Janine Jackson interviewed Free Press's Tim Karr about defunding Fox News racism for the April 30, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: What hasn't Tucker Carlson done lately? Earlier this month, the primetime Fox News host touted the white supremacist “great replacement theory.” Democrats, he cried to viewers, are “trying to replace the current electorate” with “new people, more obedient voters from the Third World”: “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter; I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate.”
Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid in Walmart: Call the police immediately. Contact Child Protective Services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What you're looking at is child abuse, and you are morally obligated to attempt to prevent it.
OK, you, a non-Fox watcher, say: Tucker Carlson is a dangerous humanoid, and I wish he didn't have a platform for millions of people open to that particular strain of weaponized ignorance. But enough people or sponsors must want it on the air, or it wouldn't be there.
Well, here to help us see what's amiss with that idea, and how we could disrupt it, is Tim Karr. He's senior director of strategy and communications at Free Press, and he wrote the recent piece, “Tucker Carlson's Racism: Paid For by You.” He joins us now by phone from New Jersey. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tim Karr.
Tim Karr: Hi, Janine, how are you?
JJ: I'm all right, but boy, you know....
As media critics, we know it's important to expose the structure, the workings of media, because it's somewhat hidden, and because so much is predicated on it, you know. "If it didn't have an audience, it wouldn't be on your TV, because media is a market, after all": We know that that is a pervasive, but misleading, idea. When it comes to Tucker Carlson, it's not that he doesn't have fans, but what complicates the notion that he's on my TV because somehow I want him there?
TK: You, like me, might remember the good old days of over-the-air broadcast television, when we got our news and information for free. Unfortunately, at the time, in my childhood, it was only like four or five local television stations. But we've now transitioned to this cable era, where we can buy packages that provide us with hundreds of stations. And the economics of that is somewhat complicated, because I think people who don't watch the Tucker Carlson show don't realize that, regardless, they're still paying for Tucker Carlson's salary.
And what I mean to say by that is that when we purchase a cable package from our provider—whether we have a satellite service; or a cable service, like Comcast; or a fiber service, like Fios by Verizon—we pay a lump sum for a large package of channels. And that money gets distributed to those channels via what's called carriage fees.
And for Fox News and Fox Television, that is the bulk of their income; last year, they made about $1.6 billion from carriage fees. These are negotiated deals with their cable carriers that we all pay as part of our monthly bill, those of us who are still on cable and satellite pay-TV services, which is the bulk of American viewers. And so it's a lot of money that we're paying, an average about $1.72 a month per person that goes to Fox News, even if we don't like that.
So when I say Tucker Carlson's racism is paid for by all of us, that's in fact true. And a lot of people don't really think about that; they don't think about the implications of carriage fees, and how—unless we change that system—we're all complicit in some way in supporting this sort of racism.
JJ: I think folks would like to know, on hearing that, how can we stop it? And it's not a new idea to try to stop it. I mean, we've been back and forth on this for a while. FAIR’s Peter Hart wrote about responses to this in 2010, and he was reminding folks that when NewsCorp launched in 1996, they couldn't charge for Fox News, they had to pay their way onto cable. It was only as they got more political influence, more audience, that they were able to charge—and then triple—these carriage fees that you're talking about.
And I just want to throw in there one thing that Peter wrote about: Then he was saying, “Why do we have to pay Sean Hannity’s salary?”
TK: Right.
JJ: Same conversation, just a different person. But he noted then–Fox head Rupert Murdoch's boast that he could name his price with cable operators: “Cancel us, you might get your house burnt down”; that was how Rupert Murdoch described his negotiating strategy.
So all of that just to say, this is not a brand new battlefield. But what are the ideas we're looking at now to undo this thing where we're paying for shows that we not only don't want, but that we really, really don't want?
TK: There are a couple of ways to address this. And some of the things that people have heard about are these advertiser boycotts that have happened in the past, whenever Tucker Carlson says something inflammatory. There are a lot of good organizations, like Sleeping Giants and others, who've mobilized advertiser boycotts, and that has harmed them a little bit. But again, it's only a smaller piece of the larger pie of income.
So if you really want to look at the problem of carriage fees, and address that, there's a few things you can do: No. 1, we need to embolden these cable carriers—the cable companies like Comcast and Verizon and AT&T and Spectrum—to be a little more bold, to be a little more forthright in their negotiations with Fox News. If, indeed, the majority of their customers don't watch Fox News, which is true, why do they feel obligated to pay such high carriage fees? So there is a public pressure campaign that can be very effective.
