Black FOX Staffers Complained About Racism At Network Known for Being Racist

I normally sympathize with Black people who are victims of racial discrimination but there are certain occasions … For example, it’s hard to sympathize with a Black person who knowingly goes to work for a racist organization, and then complains about it being racist. That’s like getting a lion as a pet and getting angry when it tries to eat you. It’s what lions do.

And this is one of the current scandals du jour at FOX News. (There’s also the issue of Sex Scandal 2.0 and former anchor Ed Henry’s rape accusation, but I’ll tackle that in another column.) Just before neo-Nazi Tucker Carlson was revealed to have employed a racist incel for four years, several African American FOX News staffers held a heated meeting with senior management. They complained about the network’s tolerance of Carlson’s comments and other racially offensive stories.

“Four days after Fox News aired a particularly tone-deaf graphic connecting the killings of Black men — including George Floyd and Martin Luther King Jr. — to stock market gains, many of the network’s Black staffers took part in a phone call with company brass to confront Fox’s increasingly racist and hostile rhetoric towards the protests against police brutality. It did not go well,” according to a July 18 Daily Beast story. “… One employee was especially angry, saying, ‘They created a cell — they created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president… This is rank racism excused by Murdoch.’”

I was curious about their complaints and asked, “Didn’t you know what you were walking into?”

FOX News: Pro-White, Anti-Black

It’s pretty well-known among media watchers what FOX News stands for. Far-right politics, pro-white views and anti-Black and anti-immigrant opinions. Every other story is about Blacks, Latinos or Muslims threatening white people in the suburbs.

In a recent anti-Black Lives Matter story, Carlson said, “This moment ‘is definitely not about Black lives. And remember that when they come for you.’”

They’ve been pretty open about this for years. It’s their business plan. It was obvious when John Gibson told people to “have more white babies” in 2006. It was obvious when the network didn’t punish Bill O’Reilly for muttering “wetbacks” during a story about immigration, it was obvious when lunkhead Brian Kilmeade made disparaging comments about interracial relationships. And it’s pretty obvious with the network’s tolerance and promotion of Carlson’s white supremacist diatribes, which I have covered exhaustively.

Laura Ingraham, a second-generation neo-Nazi, is also tolerated even though she’s attacked Black athletes such as Lebron James and told them to “Shut up and dribble.” She also laughed at the killing of Nipsey Hussle, a rapper who tried to revitalize his neighborhood, and complained about Latino immigration “reshaping America.”

Black FOX News staffers find themselves in a strange situation. They work for an organization that is fundamentally hostile to them. Sure, the organization will tolerate you, but they’ll never make a non-white person their poster boy or top-rated star. It doesn’t fit their business model. And even if that situation ever happened that person would have to denigrate his culture and ethnicity so much, he’d become a caricature. (Pretty much what Diamond and Silk did.)

And it’s not just FOX News, you also find the same kind of white nationalist rhetoric in other News Corp publications in Britain and Australia.

“A New York Times Magazine investigation found that in recent years, the Murdochs’ media empire has been ‘instrumental in amplifying the nativist revolt that was reshaping governments not just in the United States but also across the planet,’ with their outlets fueling xenophobia and ethnonationalism to achieve political aims in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia,” said Media Matters in a 2019 article.

FOX tolerates top earners’ bad behavior

FOX News, which Bloomberg values at $23 billion, will put up with a lot of bad behavior from top earners such as O’Reilly and Carlson. The network only fired O’Reilly after his second round of sexual harassment charges. FOX News stuck by him after he was accused of harassing a producer, including using a vibrator on himself during a phone call. She got a $10 million settlement, he got to keep his job.

They also tolerate Carlson’s pro-white rants which have made him required viewing in white supremacist homes. He has the network’s top-rated show. Raping and sexually exploiting women seems to be a line too far at FOX News, because that’s what got Roger Ailes and Henry fired.

Working in a hostile environment

Black FOX News staffers find themselves in a strange situation. They work for an organization that is fundamentally hostile to them. Sure, the organization will tolerate you, but they’ll never make a non-white person their poster boy or top-rated star. It doesn’t fit their business model. And even if that situation ever happened that person would have to denigrate his culture and ethnicity so much, he’d become a caricature. (Pretty much what Diamond and Silk did.)

I know the media business is a tough field and work opportunities are scarce, but there are other outlets. It’s better to work at a lower-rated and maybe lower-paying outlet than to work for an organization that’s hostile to you and your culture. I’ve learned that if you work for an organization where you don’t agree with the business culture or organizational goals, it’s just a matter of time before you hit the breaking point. The Black FOX News staffers look like they've hit theirs.