Yes, Fox News should be allowed to exist

Posted January 2021

By Tristan Hansen

Staff Editor

Despite what a recent tweet might suggest, yes, Fox News should be allowed to exist.

On Friday, author and columnist Anand Giridharadas took to Twitter to ask the question of whether Fox News should be legally tolerated

“It’s time for this question to be front and center: Should Fox News be allowed to exist? Brain-mashing as a business model shouldn’t be legal,” he tweeted. It would quickly accumulate over 24 thousand likes and generate a fair deal of discussion.

To answer his question, yes. There are a few reasons as to why Fox News should be “allowed to exist,” as he puts it, with the first, and perhaps most obvious being the protections for freedom of press that exist under the First Amendment. This effectively completely prevents the government from being able to meaningfully regulate, let alone outright categorically ban, news sources such as Fox News. But we can reasonably assume he knows this and is more specifically advocating for modification of the Constitution to either completely suspend freedom of press, or at the very least introduce some restrictions. So, we must then ask ourselves, why is the right to freedom of the press enshrined in the Constitution in the first place?

The founding fathers who drafted our Constitution had just escaped from and successfully fought back a tyrannical and overreaching government who denied them representation and sought to stifle their expression and protest. As such, they knew very intimately the necessity of being holding the government accountable. They knew that government was, by its very nature, a self-interested and corruptible force that ought to be controlled. And they drafted the Constitution with this in mind, implementing a system of checks and balances meant to reign in the corruption and abuse of power.

“If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary," James Madison famously stated. "In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

One of the most important external controls he speaks of is freedom of the press, which Madison himself wrote into the bill of rights. A press that is allowed to freely report on current events and the actions of the government is necessary to provide the people the information needed to hold the government accountable.

As Hugo Black said during New York Times Co v United States, “The press was to serve the governed, not the governors."

On the topic of New York Times Co v United States, without freedom of the press existing under the first amendment, this landmark Supreme Court decision would never have been reached, and the Pentagon Papers would have never been released. It’s highly unlikely that the Watergate scandal would have ever been covered by the Washington Post without this decision, either, or that Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance would have been publicized.

Let’s say we suspend freedom of the press to provide the government the ability to ban Fox News. When the government inevitably becomes embroiled in yet another scandal, as seems to happen approximately every six months in America, what would prevent the government from muzzling any newspapers who attempt to report on it? What legal protections would ensure the public is able to access necessary information?

Let’s give Giridharadas the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume he isn’t advocating for an all out end to protections for the press, but rather granting the government the slightly more limited ability to ban certain publications if they’re deemed “untrustworthy”, while still guaranteeing “trustworthy” publications the ability to publish without restrictions. First of all, who’s to say this ability wouldn’t be abused to exactly the same end as the abilities granted to the government by altogether completely revoking freedom of the press would? Who’s to say that the government wouldn’t declare a news source “untrustworthy” in hopes of censoring the content of a particularly incriminating piece of journalism? And even if this power, somehow, wasn’t abused to stifle journalism that's inconvenient to the government, who decides what qualifies as “untrustworthy”?

As I tweeted in response to Giridharadas, what happens when someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene is elected president and uses the federal government's newfound power to revoke CNN's news status and designate OANN the official state media? As much as we’d like to believe there are, there aren’t really any completely unbiased, nonpartisan methods of evaluating a news sources’ trustworthiness, and one’s perception of a particular source is inevitably going to be tinged by their partisan leanings. As such, government having this ability would ultimately result in those in power choosing to censor whichever news sources they dislike and/or are inconvenient to them, under the guise of performing a public service by disposing of an untrustworthy news source.

It’s also rather ironic that Giridharadas would make this suggestion, given his twitter bio states he writes for MSNBC, a news source which, alongside CNN, was frequently excoriated by Trump and his supporters for being “fake news”. If the United States’ government under Trump had the ability to censor news sources for being untrustworthy, one of his own newspapers would have likely been on the chopping block.

We can also approach this issue from the perspective of fundamental human liberty. The cornerstone of individual liberty is freedom of thought. Freedom of thought cannot be fully realized unless those thoughts can be freely expressed. As such, freedom of speech, and by extension freedom of the press, is crucial to the very existence of a free society.

Freedom of press is among the most important rights guaranteed to us by the constitution. It serves as a critical check on the government and ensures basic human liberty is upheld. There’s a reason there exists such great overlap between countries who lack protections for freedom of the press and countries with tyrannical states. Restrictions of press freedoms are among the most commonly used tools of an authoritarian government, and shouldn’t be provided to ours in a shortsighted and imprudent jab at a media source you dislike.