The Republicans’ latest performative freakout is truly a font of fun.
In case you haven’t heard – and who among us can keep up? – the party’s leaders are screaming to the skies about DirecTV’s Jan. 24 decision to drop a right-wing channel from its national satellite lineup. Donald Trump is outraged, Ron DeSantis is incensed, and scores of House Republican have detonated their heads. New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew says that the company’s decision to dump NewsmaxTV “is what happens in authoritarian regimes,” and James Comer, the new chairman of the House oversight panel, vows: “There’s gonna be a committee that’s gonna hold hearings.”
Wait a sec. They’re “gonna” haul executives of DirecTV and its parent, AT&T, into a congressional hearing and demand that the private business explain why it has made a private business decision…in the hope that the private business, duly intimidated, will reverse its private business decision?
That’s ironic – and hypocritical – coming from a party that has always purported to revere the private sector and condemn all attempts by Big Government to bully it.
But I guess the party needs to distract us from the real news about the private sector: That under Joe Biden, the nation’s jobless rate (3.4 percent) is now the lowest since May of 1969. Hence, the GOP’s fixation on the bright shiny object du jour.
Even someone with a business degree from Trump University should be able to grasp the simplicity of DirectTV’s financial decision. It had long carried Newsmax at no cost, but suddenly the conservative outlet wanted to change the terms of the deal; going forward, the outlet wanted DirectTV to pay tens of millions of dollars (a “carriage fee”). DirecTV balked at the idea of paying for something it had been airing for free – especially since Newsmax was streaming for free on YouTube and Roku. Indeed, if DirecTV were to accept that carriage fee, it’d be compelled to pass on the cost to its subscribers. That didn’t sit well.
So the satellite company made its decision. Bye bye, Newsmax.
Cue the cartoon rhetoric from the likes of Trump (“The Radical Left seems to have taken over the mind and soul of AT&T”), party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel (“The woke agenda of many corporations is bent on censoring voices they disagree with”), back-bench House member Eric Burlison (“There’s a famous quote about what happened during the Holocaust, when the Nazis first came for some, and people said nothing. And then eventually they’ll come for you”), and even MAGA hack-actor Jon Voight (“We all love truths and good news and that’s what Newsmax brought to us…Now the Left are taking it down”).
Somehow they all ignored the fact that DirecTV swiftly replaced Newsmax with another conservative channel, The First, which features the disgraced Bill O’Reilly. But never mind. What’s most galling is the threat to hold congressional hearings to pressure a private company into paying for something that it doesn’t want. That seems a tad authoritarian, does it not?
In the MAGA era, Republicans still profess to love the private sector – until it does something that Republicans dislike. Then their impulse is to intimidate and punish. We’re seeing this in Florida (natch), where DeSantis is retaliating against Disney because Disney has stood up for gay people. We’ll soon see whether House Republicans hew to their vow to hold hearings, but if so, here’s hoping that DirectTV’s execs utter two simple words:
“Free market.”