Should the Military Censor Fox?
Fox News undermines democracy, but censorship is not the answer.
Sometimes, I say something on social media that I have no idea is controversial, only to find that some people have a lot of emotional investment in a particular subject. Some folks think I do this intentionally, but I swear to you all on a stack of my beloved Boston albums that nine times out of 10, I am surprised by such reactions. Besides, I’m usually pretty up front about when I’m being intentionally provocative. (My reference to my Boston albums might be an example.)
Anyway, I tweeted two things that got people into a lather. First, I said that there is a growing civil-military problem in the United States. I taught for a quarter century at the Naval War College, the premier senior military educational institution in the United States—and in my view, the world—and I have worked closely with many American military officers over those 25 years. I am worried about what looks to me like an increasing political and cultural distance between the military and American society (which is hardly a new observation) and about the danger of extremism in the ranks (which is a hot-button issue).
I’m going to leave them aside for today, but I’ll have a lot more to say about both of these problems later this year in The Atlantic.
The second thing I tweeted is that it’s a problem that Fox News is, based on what I saw in the years I worked for the Defense Department, the default channel in so many military installations. This observation prompted a huffy retort from my longtime online sparring partner, Jay Caruso over at the Washington Examiner, who asked me why I would blame Fox for problems in the military and whether I think all military televisions should be set to MSNBC instead. (This was an unfair reading of my comment, but hey, Jay is also the guy who helped rat out my disdain for Led Zeppelin on national television.)
The overlap between Fox and even more-extreme outlets such as Newsmax and One America News Network, a slew of right-wing internet sites, and talk radio is part of a closed information ecosystem that affects the military no less than it does American society at large. Many years ago, I defended the emergence of Fox as an antidote to the politically homogeneous center-left tilt of the established American media. (Please spare me too much caviling here about media bias back in the Good Old Days; it was less of a menace than conservatives depicted it, but more of a reality than liberals were sometimes willing to admit.)
But things change: Fox is no longer an additional source of news and opinion. It is, instead, a steady stream of conspiracy theories and rage-bait, especially in prime time.
I first recalled noticing the effect of a narrow information diet on the U.S. military many years ago, when around the same time, multiple military students raised the concern with me that climate change (which was then in the process of being acknowledged by the Pentagon as a national-security issue) might be a hoax enabled by the United Nations or China. I was flummoxed by the sudden appearance of this idea. After some discussion, I realized that it had come directly from cable television, and had been amplified by the internet and talk radio. Over the next several years, I heard such theories with increasing frequency, and not just garden-variety doubts about whether the Russians had attempted to influence the 2016 election, but even stranger stuff, such as the idea that radical Muslims have infiltrated the U.S. government.
There is no prohibition on Americans—including military people—believing any of these things, and certainly not against discussing them in an academic environment. As I have said to all of my students for over 35 years, I care far less about the content of their views than the thought and analysis behind those views, and some of these moments have actually produced productive exchanges.
I am increasingly concerned, however, that what comes from Fox and similar outlets these days is not a “view” so much as an attack on reality itself. As Russian dissident Garry Kasparov has noted, modern propaganda isn’t designed “only to misinform or push an agenda”; it is meant to “exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth,” a good description of how Fox and similar outlets now present their programming. They may do it for profit or ratings or the ego of their hosts rather than for some abstract political goal, but the effect is the same: To watch Fox for an extended amount of time is to go on an excursion into an alternate reality of paranoia and fury, to plunge into a hurricane of anger that shapes views by defying logic and evidence.
This constant drumbeat of political and civic nihilism is bad for democracy. Military installations are government organizations. Can’t the government itself change this?
No.
As much as it might pain many readers to hear this, the response to this flood of right-wing media sludge, on military bases or anywhere else, should be more openness, not censorship. The answer to an authoritarian challenge should never be more authoritarianism. It is important to embrace this fundamental but vexing truth, especially at a time when we should all be fighting for the survival of constitutional democracy.
And yet, when I raised the issue of Fox on military bases on social media, I was deluged with people demanding that President Joe Biden or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin or someone, somehow, ban Fox from military televisions. (I will not link to these tweets because I am not trying to direct any criticism from others toward them.) Censorship with good intentions is still censorship. I tried—in vain, I fear—to explain that giving a U.S. president the legal right to decide by fiat what’s propaganda and what’s news is not only unconstitutional but unbelievably risky: Just imagine if Donald Trump could have done that.
Likewise, I was swamped with “bring back the Fairness Doctrine” tweets, because most Americans don’t seem to understand this 1949 rule, finally discarded in 1987, that supposedly limited editorializing over the public airwaves. I don’t have the energy to walk through, yet again, why the Fairness Doctrine never really mattered very much and why it would never have applied to cable. If you believe that the government can regulate the content of Fox or any other channel, not only do you misunderstand the Fairness Doctrine, but your grasp on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might be a bit shaky. You can read more here and here.
In any case, as retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling (the former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe) commented, the presence of Fox on military bases is not some mandated policy. No one is ordering this; people in military buildings are tuning televisions, and others can change the channels. “Like many,” he tweeted, “I would prefer certain networks not get attention. But it’s our responsibility to use facts and logic to counter disinformation, not ban it … I won’t suggest censoring.”
No matter how much you don’t like it, you cannot ban, censor, or silence Fox. It’s that simple. You can choose not to watch it and encourage others to do likewise—which can have more impact than you might think. Another possibility is for businesses and institutions to choose neutral programming in common areas such as sports or weather, as military exchanges (stores for military personnel) did in 2019. If talking like adults about changing the channel isn’t possible, and if a particular commander on a base seems determined to impose one news channel—any of them!—and a particular viewpoint on his or her subordinates, that is impermissible and potentially illegal. And as Hertling pointed out, it’s what the military’s inspectors general are supposed to investigate and then help fix, and there are multiple avenues for reporting such things openly or anonymously.
When I began my War College career, one of my first lectures was on the history and theory of civil-military relations. I emphasized how blessed Americans were to have a remarkably powerful and capable military that was no danger to its own society. I still believe that, although I might put a few more caveats in that lecture than I did back in 1997. I have since become deeply worried about what I see as the damage Fox and other toxic outlets are inflicting on American society—and by extension, on our military men and women, the sons and daughters of that society. But asking the White House or the Pentagon to be Big Brother is not the answer.