The Philadelphia license review petitions are not the first time a Fox station’s license had been challenged. But this is the first challenge backed by a court decision (in the Dominion case) on the broadcaster’s untruthfulness. The Media and Democracy Project is not asking the FCC to make a determination about whether the reporting was false, because it’s already been made, but to consider the implications for Fox now that a court has said it lied. And to consider how that behavior should impact the licensing.
To the surprise of many, the FCC has agreed to review the license. But the agency has set no timetable for when it will do so. And if Trump is reelected, he will likely appoint FCC commissioners who will mothball the review.
How to Fight Back, Part III: Boycotts and Carriage Fees
Another potential avenue of attack is to hit Fox in the bank. Since the Dominion lawsuit and related defenestration of its prime-time ratings star Tucker Carlson, Fox ratings have dipped, and the announcement cost the network $800 million in value.
During the Trump years, as Fox anchors echoed the president’s white supremacist dog whistles, and Carlson started mainstreaming the Euronazi “Great Replacement” theme, horrified progressives organized advertiser boycotts. Major companies like Disney, Ameritrade, Jaguar Land Rover, and big pharmaceuticals ditched some Fox programming. More than 70 advertisers abandoned many of Fox’s prime-time shows after the insurrection alone.
The advertiser exodus was not good optics, but financially it didn’t really matter. Not everyone bailed: MyPillow, PragerU, the Indianapolis Colts, Bass Pro Shops, and a variety of dubious nutritional supplements were happy to step up. But boycotts are a bit of a sideshow. Fox makes most of its money not from advertising but by strong-arming cable companies into paying it unusually high carriage fees. Carriage fees are the fees providers of pay-TV fork over to the networks whose channels they carry on satellite, cable, or streaming. The major cable companies pay Fox over $2 per household simply to carry Fox on their systems, compared to $1.06 to CNN, and MSNBC at just 36 cents, according to The Guardian.
Why the imbalance? Because Fox has shown cable companies that it can move blocks of viewers around—a powerful incentive for cable execs to pay up, no matter how much activists squeal and complain. Some of the Fox cable agreements were up in 2023, although the timing is unclear. Spectrum, Charter, Xfinity, and Cox were believed to be in negotiations while I was reporting this story, but it’s all cloaked in deep secrecy. It seems plausible that after the loss of Tucker Carlson, the drop in ratings, and the negative Dominion publicity, cable providers could press Fox to agree to lower rates.
Cable consumers have little say over whether Fox is in their packages. And anti-Fox activists have repeatedly tried to break the link. During the pandemic, Media Matters started an “unFox My Cable Box” movement, by which consumers wrote to cable providers and asked for Fox to be taken off their packages, and a “No Fox Fee” project is underway. Common Cause has circulated petitions begging cable providers to stop forcing consumers to pay for Fox. The community activist group Color of Change has a petition drive called “Turn Off Fox,” asking business and public establishments not to turn on Fox during business hours, in order not to serve as “a conduit for the race-baiting and distortions put forth by Fox News Channel.”
In the end, citizen activism can only go so far when there’s money to be made. But there are other individuals who can make Fox executives pay attention: investors.
If the $787 million Dominion payout was little more than chump change to the Murdochs personally, the figure certainly drew the attention, and ire, of fund managers. In September, two complaints against Fox directors, including Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, were unsealed in Delaware. One was brought by the pension funds of public employees in Oregon and New York City, another filed on behalf of eight other pension funds.
Members of Fox’s board of directors and senior management team “allowed the controlling Murdoch family and on-air personalities to expose Fox to massive third-party liability for intentionally tortious conduct and related regulatory issues, failing to lift a finger to protect the Company,” one lawsuit claims. “The Board’s unwillingness to exercise even rudimentary oversight over Fox’s controllers resulted in obvious violations of defamation law and furthered the controllers’ desire to maintain their influential status in the conservative political movement.”
The investor suits add to the arsenal of evidence that claimants in the Philadelphia license challenge are submitting to the FCC. “The evidence presented in the Dominion case, considered in the light of the Commission’s Character Policy, leaves no room for doubt,” Bill Kristol said in an objection submitted jointly with former PBS president and former FCC Commissioner Ervin Duggan. “Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s role in failing to stop, and indeed in perpetuating, election falsehoods broadcast on the [Fox News Media] channels in connection with the 2020 election stands as a blatant violation of the character requirements expected from public trustees controlling broadcast licensees.”
The Wounded Beast
Going into 2024, Fox is a bit of a beaten dog. Viewership has been fluctuating, dropping by 30 percent after Carlson’s exit, before bouncing back. Analysts are downgrading the stock, with JPMorgan recently stating Fox doesn’t seem to have a plan for adjusting from cable to streaming. Carlson was the engine of that conversion, and he’s gone. Millions of Americans are dumping cable packages annually.
