House Democrats are pressuring some of the largest U.S. cable companies to punish conservative cable news channels Fox News, Newsmax and One America News for airing “disinformation.”
The pressure: In a letter on Monday, two Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee asked the cable companies why they had apparently not yet taken action against the conservative networks for airing claims that the presidential election was rigged.
- “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, OANN and Newsmax on your platform both now and beyond the renewal date?” asked Reps. Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney from California. “If so, why?”
- The letter was sent to Comcast, AT&T, Spectrum, Dish, Verizon, Cox and Altice as well as digital cable news carriers Roku, Amazon, Apple, Google and Hulu.
The letter came ahead of an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Wednesday called “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.”
The reaction: Blair Levin, the former chief of staff of the F.C.C. under Bill Clinton, said the hearing could be a first step to what The New York Times called “meaningful action.”
But conservatives, including the two Republican members of the Federal Communications Commission, accused the Democrats’ of waging a campaign to silence their political opponents.
Some left-leaning commentators, including Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi, agreed.
- In his newsletter on Tuesday, Taibbi linked this week’s letter and hearing to other recent acts of censorship and said the mainstream media and Big Tech are complicit:
The so-called media reporters at major organizations like CNN and the New York Times have mostly either been silent or have played cheerleading roles during the most eyebrow-raising recent developments: the decision by Facebook and Twitter to block access to a pre-election New York Post story about Hunter Biden, the stunning exercise in monopoly influence by Amazon and Apple in swallowing up the “free speech” platform Parler, the banning of Socialist Worker Party accounts in England and the U.S., and the shutdown of livestream capability by alternative media outlets (and the removal of celebrated footage shot from the Capitol riot by people like Status Coupvideographer Jon Farina), a story that amazingly only got major play at… Fox News.
Fox News, Newsmax and One America News have separately responded by denouncing what they characterized as a Democratic attack on free speech.
- Fox News said in a statement on Monday: “For individual members of Congress to highlight political speech they do not like and demand cable distributors engage in viewpoint discrimination sets a terrible precedent.”
- All three conservative networks are facing lawsuits for their broadcasts of unproven allegations of systemic election fraud, which inspired the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The cable companies have not responded to requests for comment.
