Right-Wing Provocateurs Say They Are Being Silenced. Cry Me a River

By Christian Christensen, Guardian UK

29 May 17

It’s hard to sympathise when arch-capitalists such as Bill O’Reilly, Katie Hopkins and Sean Hannity find themselves at the receiving end of corporate savagery

here is a delicious irony when free market zealots become victims of the very system they celebrate. When those who pontificated about the evils of the “nanny state” and the genius of consumer choice and the “invisible hand” suddenly realize that consumers don’t like them any more, and that the invisible hand is about to yank them out of their position of power. When the market tells them: “You know what? You’re losing us money. We couldn’t care less what you did or how much you made for us yesterday. Get lost.”

Of course, it is “leftists” and “liberals” who are most often accused of not being tough enough to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. Lefty “snowflakes” need the warm embrace of the state to compensate for their inability to cut it in the real world. They need “entitlements” and welfare. They need laws to protect them.

Yet when arch-capitalists such as Bill O’Reilly, Katie Hopkins and Sean Hannity find themselves at the receiving end of corporate savagery, their reactions speak volumes. Sermons about the reign of the consumer disappear, replaced by hysterical accusations of conspiracies, political correctness gone wild and cowardly corporate censorship.

In response to O’Reilly’s release from Fox after a slew of sexual harassment cases, Alex Marlow, editor in chief at Breitbart News, said that the decision created “an America where corporations decide what can and can’t be said, and I don’t like the idea where the corporations have so much control.”

After Fox News put the hammer down on Sean Hannity after his pushing the discredited Seth Rich conspiracy theory, Hannity tweeted: “Spoke to many advertisers. They are being inundated with Emails to stop advertising on my show. This is Soros/Clinton/Brock liberal fascism.”

When it was announced Katie Hopkins was leaving LBC immediately – after a tweet, later deleted, in which Hopkins called for a “final solution” for Muslims – chat rooms and websites claimed mob rule and thought-policing. Even Julian Assange weighed in on Hannity, tweeting: “On @SeanHannity: regardless of the politics no one should be cheering advertisers controlling the parameters of acceptable debate.”

For critics and scholars who have for decades pointed to the acute dangers connected to corporate control of the media, howling from the far-right over O’Reilly, Hopkins and Hannity rings hollow for a couple of reasons.

First, an individual who invokes Nazi ethnic cleaning terminology in relation to Muslims, or was involved in so many sexual harassment lawsuits that his employer had to pay $13m in settlement deals, are hardly poster children for journalistic free speech. At the broader level, however, these are people who have served a political ideology that has pushed deregulated markets conducive to the concentration of corporate control – which in the case of media also means excessive advertiser influence.

It is worth remembering that O’Reilly, Hopkins and Hannity are three individuals. They are not the sum total of the far right, and thus the argument that what we are seeing is tantamount to the eradication of their worldview from the media is a sad joke.

Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Mail and Daily Express are all alive and well. Bill O’Reilly wasn’t replaced by Noam Chomsky. He was replaced by Tucker Carlson, who provides a very similar brand of far-right vitriol … just without the sexual harassment accusations. And will LBC now be bereft of far-right anti-immigration voices? Fear not. You can always tune in to Nigel Farage’s show on the same station.

So when senior people at Breitbart and on-air talent at Fox News start saying they are only now realizing the extent of corporate and advertiser power? Cry me a river. They are liars, naïve or have been in a coma for the last 50 years.

Ask the other end of the political spectrum about the impact of corporate control. Truly leftist, progressive voices have been essentially frozen out of the US and UK commercial public spheres. And by “leftist” I don’t mean the Wall Street friendly, Coke-sponsored, pseudosocial democracy of Hillary Clinton.

Critiques of consumption are rarities. When wars rage, most media will cheerlead the battles and interview former generals while anti-war protests, sometimes enormous in size, are either ignored or sidelined as nothing more than PC slacker culture. When truly progressive candidates emerge, they are belittled as at best anomalies and at worst pie-in-the-sky dreamers who will destroy the economy.

Unfettered corporate and advertiser control of the media are real and are bad for democracy. But when people like Bill O’Reilly, Katie Hopkins and Sean Hannity claim victim status after advertiser pressure, let’s remember that they are suffering the consequences of a system they so gleefully championed.