Fox News CEO Wants the Network to Become a Smidgen Less Racist

Your racist uncle’s most trusted source in racist news, Fox News, is trying to be a little less racist. Like a smidgen less racist? A pinch.

Politico reports that Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott gathered the network’s producers recently for a bit of a scolding, imploring them to have better control over the hosts and guests if they get too bigoted. Which is like, always! Every single day on the network. Every minute?

Scott told the producers that they would be held accountable for anything said on their air, and that it was their job to head off any inappropriate remarks, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting. Appearing via video conference from Washington, D.C., to the group in New York, which also included programming executives, Scott read from a prepared script, explaining that she wanted to make sure she communicated her message precisely.

“She said, ‘You are responsible for protecting the talent, protecting the brand,’” one of the people aware of the meeting said. “She said, ‘You are responsible as the producers. You have to protect the talent and the brand.’”

Fox News had been at the center of a notable string of bigoted controversies prior to the meeting: Laura Ingraham compared the facilities migrant children are held to summer camp; Ann Coulter called migrant children “child actors;” former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said “womp womp” in response to a story of a migrant child with Down syndrome being separated from her mother.

In the days after the meeting, conservative commentator and former Trump Deputy Campaign Manager David Bossie told black Democratic strategist Joel Payne that he was out of his “cotton picking mind” in the middle of a segment on racism. Fox News host, Ed Henry, denounced the racist comment in the next segment and Bossie has since been suspended. For Fox News, that’s what progress looks like, I guess?