TikTok has been banned in Congress, the White House and in more than half of US states amid concerns that China could “push disinformation or narratives” favoring China. In Dominion Voting System’s defamation suit against Fox News, it has come to light that senior figures at Fox News knew that election voter fraud claims were false, yet because they were losing audience numbers (“Getting creamed by CNN,” said Fox owner Rupert Murdoch), Fox News pivoted to embrace and broadcast Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election had been stolen. Fox News made the conscious decision to push disinformation and a false narrative, that they privately acknowledged to be false, that favored Trump and their ratings. TikTok’s disinformation campaign is banned. Fox News’ disinformation campaign isn’t. Yet how are Fox News’ actions any less troublesome or dangerous than those posed by TikTok?
To further compound this troubling quandary, Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy has handed over upwards of 42,000 hours of Capitol Police security video of the January 6 attack exclusively to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, one of the vocal promoters of the disinformation and false narrative of election fraud. McCarthy is serving up fodder to his propaganda arm on a silver platter, to be manipulated and photoshopped and grotesquely twisted to fit the equally twisted narrative that McCarthy and his conservative Republicans want to feed the American people. Like Winston in 1984, they would rewrite history, turning traitors into heroes, an insurrection into a mere walk in the park, sending earlier accountings of what really happened at the Capitol on January 6 wafting down memory holes, to be incinerated and forcibly forgotten. Fox News, with McCarthy’s blessing, will push disinformation and narratives favoring their ratings and the MAGA Republican party. Birds of a feather. TikTok is banned. Fox News lives on, the tool of conservative MAGA Republicans everywhere pushing disinformation and narratives favorable to themselves. Change the channel, vote them out. Push the truth and the narratives that favor the rest of us.