Fox News reveals its "utter desperation" with claim that Tom Hanks was canceled

The Washington Post

On Sunday, NPR TV critic Eric Deggans responded to Hanks' New York Times essay, in which the actor reflected on not knowing about the Tulsa Race Massacre until last year even though he's a history buff. Deggans pointed out that Hanks has spent a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men "doing the right thing," from his many film roles to producing Band of Brothers, The Pacific, John Adams and From the Earth to the Moon for HBO. He urged Hanks to use his influence in elevating history to promote anti-racism. Deggans called Hanks a "non-racist" who should be an "anti-racist" in the wake of his guest column. The difference, said Deggans, is that "anti-racism implies action – looking around your universe and taking specific steps to dismantle systemic racism." But nowhere did Deggans call for Hanks to be canceled. Yet on Monday, Fox News picked up Deggans' column with the banner "Cancel Culture Comes for Tom Hanks." “Being white in America apparently has a lot of pitfalls,” said Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer said in his misleading description of the column. Deggans pushed back on Twitter: “Fox News associating my column with cancel culture is disingenuous and inaccurate. And now I have a new deluge of Fox fans who haven’t read my column objecting to something I haven’t said.” As The Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan notes, "accuracy is not really the point here. Nor is anything that can even loosely be called 'news.' Last fall, shortly after the election, as Fox teetered slightly — briefly losing audience share to Newsmax and One America to its right, and to CNN and MSNBC to its left — I had the quixotic notion of suggesting something that the network might do. With the cable network’s great hero Donald Trump moving off center stage, I thought perhaps Fox might want to pursue more hard-edged reporting about serious subjects. Beef up the news report; tone down the rhetoric. If they did it from a conservative perspective, fine. But they could at least make their programming about the news, not hyperpartisan commentary. It was probably always a pipe dream. But now it’s clear: Fox has gone entirely the other way."