I don't think people who watch Fox news are inherently bad people, just terribly misinformed and obviously comfortable watching things that don't 'agree' with their perceptions of the outside world.
Murdoch knew what he was doing when he created News Corp/Fox/Sky. He realized that there was a market for people who didn't want to be exposed to news that challenged their worldview. In all fairness, sometimes the mainstream media really do go a bit far in exaggerating certain things or editorializing others, but Murdoch saw Rush Limbaugh's meteoric rise on AM radio and figured there had to be a market for this on cable news, and sure he enough, there was.
Before the internet really became a thing, I think Fox was basically the inverse of CNN. It could credibly argue that it was just a news organization with a right wing tilt, as a way to balance the reporting in the other direction. But as more and more of the news went to blogs and social media channels, extreme outlets started pulling away some of their viewers and they had to bring them back in by being more aggressively right wing. They're borderline alt-right now, which they weren't even 10 years ago.