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Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, is an important voice in the media ecosystem that seeks to encourage media institutions to do a better job of holding politicians accountable. And she does so diligently and intelligently, getting tons of likes and retweets when she posts on Twitter, which is all to the good.

Thing is, many people believe that in order to be an effective mainstream media columnist, you have to pretend to believe a lot of things that have consistently been demonstrated to be false, lest you find yourself admitting just how horrible the situation has gotten and admit that well, dammit, it’s hopeless. The appearance of “fairness” is also another crucial consideration. The best example of this came early in the century with Thomas Friedman’s consistent promise that maybe, somehow, in the next six months, something was going to turn around for U.S. troops in the Iraq War, for which he had so energetically cheerled. At some point, he had to have known better, but he couldn’t admit it. Hence the invention of the “Friedman Unit.”

Sullivan does something similar, albeit far less egregiously, in her current column, in which she notes:

Last fall, shortly after the election, as Fox teetered slightly—briefly losing audience share to Newsmax and One America to its right, and to CNN and MSNBC to its left—I had the quixotic notion of suggesting something that the network might do.

With the cable network’s great hero, Donald Trump, moving off center stage, I thought perhaps Fox might want to pursue more hard-edged reporting about serious subjects. Beef up the news report; tone down the rhetoric.

If they did it from a conservative perspective, fine. But they could at least make their programming about the news, not hyperpartisan commentary.

I don’t know Sullivan well, but I know she is too smart to believe that this was ever really possible. She nods in this general direction with her use of the word “quixotic” in the column. The rest of the column, regarding Fox’s doubling (at least) down on incitement, disinformation, and general craziness since the inauguration covers much the same ground I did in my column in this space last week. This, too, is salutary, as far more people pay attention to what Sullivan writes than what I do. This can be demonstrated by the fact that I have undoubtedly made a version of this argument literally hundreds of times since Fox became the benighted force in our lives, the moment it first appeared in 1996 when then–NYC mayor, now Trump-loving (alleged) criminal conspirator Rudy Giuliani literally forced Time Warner to carry it as a favor to Rupert Murdoch, and ultimately, to himself.

Fox has not ever been a news organization, and it never had any intention of being one. Eleven years ago, I tried to raise the question of exactly what it was in this column. It began as follows:

Fox News Channel is often described as a cable news station. On occasion, the words “conservative” or “biased” are attached to that description. But few dispute the journalistic orientation of the overall enterprise.

This is a mistake. Fox is something new—something for which we do not yet have a word. It provides almost no actual journalism. Instead, it gives ideological guidance to the Republican Party and millions of its supporters, attacking its opponents and keeping its supporters in line. And it does so at a hefty profit, thereby turning itself into the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.

Recall that last spring, David Frum lost his appointment at the conservative American Enterprise Institute before observing, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.”

A big part of the genius of Fox has been its successful ability to masquerade as a news station and to get real journalists to go along with the con. I could give literally thousands of examples of how Fox anchors and personalities act in ways that are directly contrary to the way professional journalists are understood to behave, but I want to return to two that I used in that same 2010 column to demonstrate, to borrow from George and Ira Gershwin, how long this has been going on.

[W]hen Fox ran Andrew Breitbart’s deliberately doctored video over and over that was designed to falsely portray Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod of having bragged to an NAACP audience of discriminating against whites when she was saying just the opposite, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack [then and now, alas] panicked and fired her right away, without bothering to get to the truth himself.

What spooked him so? As Sherrod explained, Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook had demanded her resignation, telling her “do it, because you’re going to be on ‘Glenn Beck’ tonight.”

The implied threat of unfavorable Fox coverage works even better with Republicans. During the period of 2010 when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) [Remember that Lindsey Graham?] was negotiating to join Democrat John Kerry and conservative independent Joe Lieberman in their attempt to craft an energy bill, the Republican warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza.

“He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’”

The upshot was that, even way back then, Democratic Cabinet officials and Republican senators were afraid to do whatever they truly believed to be the right thing lest Fox twist it into some nefarious plot against “real” Americans. It did not matter that Fox anchors were nakedly lying (or in the case of Beck, were obviously nuts). With Breitbart, they were playing a deliberately doctored videotape, purposely out of context, in order to slander Sherrod and intimidate Vilsack. And the last thing in the world that mattered to the Fox executives who so frightened Lindsey Graham was the fact that the United States desperately needed some sort of response to the climate catastrophe whose reality the network continues to deny to the detriment of literally everyone on the planet who does not make money from it.

Since then, our politics have grown far more toxic, and conservatives considerably crazier and more malicious. Fox has led every step of the way. The result has been literally billions in profit for the Murdoch family that controls its stock, and tens—in some cases hundreds—of millions for the lying liars who peddle the poison it sells on camera. Was Fox likely to follow the 2020 vote (and the murderous insurrection that followed) by suddenly turning toward honest (if “conservative”) journalism? I have a bridge for sale …

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Did you know that was a line from James Joyce’s Ulysses? I didn’t until I finally read it, in a class, finishing on the eve of this year’s “Bloomsday.” I live right around the corner from Symphony Space, where the annual all-day Bloomsday reading of Ulysses has traditionally been held. I’ve been a few times, but I never really knew what I was listening to. Imagine my pride, therefore, when I rode a Citi Bike across town on Sunday (in the rain, alas) for the Origin Theatre Company’s “Bloomsday Revel,” held at Bloom’s Tavern, which featured Ulysses readings by New York Irish actors, music, and, God help us, a juried costume contest (with a free trip to Ireland as the prize).

I am not going to embarrass myself by trying to say anything particularly perspicacious about the work itself. I disagree with the people in my class who insisted that the novel has a plot. I think it’s a portrayal of the consciousness of genius; perhaps the best one we will ever have. In this regard, it reminded me of Saul Bellow’s best work, and so I was pleased to find in Ulysses a character—one who rates only a single sentence—named Moses Herzog, thereby demonstrating that Bellow must have been thinking about Ulysses, too. Instead, I am going to suggest that you read this wonderful essay from The Paris Review. It captures the experience of reading Ulysses as part of a group, rather like Torah study. No less significantly, however, it serves as a powerful argument about another of my pet causes: the criminal underfunding of CUNY, one of the most important institutions I’ve ever encountered in the battle against economic inequality and for making the American dream a little more real.

(Sorry, there’s no music this week. My Altercation overlords don’t like me to write much more than this, but thanks to my classmate Katha Pollitt, here is one of the only two known recordings of James Joyce reading aloud, fittingly, at Shakespeare and Company, in 1924.)