Fox and Its Friends:Global Commodification and the New Cold War Dennis Broe (bio) Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, the Fox Network's parent entity, is, of the nine major media conglomerates (along with Viacom, Bertelsmann, Warners, Sony, Liberty Media, AT&T, GE, and Disney),1 the most global in scope—"the only real global media company that covers the world"2 —and often seen as the model global media conglomerate. What are the characteristics of this model? First, a drive toward accumulation expressed as either a desire to gain total control of a market or to link with other conglomerates and share control. Second, an almost frenzied fetishization of the value of "entertainment," extended both to news and fictional forms. Third, where possible, an expression of open support for the current paradigm of ruling [End Page 97] elite hegemony, neoliberalism. Neoliberalism consists of government opening of foreign and domestic markets to corporate control accompanied by rhetoric endorsing the formal trappings of democracy. Fox's support of these policies took form initially in the backing of Thatcher-Reaganite deregulation, with an attendant attack on government. Post-9/11, Fox has also directly supported the addition to this agenda of global warfare. With respect to each characteristic, Fox often led the way, but the other media conglomerates have followed suit. This article will employ an extrinsic/intrinsic method of reading both the Fox Corporation and one of its most visible products, the Fox Television series 24. The goal is to describe the significant shift that has occurred at Fox post-9/11, a shift that might be characterized as an acceleration detectable both in the global monopolistic policies of the corporation and in the form and content of its media representations. This shift occurring at Fox is in line with the sector of U.S. capital that is determined to span the globe in search of the lowest wage possible, in a "race to the bottom."3 This economic offensive is coupled with increasing militarization in a series of both "cold" and "hot" confrontations. The News Corporation has taken the lead among major media conglomerates in supporting this link, most recently when Fox Cable News trumpeted the war in Iraq and, subsequently, during the war, when Fox passed CNN in the ratings and became the most watched cable news network. To examine the Fox network itself, the extrinsic industrial environment in which 24 is produced, I will deploy the techniques of what is now an extensive body of work on the media in the field of political economy. This holistic approach enables us to describe the structure of any media conglomerate in relation to the process of capital accumulation within the wider network of power relations in the society as a whole.4 Switching gears, I will then examine 24 from the inside, concentrating first on, in Theodor W. Adorno's terms, how the series displays through its form the productive processes of the era of globalization5 and, second, how the series yokes these processes through its content to the new cold war by eliciting alliance with a vigilante lead character and promoting a regime of fear. The reading of the so-called war on terrorism as similar in scope and aim to the anticommunism of the former cold war is, of course, denied by media outlets such as the Fox News Channel, which operate in a perpetual present or in a historical moment that began on September 11, 2001. The promotion of an external enemy for the purposes of global domination and of quelling domestic dissent, coupled with the revival of a faltering economy through military spending, are characteristics in common with the Cold War. The current endless war is a global civil war fought by an apparently triumphant capitalist system against both a new, more ethnically diverse and predominantly female working class and a global anticorporate movement. At the center, this war takes the form of attacks on wages and curbs on civil rights, while at the periphery, war is more openly declared against states with natural resources (oil, natural gas, water). The capitalist system may dominate space and time, but it confronts both an increasingly more resistant...