Joshua Blanchard
Bill Kristol, the neoconservative commentator who founded The Weekly Standard and spent a decade at Fox News, is urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reject the broadcast license renewal of a local Philadelphia station owned by Fox Corporation.
The informal objection, which is co-signed by former PBS President Ervin Duggan, follows the formal petition to deny FOX 29 Philadelphia a license that the non-partisan Media and Democracy Project (MAD) filed with the FCC earlier this month. In what it described as a “landmark” bid, MAD cited Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against Fox as proof that the company broadcast “false news about the 2020 election” and, therefore, breached the FCC’s policy on licensee character qualifications.
Now an editor-at-large with the anti-Trump conservative outlet The Bulwark, Kristol said in the objection that while he and Duggan came from different political parties—Duggan served in the Johnson administration—they both believe that open and actual debate is key to American democracy.