January 7, 2021

When Will Republicans Finally Disown Fox News?

Why is this man still allowed in polite company?Starmax/Newscom via ZUMA

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In the aftermath of yesterday’s insane quasi-coup attempt, a number of Republicans have stepped up to condemn Donald Trump’s actions. That’s great. But it’s nowhere near enough. They have a lot more work to do if they want to be taken seriously.

I’m going to skip the entire laundry list in favor of one single thing: Fox News. That mob on Capitol Hill didn’t show up on its own. It didn’t even show up because Donald Trump wrote a few tweets. It showed up because Fox News has spent every day since the election spewing conspiracy theories about Democrats stealing the election. More to the point, it’s spent every day for the past couple of decades making money on pillows and gold scams and reverse mortgages by scaring the hell out of old, white people with fever swamp reporting about liberals and “illegals” and political correctness and Benghazi and a long, long list of other Democratic perfidies.

Is it any wonder, then, that polls show half of all Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen? You’d believe it too if you spent your evenings watching Fox News. Rupert Murdoch’s network is a bleeding, open wound on the politics of America. It’s fundamentally why half the country hates and fears the other half.

So give me a call when the Republican leadership works up the nerve to finally disown Fox News. When they finally admit publicly what everyone else already knows: Fox isn’t a news network, it’s a machine designed to make money by pitting Americans against each other. The First Amendment may give them this right, but it doesn’t force any of us to accept it—not even Republicans. Until they disown Murdoch’s cynical meal ticket, they aren’t even remotely serious about disowning Trump. He’s merely the symptom. Fox News is the underlying disease.

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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.

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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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