"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

Here's another question about Rupert's confession he helped Donald Trump cheat in the 2020 election:

How can this be used to force cable companies to stop requiring subscribers to pay for Fox?

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) February 28, 2023

It can't.  The simpler solution is: Quit paying for cable.

Cable has always charged for stations you don't want to watch/support.  It's the business model of cable.  It's how it works.  Frankly, with streaming services and digital broadcast cable is an absolute dinosaur, and I say this as a boomer who literally grew up on cable.

In my small East Texas town we had one one-horse local station with a very weak signal.  Everyone in town that I ever knew had cable, which mostly brought us the channels from nearby Dallas (the major three plus a local channel there that played lots of "old" movies.  Either "classics" from the '40's, or more desirable to us, monster movies and '50's "horror films" about giant ants and alien invaders.)  Basically, if you didn't have cable you didn't have TV.  Cable with Cinemax and HBO was another matter entirely.  This situation prevailed when I went to college, further south and deeper into the Piney Woods.

So we connected to cable in apartments and rent houses in our pre-home owner days, because who put up an antenna anymore?  I went so far as to cut the cable to put up a dish.  I was well and fully enculturated into the idea that TV was worth paying for (twice, since everything on cable I paid for ran ads.  I couldn't afford "premium" channels which, frankly, reycled their content on a monthly basis.  That is, they had a handful of movies to show and they showed them over and over for a month, then changed the lineup.).  Finally I went back to where I'd never been before, and put an antenna on my roof.

And I get as many channels over the air as once I got on a satellite or a cable connection.  It was a short step to a box for Netflix, then to a "smart TV" still connected to an antenna.  And yes, being a Boomer, I still watch too much TV (my childhood is pretty well summed up in the childhood memory of Bill Murray in "Scrooged," except my father was a kind man, not an asshole).  But I wouldn't install cable if the government paid for it.

I have a lot of options built into my TV remote for services I don't pay for, like Hulu.  Streaming is nice that way; lots of built in apps you don't pay anything extra for, and streaming services you can pay for, or not.  With cable I pay for so much shit I don't want to watch, why do I pay for cable?

Yes, FoxNews sucks, but you also have to pay for QVC (which is broadcast, too, but I don't have to watch it) and other crap you don't watch (I don't watch ESPN, either.  Why should I pay for it?).  There is a simple solution:  cut the cord.

It's not like Comcast is going to drop FoxNews because customers complain.  Judging by TeeVees in public locations (waiting rooms for various services, for example), the ones that pay for cable generally keep it on FoxNews or CNN.  And I hardly ever see it on CNN.  Somebody wants to watch that crap, and that's enough for cable providers.

Why do you think ATT replaced Newsmax (or whoever it was) with another right-wing outlet?  They don't care, they just cater to an audience.  The only way to get ATT's attention, or Comcast's, is to stop paying for their services.

You don't need it, anyway.