I Can't Stand Fox News, But Censoring It Might Be The Dumbest Idea Ever
How will the latest campaign against "misinformation" backfire for the
country? Let's count the ways
Matt Taibbi
Feb 23
Two and a half years ago, when Alex Jones of Infowars was kicked off a
series of tech platforms in a clearly coordinated decision, I knew this was
not going to be an isolated thing.
Given that people like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy were saying the
ouster of Jones was just a "good first step," it seemed obvious the tactic
was not going to be confined to a few actors. But corporate media critics
insisted the precedent would not be applied more broadly.
"I don't think we are going to be seeing big tech take action against Fox
News. any time soon," commented CNN's Oliver Darcy.
Darcy was wrong. Just a few years later, calls to ban Fox are not only
common, they're intensifying, with media voices from Brian Stelter on CNN to
MSNBC analyst Anand Giridharadas to former Media Matters critic Eric
Boehlert to Washington Post columnists Max Boot and Margaret Sullivan all on
board.
The movement crested this week with a letter from California House Democrats
Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, written to the CEOs of cable providers like
Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, and Dish. They demanded to know if those
providers are "planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN.
beyond any contract renewal date" and "if so, why?"
The news comes in advance of Wednesday's House Energy and Commerce Committee
hearing on "traditional media's role in promoting disinformation and
extremism."
This sequence of events is ominous because a similar matched set of hearings
and interrogations back in 2017 - when Senators like Mazie Hirono at a
Judiciary Committee hearing demanded that platforms like Google and Facebook
come up with a "mission statement" to prevent the "foment of discord" -
accelerated the "content moderation" movement that now sees those same
platforms regularly act as de facto political censors.
Sequences like this - government "requests" of speech reduction, made to
companies subject to federal regulation - make the content moderation
decisions of private firms a serious First Amendment issue. Censorship
advocates may think this is purely a private affair, in which the only
speech rights that matter are those of companies like Twitter and Google,
but any honest person should be able to see this for what it is.
In the last go-around, Virginia Senator Mark Warner prepared a lengthy white
paper called "Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and
Technology Firms," that among other things considered making the tech giants
more susceptible to tort claims, as well as beefing up FTC authority over
the firms. This was the sword raised over the head of Silicon Valley as it
considered whether or not it had a duty to implement those Senatorial
demands for plans to prevent the "foment of discord."
The line to potential government action isn't quite as direct this time, but
it's notable that Blair Levin, the former chief of staff of the F.C.C. under
Bill Clinton, said that this week's hearings could serve as a first step to
what the New York Times called "meaningful action."
"You have to establish a factual record," Levin said of this week's
hearings, "and then try to figure out: What are the appropriate roles for
the government in changing that dynamic?"
Press freedoms have been in steep decline for a while. Barack Obama's record
targeting of whistleblower sources (and in some cases, journalists
themselves) using the Espionage Act was a first serious sign, followed by
Donald Trump's prosecution of Julian Assange. We progressed to a
particularly dangerous new stage in recent years, with oligopolistic tech
companies, urged on by politicians, engaging in anticompetitive agreements
to suppress political voices on both the left and the right.
The so-called media reporters at major organizations like CNN and the New
York Times have mostly either been silent or have played cheerleading roles
during the most eyebrow-raising recent developments: the decision by
Facebook and Twitter to block access to a pre-election New York Post story
about Hunter Biden, the stunning exercise in monopoly influence by Amazon
and Apple in swallowing up the "free speech" platform Parler, the banning of
Socialist Worker Party accounts in England and the U.S., and the shutdown of
livestream capability by alternative media outlets (and the removal of
celebrated footage shot from the Capitol riot by people like Status Coup
videographer Jon Farina), a story that amazingly only got major play at. Fox
News.
All of these stories share the same theme: small, unelected groups of
private executives making sweeping decisions about speech, cheered on by
Democratic Party politicians. If it proceeds to its logical conclusion, it
poses a much more serious problem for society than even Fox News at its
worst.
The campaign against Fox is being framed as part of an effort to combat what
Eshoo and McNerney characterize as "misinformation, disinformation,
conspiracy theories, and lies." There are so many problems with this point
of view, it's hard to know where to start.
For one thing, complainants rarely make an effort to distinguish between
opinions they find obnoxious, and actual lies or errors. This blurring of
lines between "misinformation" or "disinformation," and reporting that
simply has political effects deemed deleterious by Democrats and their pals
in media, has been going on since 2016, when for instance the
leaked-but-true Podesta and DNC emails were regularly described as elements
of a "misinformation campaign."
It was the same with the Hunter Biden story last autumn, where there was no
evidence that any of the material was false, but newspapers regularly
described it as reading "suspiciously like disinformation" or a
"misinformation test for social media."
Take a look, for instance, at the timeline of "Fox News misinformation in
2020," put out by Media Matters, a media-criticism agency founded by
notorious once-Republican, now-Democratic Party attack dog David Brock. Here
are some things listed as "misinformation," a word that in almost every
dictionary carries a connotation of "false" or "incorrect" communication.