Another thing that can be done is to promote or advocate for à la carte, which is a cable subscription that allows each viewer to handpick the channels that they want to watch. There is a package of what are called “must-carry channels” that include local television stations; the PEG stations that might cover, say, the local city council hearings; and some public broadcasting stations—but in addition to that, consumers should just be able to handpick, like you would pick from a dim sum menu, perhaps, the stations that you want, and then pay accordingly. There have been a lot of legal hurdles that have been put in place for that à la carte option.
And another thing that people are doing increasingly is called “cutting the cord.” Cutting the cord means that you take pay-TV services out of your triple play, the package that you buy from a company like Comcast, and you get all of your television “over the top,” via your high-speed internet connection. You then have the opportunity to subscribe to services like Hulu or Netflix, and reassemble your own television experience. There's still only a small percentage of Americans who've chosen the over-the-top, cutting-the-cord option.
So it's kind of complicated. There are a lot of things that can be done. What we really need to do is mobilize people and educate people who don't want to pay Tucker Carlson’s salary that there are things that they can do.
JJ: One of the things that you point out in the piece is that, when folks are talking about this, it might be presented as, “Why would you intervene with this radical strategy?” It's actually…the à la carte idea is something that happens already in other spheres, like stock trading, right?
Tim Karr: "Policies that have been put in place...take choice out of the hands of consumers—whether it’s choice for an internet connection, whether it's a choice for the type of cable stations that you subscribe to—and they put them in the hands of these large companies."
TK: That's right. If you choose mutual funds, you can choose funds that are socially responsible, that, for example, don't invest in energy extraction companies. Those are all choices that consumers make. And so it's a little bit backwards. As you know as someone who's followed media policy for quite some time, a lot of the policies that have been put in place seem really backward; they take choice out of the hands of consumers—whether it’s choice for an internet connection, whether it's a choice for the type of cable stations that you subscribe to—and they put them in the hands of these large companies, who have far too much control over the ways that we connect and communicate.
So this has been a lifelong effort for me. And the work that we do at Free Press is to try to put the public back into these policy conversations, to make sure that we have control over our media experience.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, when we were talking about à la carte back in 2010, 2012, one of the things that was part of the conversation was that if you're in a system where you pick what channels you want—despite what you're talking about, the must-carry that might include local government and PEG channels—that that might sideline, or make invisible, some smaller or niche channels that might only get out there as part of a package.
TK: Yes.
JJ: And I'm wondering, have we thought about new ways to address that part?
TK: That's a real concern, because there are a lot of niche stations that cover immigrant communities, that cater to other audiences that rely upon “the bundle” in order to reach, potentially reach, a large audience. And so there are ways that you can manage that, too. There are these ideas about “skinny bundles,” where you actually create these kinds of packages that have a lot of public interest and diverse options in them. But when it comes to the premium stations, and some of the controversial stations like Fox News, they leave that up to the viewer.
One of the things that I've advocated for is a hate-free bundle: a bundle where people can pay a fairly standard subscription rate, minus the money that would go to Fox Television, for Fox News, for Fox Business News, for all of the Fox channels; minus the money that might go to One America News Network, or Newsmax, or any of the stations that have been spreading disinformation about the elections, about the Covid response, and fanning the flames of racism.
So that's potentially something that could happen. We need to gain some momentum in the organizing side to pressure cable companies to do that. I think that getting Congress and the FCC involved could also help persuade them to give these options to consumers.
JJ: And we also are in, finally, an era where it is different than 10, 12 years ago, and I think media consumers are a little more accustomed to proactively seeking out sources that they might not see, and talking to one another about what might be interesting, and sharing in social media around big news outlets. That's how podcasts get out there.
So I think public education, I just would say, would also be a big way of directing folks' attention to programming that they might miss if it can't get [to be] part of one of these bundling things.
TK: And I think, longer term, we also just need to have a reckoning with how we ended up with the media system that we have, where these commercial media outlets—in this case, it's cable companies colluding with Fox News Channel to push white supremacist content.
I mean, there's a long history of media being used to victimize impacted communities, Black and brown communities, and we need to reckon with that as well, and to see that a lot of the controversy around carriage fees is rooted in a history of discrimination.
JJ: We've been speaking with Tim Karr from Free Press; they're online at Free Press.net. Thank you so much, Tim Karr, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.