Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League, asked advertisers gathered Tuesday for Global Marketer Week to press Fox Corp. to fire its resident flamethrower and ratings-magnet, Tucker Carlson.
Carlson has been trafficking in white supremacist myths recently on Fox News and his broadcasts, Greenblatt said, offer an “example of how hatred is being mainstreamed in America in 2021.” He recommended that advertisers rein in spending on Carlson’s show. “You can hold them accountable like few other actors in society because your dollars are the fuel that enables their business model.”
There is a long tradition of companies using ad budgets to strong-arm reporters, commentators and their publishers into avoiding unfavorable coverage, so invoking the power of the purse to stymie inquiries and conversations is thorny. In this particular instance, though, it’s helpful to remember who Carlson is and what he’s up to. He’s certainly not a reporter, and he’s not a commentator in any classic sense. He’s a deft propagandist and performance artist who steeps himself and his audience in bigotry, racism and “cancel culture” antics to keep the world at bay.
As Michael Gerson, a former adviser to George W. Bush, noted in The Washington Post earlier this week, Carlson is “providing his audience with sophisticated rationales for their worst, most prejudicial instincts. And the brilliance of Carlson’s business model is to reinterpret moral criticism of his bigotry as an attack by elites on his viewers.”
This bile is a hallmark of our times. And it’s not about left versus right. At its core, it’s about a war between facts and disinformation, with power as the prize, and deserves to be throttled. Greenblatt’s appeal to advertisers aims to cut off one source of funding for it, but Carlson is just a front man for the larger enterprise churning along behind him. The Murdochs call the shots at Fox, and convincing them to change course matters most.