I have thoughts on Diamond and Silk and Fox News' PR strategy masquerading as corporate accountability. mediamatters.org/fox-news/diamo…
Fox's business model demands red-meat bigotry and conspiracy theories to keep the audience coming back. But Fox brass also can't entirely ignore the concerns of Fox’s advertisers and cable providers, who are correctly wary of being associated with the network’s worst excesses.
So Fox executives have settled on a strategy of disciplining low-level commentators when their remarks draw too much attention, while letting their stars act with near-total impunity.
Over and over again, we see less prominent Fox personalities get punished for comments that the primetime hosts make without the network thinking twice about them.
Fox’s executives have made the calculation that its big stars are too big to fail. Unless further pressure from advertisers and cable providers changes the financial equation, they will have no reason to hold them accountable.
