How to Detox from Fox

With studies showing the lethal impact of Fox News, former Fox producer and anchor Heidi Siegmund Cuda reveals how the US can wean itself off its toxic influence

Members of the activist groups Truth Tuesdays and Rise and Resist gather for the weekly FOX LIES DEMOCRACY DIES protest outside the NewsCorp Building in Manhattan. Photo: Erik McGregor/Sipa US/Alamy Live News

"Whatever your first issue of concern, media had better be your second, because without change in the media, progress in your primary area is far less likely." — Nicholas Johnson, former Federal Communications Commissioner

Protecting your sources is a golden rule in reporting, and I recall being horrified when a reporter neglected to blur the face and alter the voice of a source who mouthed off on camera about a well known Los Angeles gangster.

I yelled at the television: “He’s gonna get killed!”

And within a week, the source was dead. 

I have written books with the rapper Ice T and with the bodyguard of Tupac Shakur, and I produced a TV news series called Thug Life about former gang members who had turned their lives around. I knew a few things about the streets, and I knew when the reporter neglected to blur his source’s face that the source was a dead man walking.

I had been doing the job long enough to know that reporters need to protect their sources from themselves. 

Reflecting back on that era almost seems quaint now. Fox News has become a fully deployed weapon of mass destruction — both on the minds of viewers, who buy the unreality the Murdochs sell them, and how that very same propaganda can kill people, as evidenced by the Fox viewers body count during from the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of lives due to the Insurrection.