Former US intelligence director backs Turnbull and Rudd’s call for Murdoch media inquiry

The former US director of national intelligence James Clapper has backed a call by former Australian prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull for a royal commission into the Murdoch media, saying Australia needs to take preventative steps to avoid any slide into “truth decay”.

In an interview with Guardian Australia, Clapper, a retired lieutenant general in the US air force and the top intelligence official for seven years under former US president Barack Obama, said Fox News was a “megaphone for conspiracies and falsehoods” in America. He said the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January had demonstrated a clear connection between truth decay and the risk of civil disobedience and unrest.

“I have spoken a lot about a phenomenon that is not just in the United States but in other places as well of what the Rand Corporation has very aptly and cleverly called truth decay,” Clapper, who is a CNN analyst, said. “This is the whole business of disregarding facts and objective analysis and empirical data.

“Unfortunately, in this country we’ve fallen into two separate reality bubbles, one of which is fomented and amplified by Fox News.

“Rupert Murdoch and Fox is part of a larger issue we have in this country. To the extent that anyone feeds, amplifies, expands, embellishes truth decay – that is insidious and dangerous to democracy.”

Clapper said his view was an inquiry into the activities of the Murdoch-owned media led by credible people in Australia would be “a good idea for the sake of transparency and objectivity”.

The former top US intelligence official entered the fray after Turnbull was interviewed this week by the US cable news network CNN and, in his remarks, drew a link between the “assault on democracy” on 6 January in Washington and the hyper-polarisation “delivered by Fox News and by other players in the right-wing populist media echo system”.

“The question you have to ask yourself is, ‘Is America a more divided country than it was before thanks to Murdoch’s influence?’, and the answer must be ‘yes’,” Turnbull said on CNN.

The two former Australian prime ministers have spearheaded the royal commission campaign as a means of highlighting the need for greater media diversity in Australia.

Clapper said there had been an effort in the US after the riot in Washington to put together a bipartisan commission to study the causes and events surrounding the insurrection on 6 January, “but that [had] run into all kinds of difficulty”.

He said Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the United States House of Representatives, had wanted to establish the commission “a la 9/11 to do a detailed critique of what led to the insurrection and the events of that day – but that [had] run into partisan headwinds because Republicans don’t want to do that”.

“We should have, in my mind, and the minds of many other people, we should have a commission similar to what was done after 9/11 for what happened on January 6, and I would certainly think [a commission] would be a good thing for Australia to do.”

Clapper said, having watched the storming of the Capitol by enraged supporters of the former Republican president Donald Trump, he was struck by “the fanaticism of the people, the ferocity of their fanaticism – they believed the big lie [that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by the Democratic party] and that’s why what I’m calling truth decay is so dangerous to the fabric of a democracy”.

He said Fox News was “the principal media component of this general trend towards truth decay” in the US, and the trend was “quite threatening to the basis of our country and society”.

He said the main challenge of establishing any inquiry either in the US or Australia would be “putting together a group of people who would be viewed as objective, and not partisan, to do that”.

“But I think it’s absolutely crucial.”

Clapper – a regular visitor to Australia – said Australia would be well placed to bolster its institutions and examine any corrosive forces because the country still had time to counter truth decay.

“It appears to me from afar that the case of truth decay that Australia might have is not nearly as severe as what we have.”

Half a million people signed a petition supporting a royal commission into the Murdoch media and broader issues of media diversity.

Both Rudd and Turnbull have appeared before a Senate inquiry into media diversity examining the dominance of News Corp Australia and its impact on democracy – a probe triggered by that petition.

News Corp executives hit back strongly against the campaign when they fronted the media diversity inquiry in February.

Michael Miller, the executive chairman of News Corp Australasia, dismissed what he termed “sloganeering” about the outsized influence of the editors in the organisation, noting Australia currently had nine federal, state and territory governments – four of them Coalition-run and five Labor-run.