These are verbatim entries from December, 2020:
- A Fox "straight news" program mentioned Benghazi more than the over 3,100
people who died from the pandemic the day before. [Outnumbered Overtime,
12/10/20]
- Laura Ingraham encourages viewers to gather for the holidays. [The
Ingraham Angle, 12/16/20]
- Fox & Friends goes full War on Christmas, after over 2,600 Americans died
from the pandemic the day before. [Fox & Friends, 12/9/20]
- Dana Perino: Biden should show "a little bit of grace and gratitude" to
Trump for COVID-19 vaccines. [The Daily Briefing, 12/8/20]
These are political, not factual complaints, as is Sullivan's beef that
Tucker Carlson "tries to sow doubt about the prevalence of white supremacy,"
or that Sean Hannity likes to "blast Biden as 'cognitively struggling.'" As
to that last point, news features wondering about Donald Trump's mental
fitness were myriad for four years (hell, even I wrote one), as were "Trump
with tiny wang" cartoons, and "Trump touchingly gay with Putin" jokes.
Confusing that which you find politically offensive with actually erroneous
or deceptive reporting has become so common, even media professionals don't
seem to care about the difference anymore.
Fox absolutely does drift into outright deceptions, though it hardly has a
monopoly on this behavior (more on that in a moment). But being the gigantic
money-obsessed enterprise that it is, it still tends to steer clear of the
worst kinds of offenses in this business, i.e. actionable lies.
It was amazing to see the Washington Post media critic Sullivan argue in
favor of extraordinary measures to remove or boycott Fox by citing the fact
that the network was considering a promotion for Maria Bartiromo, who was
"among those. recently forced under threat of a lawsuit to air a video that
debunked repeated false claims on her show that corrupt voting software had
given millions of Trump votes to Biden."
Sullivan glossed over this episode, which was actually evidence against the
need to take these channels down. Before the New Year, a cease-and-desist
letter from Dominion Voting Systems went out to Fox, the Epoch Times, OAN,
Newsmax, and others, demanding an end to evidence-free claims about their
company. It worked, as even OAN retreated, and Newsmax, tail between its
legs, broadcast a two-minute statement to "clarify" that it had no evidence
for claims of election fraud made against the companies Dominion and
Smartmantic.
This is exactly how the existing system is supposed to work, in a legal
framework that still makes the cost of broadcasting provable deceptions
prohibitive to deep-pocketed companies like Fox. Libel and defamation laws
are imperfect, but effective. If the massive Fox audience were driven
further underground, that tool would no longer be worth much.
However, those gunning for the removal of Fox, Newsmax, and other outlets
are clearly not interested in getting there by way of the law. They want to
take advantage of the hyper-concentration of power among media distributors
- the tech giants like Apple and Amazon that can zap a massively successful
app like Parler overnight, and the confederation of cable carriers like
Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon that hold dominion over broadcast networks.
We have to ask politicians like Eshoo and critics like Sullivan and Boot:
where exactly do they want massive conservative audiences to go, if Fox is
removed from the air? By any rational standard, having them watch Fox is way
down the list of worst-case scenarios.
Take the example of Carlson and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Carlson asked
for proof of election theft last year, and "she never sent us any evidence,
despite a lot of polite requests." Trump voters mostly don't read the
Washington Post or watch CNN, but they do watch Carlson, which made that
segment significant, just as the following sizzle-reel of Fox personalities
trying to convince viewers the election story was over was significant.
Sullivan went so far as to post this in her piece decrying Fox - would she
prefer that a station with even less appetite for challenging its viewers
rose in its place?
The unspoken subtext to all of these efforts is a hope that those enormous
conservative audiences eventually won't be able to go anywhere at all. The
Internet, it is hoped, will gradually be cleansed of their "misinformation"
agents, and red-staters will either watch CNN or suck eggs. The information
distribution business is now sufficiently concentrated that it's possible to
imagine a fully politically homogenous news landscape. That's the clear
endgame, and the reason letting Fox go to the guillotine is a serious
mistake.
It's no accident that this campaign to go after Fox comes at the end of a
very long and painful process of kneecapping the alternative press in
America, one that benefited the biggest corporate actors every step of the
way.
The introduction of the Internet destroyed the commercial formula of local
newspapers, among other things by undercutting the revenue base long
provided by classified ads. Marshall McLuhan wrote all the way back in 1964
that "classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the
press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily
information be found, the press will fold."
He was right. According to PEN, in the fifteen years between 2004 and 2019,
1,800 newspapers closed, and the news media, most of it local, lost $35
billion in revenue, and roughly 47% of its staff. Roughly 1,300 communities
in this country have no newspapers now, a dynamic that more and more forces
people to look to regional or national news sources for information.
Having severely undercut the ability of alternative media outlets to survive
- just look at the preposterous YouTube restrictions of independent
videographers like Farina and Ford Fischer - audiences are herded into
ever-larger informational pens. Within those pens, the trend in recent years
has accelerated toward ideological homogeneity, so that most people are
getting their information from one of two ecosystems, conservative or
"liberal" (which is really more like "neoliberal"). I warned four years ago
where this was headed:
The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering
Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption.