In the not too long term, Fox News on cable will be a relic of a bygone time. Something was lost after the election night break with Trump in 2020, when Fox called Arizona for Biden. When Fox was fully in sync with Trump, and Trump was in the White House, the network had a red-hot center, and as fickle and batshit as it was, everyone was on message. Crooked Hillary. The perfect phone call. No worse than the flu. Republicans across the country functioned as Fox’s echo chamber.
Now, like the doddering patriarch, Fox seems lost. It has been evident in the chaos of the House speaker fight, and every weeknight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern in the nonsensical word salad Jesse Watters—who arguably owes his Fox anchor seat to advocating a “kill shot” for Dr. Fauci during an appearance at a Turning Point USA conference—starts to spew. Carlson could project that he believed in the conspiracy theories and wacky faux medicine—ball-tanning, I know it sounds weird folks, but hear me out!—even when he really didn’t.
But that doesn’t mean the biggest right-wing propaganda messaging machine ever invented isn’t a threat to big-D Democrats and small-d democracy in 2024. Fox is a wounded beast, and a wounded beast is dangerous. In this election cycle, Fox will go after Biden hourly with more lies and more selectively cut video and attack him and Democrats in the dog-whistling racist language of Steve Bannon, or, in the parlance of the white Christofascists, call them literal demons. Why not?
“They will tread water before they drown for a while, and that means their punches will be more heavy, more chaotic, and harder to address,” said Carusone. “And the only way out is to dabble in the conspiratorial nonsense…. I see a pretty intense year of Fox not being an arbiter for conservatives, not the conductor, but straddling two realities—of simultaneously being a little less of a threat, because they don’t have the functionality that they’ve had, but more of a threat because of the bloodlust, the irresistible temptation to drive further into conspiracy.”
Ammar Moussa, the Biden campaign’s rapid response director, takes an optimistic view. The network “makes our jobs more difficult,” he allowed, but he is hesitant to call the network an adversary to his candidate. He argues that Fox is damaging Republicans. “What has emerged due to the quote-unquote Fox effect is that it has created a Republican Party that is increasingly detached from where the median voter is.” Moussa pointed to the example of Florida’s governor. “Ron DeSantis is very reactive to whatever is news of the day on Fox or in conservative Twitter,” he said. “Whatever is in their B and C blocks, whatever The Five are talking about. But more often than not, it doesn’t bleed into the median voters’ news consumption. So Republicans will go on Hannity and answer crazy questions and then voters are like, what are you talking about?”
Professional Fox-watcher Aaron Rupar agreed with that assessment. He foresees the network becoming a fragmenting force for Republicans in 2024. “I don’t feel any sense of despondency,” he said. “If you were in a lab designing the ideal Republican campaign, pushing six-week abortion bans is not really popular. But that’s where their viewers are. They alienate people they need to win elections by stoking culture wars over and over again. It’s a kind of blind spot.”
Even if those assessments are true, and Fox is too radical now to bring more voters to the Republican side, the effect of its volume of innuendo and lies about Biden is tremendous. Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, editor of the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of mental health professionals’ assessments of Trump, called Fox News a “cultic programming” vehicle. “Fox News viewers are isolated in their own information, and it’s all about generating fear. They are exposed to a continuous expansion and repetition of a certain way of looking at the world. The ideas themselves are not as important as feeding certain emotional needs.”
Most American voters are not political junkies watching MSNBC or reading this magazine (alas). They are, as Tara McGowan pointed out, busy with jobs, caretaking duties, the kids’ sports schedules. They are not paying attention. Like a drop of ink in a glass of water, the political “news” that the most-watched cable network spews gets actively consumed by the cult but also passively consumed in American consciousness. “Biden stumbles” clips become memes driven into billions of eyeballs on social media. People who watch Fox for the football might turn down the shrieking anchors but still see chyrons warning about the horrible economy, socialist takeovers, and border terrorists. Fox’s fearmongering and lies are part of the country’s psychological landscape. They condition the general public emotionally, all under the name of “news.”
The 2024 election could be the most significant in American history; if things go badly enough, it could be the last. Bill Kristol, the anti-Trump conservative who spent a decade as a Fox News contributor and who now supports a license review, said progressives seem ill-prepared to respond. “As for 2024: Fox remains a part of a dangerous and much larger ecosystem, whose power is still underrated by establishment liberals; I think that could have very bad effects during the next year in the run-up to the election and after,” he told me.
Kristol’s assessment of progressive preparedness for this fight is not wrong. Based on numerous interviews with strategists and activists over the last months, I’d say it’s clear that the Democrats and Biden’s campaign do not share that same sense of the emergency about Fox’s emotional manipulation and cynical abuse of the American tradition of free speech. So, there is not yet a coherent strategy by which they plan to counter Biden’s other, perhaps most powerful, foe.