Dear John,

The Fox News coverage of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court confirmation hearings has been reprehensible.

All week Fox News has featured ruthless attacks on Judge Jackson without any regard for the truth. Tucker Carlson vulgarly claims she is getting an “easy pass” at the hearings because she’s Black -- as Republican Senators grilled her for hours, and tried to turn her nomination into a cesspool of racism and partisanship.

Meanwhile, Fox host Jesse Watters claimed that Judge Jackson sympathizes with child pornographers and a parade of GOP Senators and right-wing “analysts” spouted lies about her judicial record.

There’s no fact-checking or follow-up questioning to these false statements. In fact, as Talking Points Memo reports^[1], hosts like Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity "cheered" in response to Republican senators’ race-baiting line of questioning, and then went on to spread their own disinformation.

Fox News spreading disinformation, half truths, and innuendo smearing Judge Jackson is yet another example of why Fox must be deplatformed. It's not news, it's opinion at best... and when it's not opinion, it's lies. Cable news companies have a responsibility not to spread fiction masquerading as fact. Please add your name now.

Would the GOP be fixating on critical race theory if Judge Jackson were white? We all know the answer to that. And despite her multiple degrees with high honors, Tucker Carlson keeps demanding her LSAT scores. He never once asked for decades-old test scores from white nominees.

Regrettably, but perhaps not surprisingly, studies show that Fox News viewers are more racist than the general public.^[2]

Tucker Carlson repeatedly supported the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, a hateful fiction that welcoming immigration policies are a plot designed to replace the political power and culture of white people living in Western countries. Laura Ingraham has retweeted a white nationalist hate group. And after Jesse Watters told a woman of color in Philadelphia that racism didn’t exist and mocked Asian-Americans in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Fox News didn’t sanction Watters or even give him a slap on the wrist; they promoted him.

Fox won’t hold their hosts accountable. So we must.

Here’s the deal. Deplatforming works. Data shows^[3] since right-wing race-baiters like Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Owen Benjamin have been deplatformed, public discourse itself has become less toxic.

Pressure on major corporations works, too. Disney stopped advertising with Fox News in response to their racist coverage of Black Lives Matter protests. Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and even DirecTV have all dropped purveyors of lies and disinformation from their platforms.

It’s time to demand cable companies -- including Comcast, Charter, and AT&T -- deplatform Fox News and take dangerous disinformation off the air.

We can win this.

I’m not saying it will be easy. But with more than 100,000 people already demanding action, cable companies are feeling the pressure.

As we witnessed this week with the dignified, steadfast performance from Judge Jackson, who will very likely become both the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and the first public defender, America is becoming a better nation. However, many at Fox and in the GOP are hell-bent on undermining that progress.

It’s up to us to keep fighting.

Thank you for joining me in demanding action and for standing on the side of truth.

Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action

^{[1] All Four Republicans Who Hectored Jackson On Sex Offenders Rewarded With Fox News Airtime, Talking Points Memo, March 2022
[2] The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage, Mother Jones, July 2021
[3] Evaluating the Effectiveness of Deplatforming as a Moderation Strategy on Twitter, Georgia Tech Report, Oct 2021}