Newsmax Versus DirecTV and America’s Censorship Regime

Commentary

Almost daily now, Americans see new evidence of a mass, public-private censorship regime—part and parcel of something resembling an American social credit system in which those who submit to ruling class orthodoxy are rewarded, and those who run afoul of it are railroaded.

So when news broke recently that DirecTV was booting center-right network Newsmax, the fourth highest-rated cable news channel, from its lineup, the question naturally arose: Was this about politics, or was it strictly business? A deeper question also beckons: To what extent has politics so pervaded every facet of American life that a distinction can even be drawn between the two?

DirecTV claims it parted ways with Newsmax upon expiration of their prior contract because the outlet “made unreasonable demands” that would have cost the TV provider millions of dollars in fees, which it would have had to pass on to viewers. It maintains it wishes to bring Newsmax back, albeit on more favorable terms.

Newsmax is adamant that it’s a victim of censorship—that the economic argument is a ruse. It claims that the fees it was seeking under a new contract were well below those of most of two dozen largely left-leaning news and information channels DirecTV carries—and that DirecTV has dishonestly characterized Newsmax’s negotiating position to the press to boot, calling into question its candor over the impasse.

Outrage over DirecTV’s ouster of Newsmax two years out from the next presidential election was swift and widespread, with condemnations flying from right-leaning politicians and pundits alike. Within two days, in a seeming bid to counter claims of ideological discrimination against Newsmax, DirecTV announced it was adding conservative network The First to its lineup, touting its support of “news programming options that reflect all voices.” Newsmax responded that while it’s “glad AT&T DirecTV is adding a conservative commentary channel,” it viewed the move as “a pathetic attempt to deal with millions of angry [Newsmax] viewers.”

For full disclosure, I’m no disinterested observer of these developments. I have regularly appeared on and/or worked with both networks and count former colleagues at each of them. I’m as thrilled for my friends at The First as I’m saddened for my friends at Newsmax.

But the reality is that both are operating in a hostile corporate ecosystem that leaves no network that hosts dissenting voices from ruling class orthodoxy safe. And notwithstanding DirecTV’s efforts to blunt claims of discrimination against Newsmax, given the ways in which the deck is stacked against any right-of-center voice, it would only be surprising if Newsmax wasn’t a victim of the ruling class’s broader War on Wrongthink.

The Newsmax–DirecTV saga may well be a microcosm of this broader war.

Consider that as some observers have noted, DirecTV’s majority owner, AT&T, and minority owner, private equity giant TPG,  share overwhelmingly left-leaning bents, reflected in the former’s board composition, and the latter’s emphasis on ESG and its executives’ overwhelming campaign contributions to Democrats.

Too, virtually every influential business across virtually every influential industry from Big Tech to Wall Street has submitted in one way or another to Wokeism. This can be seen for example in the fact that every Fortune 100 company has now adopted a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion program.

There are myriad reasons why corporations have succumbed to the anti-cultural revolution of Wokeism that has swept across virtually every aspect of American life. Some corporate executives are true believers that businesses are to be paragons of progressivism. Others may merely don progressive garb to be on the “right side of History,” or for other cynical reasons. To those who might resist, as I have detailed in reporting at RealClearInvestigations, the pressure to conform is immense, and comes from virtually every direction, including, investors, board members, employees, competitors, lawyers, consultants, progressive activist groups, the media, and perhaps most importantly, the state.

Wokeism is the animating, or at least operating, ideology of our ruling regime—including our administrative state, and wide swaths of the legislative and judicial branches of government too—codified perhaps most directly in President Joe Biden’s first-day executive order on “affirmatively advancing equity.” In an America in which the state, which has a monopoly on force, is involved to ever-greater degrees in every aspect of American life, including our commerce, it would only make sense that businesses would take on its character. Facing carrots including special privileges and government contracts, and sticks including oversight and detrimental regulations, businesses naturally see it as in their self-interest to be on the right side of the state, which includes adopting its Woke anti-religion.

As businesses have submitted one by one to said anti-religion, there’s a compelling argument to be made that—increasingly invested in political and social issues totally unmoored from their bottom lines, and arguably seeking to effectuate related changes outside the political process—businesses have become an extension of the state.

That is, one might think of Corporate America increasingly not just as a reflection of the administrative state, but as part of the administrative state.

And if the administrative state brooks no dissent—casting challenges to its privilege and prerogatives as dangerous, and demanding conformity to its ideology of Wokeism as an existential imperative—then businesses too would be obligated to root out such dissent.

Certainly, this can be seen in the information sphere, and perhaps most clearly in the censorship regime reflected in the Twitter Files, in which the national security apparatus conspired with a social media platform to suppress dissenting speech in violation of the First Amendment.

That censorship regime, which has touched not only social media platforms, but all manner of Big Tech companies and financial firms, has sprung into action broadly so our ruling class can maintain a monopoly on the narrative—ideological control in service of political power—under the guise of national security and public safety. Wokeism cloaks this power play in a veneer of piety.

Jan. 6 was the key accelerant to the development of this regime, providing a pretext to silence, deplatform, and chill dissenting views on a whole slew of contentious topics from election integrity and the Chinese coronavirus, to radical gender ideology—a censorship regime the U.S. government managed in the private sector to complement its “domestic counterterror” policies.

This brings us back to Newsmax, a named target of this censorship regime dating back to at least February 2021. Then, weeks after the Capitol breach, California Democrat Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, members of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, wrote to a dozen TV providers, including DirecTV, urging the companies “to combat the spread of misinformation and requesting more information about their actions to address misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies spread through channels they host.”

In their letter to DirecTV, the members asked it to disclose whether it would continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network (OANN), given the networks’ airing of purported “dangerous misinformation that enabled the insurrection of January 6th and hinders our public health response to the current pandemic.”

This letter could be seen as a thinly veiled assault on the First Amendment—a way for government officials to indirectly compel TV providers to ban speech politicians don’t like by dropping select networks. We have seen this tactic play out repeatedly as America’s sprawling censorship regime has come into clear view over the last two years.

DirecTV would drop OANN in the spring of 2022. Now it has dropped Newsmax.

The pull for TV providers to drop networks that propagate unfashionable political views would exist irrespective of government compulsion—simply considering the political views prevailing across corporate America, and the uncontested campaigns from left-wing activists for decades to purge the public square of center-right voices. But direct pressure from politicians with jurisdiction over major tech companies—companies in some cases that, like DirecTV majority owner AT&T, do substantial business with the government—may well prove irresistible.

With Senate and House Republicans now demanding answers from DirecTV and its owners aimed at discerning whether the trio engaged in what constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has termed “censorship by surrogate,” soon we may get a clear answer as to what really drove its decision.

We have a right to know whether and to what extent they bent to pressure from federal lawmakers and other officials.

In fact, we ought to be able to see not just the DirecTV Files, but the files of every single corporation reasonably suspected of being co-opted by, or wittingly partnering with the federal government to violate our rights.

The sunlight of congressional oversight is an important disinfectant.

Legislative action, lawfare, and public pressure are important tools to begin to restore free speech in this country too.

That such measures are needed—that our culture doesn’t demand the protection of speech as the only moral position—illustrates how far we have fallen.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.