January 18, 2021

It’s Time to Crush Fox News

A new logo is fine, but how about doing something to really show that you care about your customers?Andre M. Chang/ZUMA

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Max Boot says that it’s all very well to fight the social media sites which promoted the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, but if you really want to make a difference you need to go straight to the source: Fox News.

To its credit, Fox News acknowledged that Joe Biden won. But, reports Media Matters for America, “in the two weeks after Fox News called the election for Biden, Fox News cast doubt on the results of the election at least 774 times.” According to NPR, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said Trump’s opponents in the government were guilty of “treason” and that it would be “criminal” for Republicans to recognize Biden’s victory. Fox News host Mark Levin told viewers: “If we don’t fight on Jan. 6 on the floor of the Senate and the House — and that is the joint meeting of Congress on these electors — then we are done.”

….James and Kathryn Murdoch, part of the family that controls Fox News, just called on “media property owners” to stop propagating “lies” that “have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces.” If James’s brother, Lachlan (co-chairman of News Corp and chief executive of Fox Corporation), and father, Rupert (executive chairman of News Corp and co-chairman of Fox Corporation), won’t listen, then large cable companies such as Comcast and Charter Spectrum, which carry Fox News and provide much of its revenue in the form of user fees, need to step in and kick Fox News off.

I appreciate the fighting spirit here, but cable companies aren’t going to boot off Fox News. Contracts alone would prevent them from doing so. But there’s another way: boycotts.

This may sound tiresome. It’s not as if there aren’t already people who are trying to lead boycotts of Fox News advertisers. But here’s the difference: if we want to make a difference, we should target one big advertiser and leave the rest alone for now. This is what the UAW does: they negotiate with one car company, which sets a pattern for their contracts with everyone else. And they don’t pick their victim randomly. They pick the company that seems most vulnerable to a strike threat.

So who would that be? Ideally, a company that (a) can’t afford to be associated even slightly with unAmerican activity, and (b) is not in the greatest financial shape. You also want a company that’s relatively easy to boycott. Big conglomerates, for example, make so many things that it’s hard to get people to boycott them all. Likewise, pharmaceutical companies make drugs that might be lifesavers for a lot of people. But then there’s . . . General Motors. Allstate. Applebees. Any one of those might be a good target.

Some Super PAC with a lot of money ought to pick one of these targets and go after them. It can hardly do any harm, can it? One way or another, we need to make Fox News into a pariah.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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