Is cable news really the most important thing in America right now? At the end of the day, how much do Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon et. al. actually impact our lives? CNN, MSNBC, and Fox have become institutions unto themselves and made themselves into the center of the story. Not just mediums of information but power centers that say everything about what the elite want America to be. Fox has always been GOP TV, that was Roger Ailes' explicit lodestar in pitching the idea in 1996, based on a strategy he came up with as an operative in the Nixon administration. Tell fairy tales of grievance to the poorly-educated masses and directly communicate right-wing talking points to the base. It is the strategy of every subversive institution since, whether trump himself, or wingnuts trying to make it big. Social media is therefore just a slightly more interactive form of propaganda, more insidious because sock puppets and 'bots can make an incredibly bad take look more popular than it is. One way media like talk radio and cable news can only sound as big as the confidence level of the host or anchor talking.
Things aren't any better at the other two cable news channels, CNN has very consciously moved right and is now a parody of itself. While MSNBC is trapped by the balance police, to put it most charitably, making sure there are two hours of conservative talk to every one of center left. These people running the networks are not friends of democracy or freedom, but FOX has always been the problem. Tucker, whom I used to laugh at as the bowtie frat boy squealing on Crossfire all those years ago, evolved into the most dangerous of propagandists. The one who deals in straight ideology and not individual personalities. Just like the phrase "conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed" Tucker laundered neo-Nazi bullshit through his patrician idiom to make the right wing authoritarian followers feel more confident in their eliminationist beliefs. Not better, not more acceptable but validated for sheeplike followers who are actually constantly seething with rage. Getting him off the air and making eliminationism just a little less respectable will lower the temperature on rising American fascism.
Until the next one steps into that vacuum that is. Only about three million people watched his white power hour on Fox, less than one percent of Americans, yet his reach was far greater because the medium is the message and endlessly echoed by others. By making that message about ideology and eternal grievance, and not about and individual leader, Tucker's propaganda left a wide opening for whomever can grab his mantle. Who knew at the time that this whiny, petulant heir to the Swanson foods fortune with the million silly faces could step into Bill O'Reilly's spot and take his audience to even darker places? It had everything to do with the confident impunity that pushed the boundaries of acceptable speech. Individual leaders can be shrugged off when they no longer serve the march to fascism, see Bush, George W. Trump will go the same way, most of the republican base is losing faith in the constant individual grievances that Doughface Donny gives them. The authoritarian followers want to hear about kicking ass on the poor, immigrants, and liberals, not how mean this or that district attorney has been to poor Donny.
Which is why Carlson's firing was a big story. The public had barely absorbed the news of the Dominion settlement when Tucker made all the elite journalists whiplash away from that settlement's implications. As I understand it, that $787 million or whatever is barely half a year of revenue for Fox, most of it will be paid by insurance and the rest will be written off of their taxes. As Keith Olbermann said, "we are subsidizing Fox's punishment". So this is not going to be some great deterrent for the next Big Lie. Neither will that money go toward anything productive, unless the hedge fund that acquired Dominion for a song decides that it must surrender some of it to a pro-democracy nonprofit or something for PR purposes but most will just end up in the pockets of the same elite buccaneers who have ruined so much of American democracy already.
Will Carlson's firing actually impact Fox's ratings or share price for more than a day? It will be the question of the news cycle unfortunately. Gotta have something to fill that 24 hours of air time each day. And too many people will be caught up in it that could be doing something more constructive. The question I am looking forward to hearing about is whether or not these troubles will impact Fox's negotiations with cable companies for increased "carriage fees" for the network's lies. Did you know that every cable subscriber subsidizes all these rotten channels that nobody watches? I didn't. Though I cut the cable cord over a decade ago and never looked back, I consider it one of the better decisions I have ever made.
We Americans are at war, or more accurately are having war waged against us, by the fascist movement. Thankfully it is not a full shooting war (although the relentless string of mass shootings is starting to be noticed as an actual military campaign, finally) it is definitely an information war. Cutting the cable cord should be considered a patriotic act. Roger Ailes sold Rupert on Fox as a niche channel for exactly this reason, it isn't even advertisers that make up the bulk of Fox News' revenue but these damn carriage fees. Olbermann has harped on this angle a lot but it bears repeating, Fox has three million regular viewers, there are about ninety million cable subscribers in America so eighty seven million subsidize the poison being fed to the three million. Advertising boycotts make a good story but don't do nearly as much as depriving all these thieves of carriage fees for programs and channels you don't even watch.
