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APRIL 18, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

Dominion, Fox, and Us

It's time for Americans of goodwill to pressure cable companies to
drop Fox News, and pressure the government to deport Rupert Murdoch.

As I write this afternoon, the opening arguments in the trial of

**Dominion v. Fox News** are set to begin tomorrow. And whatever the
trial's outcome, I think we-progressives, empiricists, fans of
informed electorates and democratic values, men and women of
goodwill-should involve ourselves in the process.

Because this trial doesn't merely pit one wronged Canadian voting
machine company against Fox News. Anyone concerned about the degradation
of our democracy and civic life wrought by Fox's two decades of Big
Lie, neo-Goebbelsesque propaganda has a stake in its outcome. Merely
following the trial, however avidly, will fail to grasp the opportunity
that the coming revelations (there have been plenty already) of Fox's
democracy-destabilizing duplicity present to us all.

To wit: The vast majority of Fox News viewers access its daily
distortions and hourly horrors through their cable TV providers. The
coming weeks provide the optimal opportunity for cable TV subscribers to
pressure those cable companies to drop Fox News from their offerings.
And while emails, phone calls, Facebook and Twitter posts, and what have
you from individuals should deluge the cable conglomerates, they would
also be far more effective if they were part of an organized campaign
put together by some empirically minded institution or institutions. If
the cable companies respond that they won't go in for the kind of
content moderation that responsible social media platforms have engaged
in, I suppose one fallback demand would be that Fox at least take the
word "News" out of its title as a condition for continuing on cable.
("Fox's Fascist Fantasies" might be an acceptable substitute.)

Even if the two sides in the suit agree on a settlement before the trial
begins (which, I suppose, is a possibility that keeps delaying the
opening statements), I think that the pretrial revelations and whatever
outrages Fox admits to as a condition of a settlement will still provide
ample grounds for waging such a campaign.

A modest parallel campaign we could all engage in would be to demand
that the government deport both Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Pretrial
revelations have already made clear that both were aware of the falsity
of the claims made on their tightly controlled network that Donald Trump
had actually won the 2020 election but for the alleged chicanery of
Dominion and deceased Third World dictators. Those revelations have also
made clear that their fears that Fox might lose its audience if it
actually reported that Joe Biden had won that election fair and square
prompted them to let the network continue to elide that fact and to
indulge in preposterous claims to the contrary.

Lachlan Murdoch, the top dog at Fox News, is an Australian citizen
who's here on some kind of green-card arrangement. Australian native
Rupert, who is the pit bull atop Lachlan, wrangled an American
citizenship in the mid-1980s as he was first attempting to buy some U.S.
television stations. At the time, the law required that a noncitizen of
the United States could own no more than 20 percent of a TV station.

America has deported resident aliens and immigrant citizens for far less
than the damage that the Murdochs have brought down upon the United
States. Indeed, it's hard to think of any other immigrant to this
country who's done even remotely as much as Rupert to tear his adopted
nation apart. (Among the native-born, you almost have to go back to
Jefferson Davis to find someone who sundered the union on so massive a
scale.)

So in addition to pressuring the cable companies to dump Fox News, we
should also consider strategically located demonstrations demanding at
least Rupert's deportation, in the process also affirming our support
for democracy and factually based reporting, and providing wholesome
outdoor fun for Americans of all ages.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]>

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