Fox News host and white nationalist Tucker Carlson lauded a gunman who killed two people and seriously injured another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, asking, “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Carlson was not the only Fox News figure to convey support for the killing, but his comments did get the most attention.
In reaction to Tucker Carlson’s dangerous comments and Fox News’ continued justification of violence, Angelo Carusone, President and CEO of Media Matters for America, explained how Fox News’ advertisers and the cable companies that continue to carry it are complicit in support of the network’s justification of murders of protesters:
This is an inflection point. Advertisers and cable companies need to ask themselves: Do they want to make it possible, let alone profitable, for a white supremacist propaganda network to advocate for the killing of their political opponents day after day?
The answer should be clear, but apparently it’s not.
The Murdochs do not have decency. They get rich from spreading lies about coronavirus and from stoking white supremacist violence. They don’t care and they have no incentive to care.
This puts the burden on advertisers and on cable companies that force all customers to pay wildly inflated fees for Fox News’ murderous lies.
So here we are. We are beyond outrage and condemnation. Advertisers and cable companies must take more significant steps to stop enabling Fox News’ recklessness, beyond the modest ones they’ve taken over the years: They must drop Fox News entirely.
