Group Wants Fox News Philly Broadcast License Yanked For Airing Election Propaganda

When it comes to Fox News’ democracy-soiling propaganda, there’s not a whole lot the federal government has been able to do. The First Amendment generally protects the network’s ability to spew race-baiting conspiratorial bile, and the nation’s top media regulator, the FCC, generally either lacks the authority or backbone to stop the “news” channel from filling American heads with pebbles and pudding.

The Fairness Doctrine — the long-dead law requiring a semblance of even-handed news coverage — is frequently trotted out by the well intentioned but misinformed as a quick fix. But that law only applied to broadcasts over public airwaves, not cable news. Even if you could restore a similar law (which would never happen under our corrupt Congress anyway), it would inevitably be abused by those with wealth and power to target criticism of, you know, those with wealth and power.

So one activist group this month tried something a little different. Fox owns 29 TV stations in 14 of the top 15 TV markets, and its license in one of those markets, FOX 29  Philadelphia (WTXF-TV), is up for renewal. Technically the Communications Act requires requires license holders face a character assessment to hold and maintain control over such licenses, though it’s historically been… decorative or reserved to applicants who commit multiple, obvious felonies.

The volunteer-run Media and Democracy Project (MAD) has filed a complaint with the FCC, arguing that Fox’s continued “election fraud” propaganda violates the law, and therefore should result in the company losing its license to operate in Philadelphia:

If the long-established law behind the FCC character clause has any validity, it must be enforced against Fox Broadcasting where internal documents from the cable news side of the corporation shows that profit comes before truth or the national interest.

Based solely on the facts and the law, Fox does not deserve a license to own a broadcast station.

If the FCC grants license renewals to a station owner that has knowingly and repeatedly reported false news shown to incite violent insurrection against the government, there is no longer any standard of character required by law.

The effort is creative, but isn’t likely to succeed (mostly because the feckless FCC won’t want to touch such a political hot potato). Given it only applies to an affiliate, even the “best case” scenario of Fox losing a license to broadcast in Philly wouldn’t imperil its broader ability to function in any meaningful way. While clearly mostly a public awareness campaign, some folks were rather mixed about MAD’s plan.

Christopher Terry, A Communications Professor at The University Of Minnesota, for example, wasn’t gentle in his criticism:

Terry’s point is that we should instead mandate a la carte cable options (letting you buy individual channels), undermining the billions Fox receives from consumers who technically pay for Fox News (but don’t watch it) due to fat channel bundles. But efforts to mandate a la carte in any legal or regulatory way routinely go nowhere thanks to captured regulators and corrupt lawmakers (recall the idea even received short-lived policy support by the late John McCain). The argument has generally been that streaming is slowly killing the traditional channel bundle model anyway.

Other telecom and media industry experts, like Public Knowledge’s Harold Feld, argued that the FCC could technically take action here. And while he doubted the FCC would actually do so, he felt that the effort still had some utility from an activism and media campaign standpoint:

Then you have folks like Ted Cruz, who insisted what MAD was proposing was an extreme example of the censorial, “Orwellian” left’s effort to unfairly censor Conservative’s speech (like, you know, implying that institutional racism doesn’t exist, or routinely lying about election fraud to agitate a gullible base):

Authoritarians want to frame absolutely any effort to rein in propaganda as itself “Orwellian” suppression of speech. They routinely piggyback on legitimate First Amendment concerns to scare folks away from doing anything whatsoever. They’ve been immensely successful at it, and 1A folks aren’t always keyed into how their legit concerns get weaponized by bad actors.

Granted you do have to ask the question: if the Biden FCC were to pull the license of a Fox News affiliate, what stops a Republican-controlled FCC from pulling the license of a local news affiliate doing real journalism that challenges Republican orthodoxy (not that there’s many of those left)?

But we genuinely do have a problem in dire need of a solution here. Right wing billionaires have spent 45 years building a massive propaganda apparatus across AM radio, local pink slime newspapers, cable news, and now the internet. And, if you haven’t noticed, the authoritarian architects of that apparatus are now clearly taking aim at the very pillars of democracy in increasingly unsubtle ways.

The solution is complicated and certainly not singular. But any kind of coherent, unified, intelligent response to the information warfare right wing billionaires like Rupert Murdoch have been waging for decades has proven hard to come by.

We could take a tougher stance on media consolidation. But the FCC has increasingly become pathetic and useless on issues related to consumer protection, media consolidation, and corporate power. It’s run by the kind of feckless careerists that won’t want to wade into the sort of political firestorms that could threaten future employment opportunities and think tag gigs, even when it can act.

For example the Trump administration mindlessly stripped away media consolidation limits built on the back of decades of bipartisan agreements in 2017. Since the Biden FCC has come to office you’ve not heard a single solitary chirp by agency leaders about how that could be considered problematic for the public interest or the health of diverse media markets, much less any thoughts of restoration.

We could try to implement the kind of education reforms taking root in Finland to help young Americans more easily recognize propaganda. But efforts on this front, when they do appear in the U.S., are usually short lived; again thanks to propaganda-wielding authoritarians who see improved media literacy as a direct threat to the alternate-reality they’ve carefully cultivated.

We could meaningfully (and even publicly) fund independent media as a counterbalance to misinformation and propaganda. But again here, the authoritarian right sees this as an ideological threat. So while data pretty clearly suggests that countries with publicly-funded journalism see healthier democracies, that too challenges the alternate reality bubble authoritarians are building.

We could put our faith in the courts, but while many suggested that the $787 million settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems would cause the station to course correct, that simply hasn’t been the case. All Fox needs to do to avoid similar problems is simply include specific corporation and individual names less frequently in their base-befuddling conspiracy theories.

We could shore up and boost funding into U.S. mental health care to help exploitable Americans more inclined to believe in conspiratorial thinking, but, well, that’s clearly not happening anytime soon.

We could target Fox’s ad income. But while groups like CheckMyAds have had some decent success in naming and shaming Fox advertisers, it’s hard to claim that the right wing billionaires and outrage economy backing this propaganda engine is in any way struggling for cash after decades of such activism.

In an environment when the conversations generally focus on what’s not possible and the end result is no action whatsoever, I’m less inclined to be bothered when groups like MAD try something creative, even (and maybe especially) if success is unlikely. At least it builds public awareness that there’s a problem, and generates a conversation about what we might try instead.

There’s no singular fix for the right wing propaganda machine. It likely requires tougher media consolidation standards, improved mental health care, increased funding for quality journalism, improved media criticism education, and a wide variety of creative campaigns both targeting the underlying financial engine–and building public awareness to what the Rupert Murdochs of the world are doing.

Right now, we’re not really doing any of that in any sort of unified way. In part because the right has frightened everyone into worrying that any action could make things worse. It’s not really clear how broken the propaganda-polluted U.S. information economy, journalism, and democracy itself has to get before an intelligent, solution-oriented consensus on what to do about it actually forms.