Chuck Schumer Calls on Americans to 'Demand' that Fox News End the Big Lie

Almost two and a half years after the 2020 presidential election, a movement seems to be gathering steam to defeat the Big Lie

You might have seen last week that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries formally called on Fox Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch to direct Fox News hosts to desist in perpetuating the Big Lie.

Not only this, the two Democratic leaders asked that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and other implicated Fox News hosts publicly acknowledge their wrongdoing and apologize.

"We demand,” Schumer and Jeffries wrote on March 1 in a joint letter to Murdoch, “that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior."

“Fat chance,” you might be saying to yourself in an inner monologue. If so, that’s understandable. Schumer, who took to the airwaves the next day to amplify the message, shares your pessimism that he and Jeffries alone can shake down the leviathan that is Fox News.

That’s why the New York senator asked all Americans to join the crusade. If legions of citizens will make the same “demand” of Murdoch, Schumer broadcast, a democracy-saving miracle can happen.

“The threat to our democracy may be greater than it ever has been before,” Schumer said on CNN on March 2.  

“What caused this?” the senator continued. “No. 1 was Fox News and their commentators spreading the Big Lie day after day, night after night, hour after hour, week after week, year after year. They are the No. 1 cause that there is such erosion in our democracy.”

“This lie is the worst lie that has been told in the history of our democracy,” Schumer said the same day on MSNBC. 

“I hope there would be a deluge of people, all kinds of people,” he urged, “who would call on Murdoch to do what I am doing. That would be the simplest and easiest way to get this done.”

Schumer said on MSNBC that the way to end the Big Lie is for “a deluge of people, all kinds of people, [to] call on Murdoch to do what I am doing. That would be the simplest and easiest way to get this done.”

Schumer is right, of course, that “We the People” can get the job done. So are the members of the non-profit MoveOn, who recently launched not only a petition denouncing Fox but a public campaign to hit the corporation where it hurts most: the bottom line.

MoveOn, deploring the fact that anyone who pays for a standard cable package is required to personally underwrite Fox News, is calling on all Americans who love our democracy to “demand” that cable providers unbundle news services, allowing individual choice about what stations a subscriber contributes to. 

In the petition MoveOn asks Americans to demand freedom from coerced payments to Fox News under “a threat to cancel our cable subscriptions.”

I believe in this stuff. I know that “We the People” can bring down the Big Lie.

So I signed MoveOn’s petition, and, after discovering that my cable provider does not in fact offer an option to spare my money from funding Fox News, I canceled my subscription altogether.

Among the steps every citizen can take to defeat Fox News’ Big Lie are signing the MoveOn petition, canceling your cable subscription, writing to your cable company, writing a letter to Murdoch, and sharing these actions with others.

I also adapted the Schumer-Jeffries letter to Murdoch as a template for my own. In my letter to Murdoch, I took the liberty to say, “We the People demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior."

The Dominion Voting Systems defamation case by itself cannot defeat the Big Lie. Neither can Schumer and Jeffries. We the People have to do whatever it takes. Sign the petition. Cancel your cable subscription. Write a letter to Murdoch. Write to your cable company. Launch your own movement. Spread the word.

Do this for the sake of the truth about 2020 but also to prevent a bloody repeat of January 6, 2021, two years from now. If we defeat the Big Lie now, we might also be preemptively averting disaster in 2024-25.

That’s reason enough to follow Schumer, Jeffries, and MoveOn in taking action against Fox News, megaphone for the Big Lie that Schumer rightly calls the “No. 1 cause” of the erosion of our democracy today.

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