Legacy cable news channel Fox News has reportedly informed news organizations and media figures that they will severely limit how much content from the Republican Party primary debate they will be able to show their audiences or else they could face potential legal action.
Ben Shapiro — the founding editor-in-chief and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the top conservative podcast in the nation — noted that Fox News sent out a memo saying that during the seven day period following the debate, no media outlet can air more than a total of three minutes of excerpts from the debate in any one program, including video and audio.
“They’re out of their minds. That’s totally crazy,” Shapiro said. “They’re treating this like a football game or like a baseball game, which is nuts. Okay, that’s nuts. This is newsworthy material involving the presidential candidates, the people who are going to represent you at the top levels of American government. And Fox News is saying that you’re not allowed to hear from them unless you watch the debate live, or unless you’re watching Fox News. That’s totally crazy.”
“It means that when people like me recap the debate, and explain to you what happened in the debate last night, Fox News is now threatening to sue people like me if I play you four minutes of the debate tomorrow, despite the fact that my show would bring them an extraordinary number of people who are viewers and listeners,” he continued. “Like, how the hell is anybody supposed to actually figure out what happened in debate unless they watched the thing live? I understand they’re now trying to telescope all viewership on Fox News to the debate itself. But good luck with this. I mean, just really ridiculous, ridiculous stuff.”
Shapiro said that Fox News was trying to “grip harder and harder to it’s declining user base,” but the information they are trying to restrict “should be relevant information like fair use, like classic fair use kind of stuff for conservatives all over the country.”
“For Fox to restrict access to your ability to listen to clips of the debate with commentary, which is the normal way that Fair Use works, threatening litigation against everybody else, is pretty insane,” he added.
Some notable responses included:
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