The oxygen of publicity

Remember that cable network whose biggest issue last week was whether the opposition party moved fast enough to denounce antisemitic tropes? Here's your occasional reminder -- the No. 2 story on the homepage Wednesday, say -- that it's still pretty good at rolling around in the stuff itself. Let's start with a little paranoia:

Ever notice how certain people have started to disappear? Not vagrants or runaways, the usual missing persons. But fairly prominent, well-educated people with dissenting political opinions. One day you’re watching or reading them online. The next time you check, they’re gone. You can’t find their videos. They’re not showing up in your Facebook feed. Suddenly you can’t buy their books on Amazon.

You Google them to find out what happened and discover they’ve been banned. They’re being called dangerous extremists, bigots and Nazis. For the public good, they’ve been shut down. Disappeared.

You’re a little surprised to hear this. They didn’t seem evil or radical to you. They were just free thinkers, saying something a little different from the party line on CNN. You don’t complain about it, though. You don’t want anyone to know you were watching forbidden videos. There’s a penalty for that.

This is what an authoritarian society looks like. It’s a place where the group in charge will tolerate no criticism at all. That’s what we’re becoming.

It was only a matter of time before they came for Fox News. Of the top dozen news networks in the United States, only Fox has an alternative view. The other channels speak with one voice. They are united on every issue, every time. They’re in almost perfect sync with the priorities of the Democratic Party.

Reminding one a little of the finest tweet of 2017: "First they came for Katie Hopkins and I did not speak, because I'd been waiting ages for them to come for Katie Hopkins." But back to the story at hand, because you'll need to keep wading another four paragraphs to get to its lone mention of the evildoer in the photo:

... That’s where Media Matters comes in. Media Matters is a George Soros-funded lobbying organization whose sole mission is to punish critics of the Democratic Party. Media Matters often uses propaganda from the Southern Poverty Law Center to bully corporations, news executives and tech companies into punishing people it doesn’t like. Not surprisingly, the media love Media Matters.

Nothing like a little worldwide conspiracy to get the fans going, huh?

For the record, should anyone care, I don't think Tucker Carlson ought to be silenced. (Not that he or his viewpoints at at any risk of such a fate, but that's a different matter.) I'd much rather he be ignored -- starved of the oxygen of publicity, as Maggie Thatcher put it. Maybe he'd have a different attitude if he went to bed hungry and cried himself to sleep.