The Patriot Post® · Cancel Fox News?

It’s been brewing for some time, the tiff between President Donald Trump and Fox News. But when the network called Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night, it was the final straw for some number of conservative viewers. If New York/Beltway churn was what people were after, fine — those outlets are a dime a dozen. But many conservatives who want conservative news were going to look elsewhere.

We’ve certainly had our beefs with Fox over the years, primarily because of its ad-revenue-driven model for infotainment. Hyping the same non-stories 24/7 with obnoxious “ALERTS” every time a meaningless detail is released gets eyeballs, and eyeballs get advertisers to pay for time. By stark contrast, your humble team at The Patriot Post, which began our enterprise just before Fox did in 1996, opted not to bow to the wishes of advertisers by electing to be donor supported. That way we could focus on what matters, not on what sells. At Fox, however, the almighty advertising dollar speaks — sometimes loudly. When everything is an “ALERT,” nothing is.

That was certainly the case with former Fox host Bill O'Reilly, who was dumped in 2017 after 21 years at the network. The advertisers spoke, and Bill had to go.

But are conservative news consumers cutting off their nose to spite their face?

Over at the Washington Examiner, Derek Hunter recounts some of Fox’s good work just this year: “interview[ing] Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner”; covering the “BLM-Antifa goons destroying cities and attacking people”; having actual diversity of opinion on its programs; and “the Fox prime-time lineup is unapologetically conservative.” Fox is the only major outlet to give airtime to the Biden Crime Family scandal.

We’re always glad to see competition in the marketplace no matter the product. Competition makes things better. Along those same lines, we also believe that Cancel Culture is of the Left — not of the Right. Squelching speech, canceling those with whom you disagree, is anti-competitive and anti-Liberty. Those are not conservative values.

Yet there is a growing movement on the Right that seeks to shun and silence anyone or any publication that gets so much as a toe over the line of whatever is perceived as acceptable opinion. Fox is only the biggest target. This, again, is leftist thinking, not the practice of Patriots who love free speech and Liberty itself.

There is, of course, a limit to how much garbage anyone can put up with, and we understand why a lot of folks have concluded Fox has simply crossed that line too many times. There is little need to watch CNN, for example, to know what Democrats want you to think. We merely offer the idea that, sometimes, reading and listening to a variety of opinions, especially from those on our own side, makes us all better than if we hunker down in our echo chambers and only hear what we want to hear.