From Ben & Jerry’s to Jimmy Kimmel

Why some businesses serve the public good, and why corporate media sells it off for parts.

Recently, a Fox News host mused on air about whether the solution to homelessness might be simply killing the unhoused. Even for Fox, it was jarring, not because cruelty was out of character, but because it revealed the logical endpoint of their programming. Dehumanization isn’t an accident on Rupert Murdoch’s airwaves; it’s the product. Cruelty draws eyeballs, ratings rise, advertisers renew, shareholders cheer. Then, as if on cue, two unhoused people were killed in the days that followed. We cannot prove the murders were inspired by Brian Kilmeade’s grotesque suggestion, but the timing is unnerving, a chilling reminder that violent rhetoric in primetime doesn’t simply evaporate into the ether. It circulates, it validates, and sometimes it precedes blood on the ground.

Fox’s descent into open calls for violence isn’t a freak eruption. It’s part of a larger disease: the alignment of for-profit media with authoritarian power. And once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for a throwaway joke about Trump’s grotesque ballroom grief, but the punchline wasn’t the joke, it was the timing. Disney and Nexstar were simultaneously pushing a $6.2 billion merger through Trump’s FCC, whose chairman, Brendan Carr, all but said on camera: “Fire the comedian or kiss the merger goodbye.” Free speech, meet the balance sheet.