Fox News and its parent company are responsible for much of the hate and division in the United States right now, according to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
But that is not stopping him from petitioning the cable newsgroup for an audience, according to the New York Times. Look, no one ever said being a politician and 2020 White House hopeful would be pretty. The Times reports:
Mr. de Blasio’s change of heart could be about his newly announced presidential ambitions. But it also speaks to the improbable way that Fox News — a network whose prime-time hours are often devoted to praising the president and skewering prominent Democrats — has squirreled itself into the heart of the Democratic primary.
It was not so long ago that the New York City mayor torched Fox and its parent company, News Corp, by name, claiming both groups are responsible for a great deal of today’s division and animosity.
News Corp. is “dividing people and creating hatred and negativity and changing our political landscape for the worse,” de Blasio told CNN last year, adding that there “would be less overt hate, there would be less appeal to racial division” if the media conglomerate ceased to exist.
“Does News Corp. have a clear right-wing agenda? I think that one’s pretty obvious,” he said. “Do they sensationalize, racialize, and divide? Yes. Does that compare to CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post? No. One of these things is not like the other.”
Earlier that same month, the mayor also said in an interview with the Guardian that News Corp. is almost single-handedly responsible for all that is wrong and dangerous in America.
“If you could remove News Corp. from the last 25 years of American history, we would be in an entirely different place,” he said about the company that owns Fox, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and dozens of newspapers.
Without News Corp., de Blasio added, “we would be a more unified country. We would not be suffering a lot of the negativity and divisiveness we’re going through right now. I can’t ignore that.”
He also argued that his attacks against newsrooms are totally different from President Trump’s attacks against newsrooms.
“There is no comparison between a progressive critique of the media — and overwhelmingly corporate media, by the way — and a president who does not believe in free speech and is trying to undermine the norms of democracy,” he argued. “If you see a steady decline in democracy, we’re going to have to vividly defend a lot of media we don’t agree with. But I don’t want to give [Fox] a free pass on what they have done to all of us.”
All that sanctimony and fire-breathing, and here we are with the Times reporting that de Blasio is imploring Fox to give him access to their massive audience numbers. I guess when your political ambition is greater than your professed principles, one necessarily wins out over the other.
