It’s obviously not just advertisers who pay for Tucker Carlson to spread his filth for money. After all, mainstream advertisers have left Fox and Tucker Carlson’s show in droves. No, the real money is in the fees that cable and satellite providers (and some streaming services) pay to carry Fox’s garbage onto your video screen.
In an article titled “Tucker Carlson’s Racism: Paid for by You,” Medium’s Tim Karr takes a dive into why a little activism around the issue of those of us who have cable or satellite TV who essentially subsidize all the hate on Fox:
Racism pays in America — especially if you’re the primetime host of a cable channel that panders to the country’s sizable population of white nationalists.
Fox News struck bigotry gold when it offered its 8 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who returned the favor by routinely fanning the flames of hatred against immigrants, Muslim and Jewish people, Black and Brown people, the LGBTQIA+ community and anyone else he considers threats to his supremacist world view.
While Tucker Carlson Tonight is among Fox News’ most-watched shows, it’s not his viewers alone who pay Carlson’s $10-million salary. Nor is it advertisers who’ve left the program in droves, refusing to have their products featured adjacent to Carlson’s bile.
Carlson’s enormous paycheck comes out of the pockets of millions of people who never watch his show or anything else on Fox. And there’s very little they can do to customize their cable so it excludes media properties owned by the Murdoch family.
(Note that Karr pays well-deserved tribute in his article to Judd Legum’s contribution toward examining this issue in Legum’s Popular.Info online publication.)
Read Karr and Legum’s entire articles. They are quite good.
Karr ends his by noting:
Until they’re given more choice, viewers in the United States need to be clear with the companies that sell them their pay-TV bundles: Paying the Murdochs for content is the modern-day equivalent of subsidizing fascism. “No rhetorical wiggle room should be allowed,” writes Oliver Willis of Media Matters for America.
Long term, we need a serious reckoning with how we got the media system we have, where commercial media collude to push white-supremacist content that harms Black and Brown communities.
We must repair the damage done and rebuild more diverse and democratic media. We can start by turning off the cable cash spigot that fuels big-media bigotry.
See below for a tweet looking at who the real Tucker Carlson is, and who the real Tucker Carlson has always been.