Watching cable after the end of the day’s impeachment proceedings, I flipped through the cable channels to see what was being said. Between CNN and MSNBC, it was a competition for who could gush more about horror, the former with Jake Tapper pacifying old man Wolf and the latter with Joy Reid silently bobbing her head in the most insightful way she could.
So I turned to Fox News and was shocked to learn that nobody told them there was an impeachment going on. At least, no one mentioned it, as they were doing a critical piece on how liberals were engaged in a conspiracy to spread foot fungus. That wasn’t really what they were doing, but it was something of similar ilk, and there was no mention, none, of the impeachment trial, as if it wasn’t happening. It was classic Fox, existing in a separate reality.
Nick Kristof asks why Fox shouldn’t be held accountable for the insurrection too. Why can’t Fox be impeached?
As America debates whether to hold former President Donald Trump accountable for inciting insurrection, what about his co-conspirator Fox News?
Fox helped sell Trump’s lie about a stolen election, propelling true believers like Ashli Babbitt — a fan of Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson — to storm the Capitol. Babbitt died in the attack, while this week Fox Corporation merrily reported a 17 percent jump in quarterly earnings.
Of course he knows that a media outlet can’t be impeached, but his point is that the “fair and balanced” news was just as responsible for what happened as Trump, so why should it be allowed to bask in riches for spewing lies.
We can’t impeach Fox or put Carlson or Sean Hannity on trial in the Senate, but there are steps we can take — imperfect, inadequate ones, resting on slippery slopes — to create accountability not only for Trump but also for fellow travelers at Fox, OANN, Newsmax and so on.
Before you get to the bottom line of whose news is more truthy, understand that a columnist in the New York Times, the paper of record, the Grey Lady, just called for steps “we” can take to silence other media outlets. And the New York Times published it.
That can mean pressure on advertisers to avoid underwriting extremists (of any political bent), but the Fox News business model depends not so much on advertising as on cable subscription fees. So a second step is to call on cable companies to drop Fox News from basic cable TV packages.
Here’s what Kristof can’t do. He can’t prevent people who choose to watch Fox from doing so. The alternative is to go down the “cancel culture” path of secondary pressure against the advertisers, but more importantly, cable companies, to choke off Fox news revenues. What makes this “cancel culture” is that Kristof isn’t saying he will not watch Fox, which is entirely his right although it’s unlikely he spent a great deal of time watching Hannity before.
He’s not even calling upon others to stop watching this blight on truth and contributor to conspiracy, mostly because his followers aren’t likely big Fox fans either. No, he’s calling on his followers to pressure third parties, advertisers and cable companies, to do their dirty work of depriving a competing news outlet of revenue so it will starve.
Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, says that Fox News relies on unusually generous cable fees — more than twice what CNN receives and five times what MSNBC commands. So Media Matters started a campaign, at unfoxmycablebox.com, for people to ask cable carriers to drop Fox News from their packages.
“Given all the damage that Fox News has caused and the threat that it remains, they absolutely should unbundle Fox News,” Carusone told me. “It’s not a news channel. It’s a propaganda operation mixed with political smut. If people want that, they should be forced to pay for it the way that they pay for Cinemax.”
Fox, like CNN and MSNBC and a host of other cable channels, comes as part of a bundle. It’s not paid five times what MSNBC is paid because cable companies are particularly generous toward it, or MSNBC prefers to make less rather than more money for the sake of the downtrodden. It demands the fees it can command, as do they all. If it’s paid more, there’s a reason.
But the point is that when cable news channels are bundled together, we pay for all or none, and if you hate lie-mongering, conspiracy-spewing, violence-spreading Fox, then why must you pay for it in your bundle of news you agree with?
Frankly, my argument leaves even me a bit queasy. I deeply believe in the “marketplace of ideas,” and I do think that there is a danger of a liberal monoculture in some universities, nonprofits and news organizations. I’ve railed against “liberal intolerance,” and I don’t think the “cancel culture” that conservatives decry is entirely a mirage.
Good as it may be that he’s not proud of himself for being a censor, he just can’t help it because Fox, et al., is just too false, too lying, too awful and too dangerous to be allowed to walk away. And Kristof deflects the anticipatory “whataboutism.”
Conservatives are likewise right that The New York Times, CNN and other mainstream news organizations make mistakes all the time, and surely right-wingers are unhappy that their cable fees subsidize Rachel Maddow.
But there’s no symmetry. Fox News and Fox Business didn’t make an honest mistake about election outcomes but deliberately spun nonsense into ratings gold.
He’s right, there’s no symmetry, but he’s being disingenuous by saying the NYT, et al., “make mistakes.” They’ve chosen a side and pound on its as hard as they can. Granted, they try harder to be factual, but not hard enough to answer the question Kristof neglects to ask: Why do so many turn to Fox, OANN and Newsmax for news rather than trust the New York Times? The way to deprive media of viewers isn’t to call on their tribe to engage in secondary pressure, but to do better and be the source of news that everyone can trust. Instead, the left press wants to silence the right press because as bad as the left may be, the right is worse.
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