This setup just doesn't work.
The reason it doesn't work is that CNN, the Washington Post, MSNBC, the New
York Times, the Boston Globe, and NPR do not act like competitors in this
sort of landscape. In a binary setup, they don't police each other's
mistakes, any more than Fox and the Daily Caller do.
Even forgetting about the appalling free speech issues involved, if you take
Fox, Newsmax, and OANN off the air, who will check the work of the remaining
CNNs of the world? CNN's own media reporter, who is at the head of the line
calling for Fox to be removed? Because the undeniable fact about the last
four years, in particular, is that as bad as Fox often is - and I've found
its cynical cheering of mask rebellion in particular almost viscerally
off-putting - the so-called "reputable" press has of late been just as bad
if not worse, from a factual point of view.
From calling Carter Page a foreign agent to raising massive fusses about an
absurd and disproven Alfa-Bank-Trump secret server story to erroneous
coverage of the Covington High School fiasco to rampant lying about the
source of the "pee tape" story to putting Michael Avenatti on live TV to
make dubious rape accusations to doing exactly what Fox is accused of doing,
perhaps at a smaller scale but still - raising questions about the
legitimacy of Donald Trump's election - the last four years have shown that
Fox does not have a monopoly on "misinformation," not by a long shot. The
Russiagate stupidity alone marks the whole business with a failing grade for
the whole era, especially as it caused news outlets to openly align with
political actors.
Just to take one example, virtually every "reputable" news agency
incorrectly denounced the so-called "Nunes memo" detailing FISA abuse by the
FBI, written in February 2018 by Republican congressman Devin Nunes. The
Washington Post called it a "joke" and a "sham," while another of its
editorialists said Trump's release of it was "his most unethical act since
firing [James] Comey." New York Magazine, bravely defending the honor of the
FBI, wrote, "FBI Director Opposes Release of False Nunes Memo." Bloomberg:
"FBI Has Grave Concerns About Nunes Memo." CBS quoted Nancy Pelosi's warning
that release of this "fake" and "distorted" intelligence might cause a
"constitutional crisis," and called for Nunes to be removed as a Committee
Chair.
In the end, the report by Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz
ratified virtually every assertion about FBI misdeeds in the Nunes memo. Who
covered this? A few random independents like me, but mainly, big
conservative outlets like Fox News:
When congressional testimony of figures like former deputy FBI director
Andrew McCabe was declassified, and we found out that the FBI as far back as
August, 2016 had dropped George Papadopoulos as an investigative target
because the evidence "didn't particularly indicate. that he was interacting
with the Russians," who covered that key information about the ostensible
origin of the Trump-Russia probe?
Not the papers that hyped to the sky the story of Papadopoulos as a conduit
to Russian spies. No, these stories appeared in the fine print of The Wall
Street Journal and in the work by figures like, of all people, Sean Hannity.
The pattern is firm: when the Times or CNN screws up, you look for the real
correction at Real Clear Investigations or Fox, and vice versa. Removing one
side from the scene will leave the other with a monopoly on error.
When original Fox programming architect Roger Ailes died a few years ago, I
criticized the "Christopher Columbus of hate" for helping invent the toxic
media culture that had long been tearing the country apart. Ailes made a
fortune innovating a programming strategy based upon a "factory-like
production of news stories that spoke to Americans' worst fantasies about
each other," realizing "the more scared and hate-filled we are, the more
advertising dollars come pouring in."
His version of Fox stoked the divisive effect with an endless barrage of
stories mainly designed to terrify older, conservative audiences, who were
told over and over - in between ad blocs, of course - that the America they
remembered was under attack, by everyone from campus lesbians to al-Qaeda.
This looked like the corporate news media version of ripping off the elderly
with telemarketed magazine subscriptions, and I wanted no part of it, which
is one reason I never appeared on the channel despite regular invitations.
It's also why in Hate Inc., I described Fox as the clear progenitor of the
division-for-profit model of modern commercial media.
Circumstances have come all the way around. Incredibly, Fox News may soon be
the last line of defense against an all-out assault on the heterogenous free
press as an institution, and people like me, who've despised the channel
their whole lives, now find themselves in the unenviable position of having
to defend the "Fair and Balanced" channel as a matter of self-preservation.
The local and alternative presses are already dying, and tech platforms have
already successfully asserted their rights to censor. All that remains is to
topple a behemoth like Fox as a show of strength, leaving an untouchable
Soviet-style club of Chuck Todds and Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots in charge
of disseminating an approvedT top-down version of reality. Are you excited
yet?
Imagine the reaction! Do the Eshoos of the world think Fox viewers would
just shrug off the L, and find ways to warm up to Rachel Maddow, Chris
Hayes, and Joy Reid? To the many Fox-haters out there: imagine a world in
which you're told, by an unelected bund of cable distributors, that you have
to get used to watching Tucker and Sean. Would you take that lying down? Or
would you lose your mind with rage, and reach for something sharp? How does
anyone think this is going to end well?
