IF SPORTS LEAGUES WERE A "WOKE" AS RIGHT-WINGERS BELIEVE, THEY COULD REIN IN FOX NEWS

Carlson's gotta Carlson:

On Fox News Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson did not appear to be pleased with the guilty verdict against former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Indeed, according to Carlson, the jury was tainted by fear of riots if they did not convict, and the public outpouring of support for Floyd amounts to an "attack on civilization."

Every night Carlson is on the air is like this, of course. And as we've been told many times, there's nothing we can do about it, because boycotting his advertisers doesn't work.

... there is no evidence that ad boycotts hurt Fox News enough to force it to mend its ways. “The boycotts themselves are not having a financial impact of any significance,” Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said in 2019. Indeed, Fox’s revenue increased 14 percent in the quarter ending Dec. 31. Often Fox is simply able to move an advertiser from one show to another. In any case, advertising is not Fox’s main source of revenue. It gets most of its money from cable system subscriber fees.

What's more, as former cable industry executive Jason Hirschhorn notes,

If you tried to deplatform them, Fox would say, we're going to pull the Fox Network or we're going to pull Fox Sports or we're going to pull regional sports outlets. This is how the cable business works. It works with leverage.

Which is why sports leagues could probably put enough pressure on Fox to change, if they really wanted to.

Fox Sports has contracts with Major League Baseball, the National Football League (for Thursday Night Football), the NCAA (for football and basketball), NASCAR, and other sports operations. If any of them were to say that they won't return to Fox when their current contracts are up, and if other sports leagues were to say that they can't be enticed to Fox, Fox might sit up and take notice.

When I see baseball moving its all-star game from Georgia in response to the recently passed voter suppression bill, I can almost imagine a response like that to the increasingly undiluted white nationalism of Carlson.

Almost. I don't think something like this could really happen anytime soon. But Carlson seems determined not to just keep tiptoeing up to the line but to push further and further in the direction of overtly racist rabble-rousing. In a few years, it's easy to imagine that he'll go far beyond his current limits -- and no one will dare to stop him, because he'll still be the king of cable prime time.

Unless his rhetoric, and the rhetoric of other extremists on Fox, becomes a genuine national issue. Then maybe the sports leagues will step in. I don't know who else can.