as the tapping of a finger).

Altogether, the new study found one statistically significant conclusion: low level inorganic arsenic exposure in American Indian populations, over long periods of time, correlates with decreasing fine motor functioning and processing speed in elders.

These results, while dramatic, may not be quite the cause of alarm that they appear. Rather than immediate action, Carroll hopes they instead spark a conversation.

"The message is not to not drink the water or to go and buy bottled water," Carroll said. Instead, he hopes to raise awareness of risks "that are disproportionately shouldered by communities in rural areas — especially in the West — and, so, looking into ways that water can be made safer for these communities."

Montezuma Well, seen in the title image (which is from Ken Lund/), is one such naturally occurring pool located near Rimrock, Ariz., that contains high levels of arsenic that can leach into ground water. 

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