A few years ago, on the Al Franken radio show, a guest suggested that there was a way for individuals have the cable companies block Fox from their particular packages. I suggest we work on moving Fox from the basic package to an optional one. This would be an extremely powerful and elegant solution to taming this tumor on our political conversation.
Imagine if even 30% of cable users insisted that their providers take Fox off the basic package and put it into one that had to be specifically opted for. This would be an huge blow to the bottom line of the beast. And why not? We won the election in a landslide, we despise Fox, and especially despise the idea that we have to pay for it in our basic cable. Let the Republican rump have Fox, but make them pay for it. The moral argument is easy to make. Fox is demonstrably biased against the majority opinion, so why should it be presented as part of the mainstream? Even if this can't be argued definitively (of course it can to any reasonable thinker, but we're not in a rational environment), it doesn't matter. If you define the case as just a matter of opinion, the majority of the country doesn't want to be represented by this lunacy. This works even if you grant the weakest possible argument-that only a large minority feels this way. And, it's not censorship-Fox can say what it wants but the wingnuts have to pay for it. The market in action!
How does one do this? I'm not sure. Maybe instead of just boycotting Beck's advertisers, we also focus on the cable companies in a sustained campaign to remove Fox from our basic package. Maybe we begin a coordinated campaign to support legislation to make a la carte cable the law of the land. Franken's guest suggested that the cable companies had a legal obligation to come out to your home and physically block any channel you found offensive in the basic package-a tremendous expense to them if they had to do that thousands of times.
In any case, this seems to be a pressure point that we haven't focussed on and may be the Achilles heel we've been looking for.