Ex-Fox News Star Bill Kristol Joins Fight to Get FCC to Come Down on Fox
Kristol said the FCC should “fully consider the fitness” of Fox to broadcast as the Dominion case proved that the company “repeatedly disseminated false news.”
www.thedailybeast.com
Bill Kristol, the neoconservative commentator who founded The Weekly Standardand spent a decade at Fox News, is urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reject the broadcast license renewal of a local Philadelphia station owned by Fox Corporation.
The informal objection, which is co-signed by former PBS President Ervin Duggan, follows the formal petition to deny FOX 29 Philadelphia a license that the non-partisan Media and Democracy Project (MAD) filed with the FCC earlier this month. In what it described as a “landmark” bid, MAD cited Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against Fox as proof that the company broadcast “false news about the 2020 election” and, therefore, breached the FCC’s policy on licensee character qualifications.
Now an editor-at-large with the anti-Trump conservative outlet The Bulwark, Kristol said in the objection that while he and Duggan came from different political parties—Duggan served in the Johnson administration—they both believe that open and actual debate is key to American democracy.
The pair added that they “believe that media companies who are directly or indirectly granted the privilege to serve the public through the operation of FCC-licensed television stations have a corollary duty to facilitate and strengthen democracy by participating in that debate—not by hiding their opinions, nor by providing ‘equal time’ on all issues to outside parties, nor by merely chasing ratings or corporate stock price, but by adhering to the highest journalistic standards in reporting and distributing news to ensure that the public has solid facts upon which to make the decisions that are essential to our society's future as a democracy.”
Kristol, who held senior positions in both the Reagan and Bush administrations, also took Fox’s ownership to task for allowing lies about the 2020 presidential election to be broadcast on their networks.
It looks like Fox Broadcasting will have to fight to keep each of their FOX owned stations in each of their cities. They have a good chance of losing their licenses.
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