Earlier this week, comedian, writer, and director Judd Apatow — the guy who made The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, to say nothing of his work as a producer on TV shows like Freaks and Geeks and Girls — declared social media war, as he has before on targets like Bill Cosby. But this time, Apatow had his sights trained squarely on Fox, specifically the studio’s movie and TV divisions. Apatow’s aim at 20th Century Fox was driven by the fact that Fox News has repeatedly depicted the detention centers where migrant children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border are being held as, essentially, summer camps, among other bizarre lies about the situation. Apatow wasn’t the first celebrity to arrive at this conclusion — he was just the loudest, perhaps because he doesn’t work for Fox. (His Apatow Productions has released movies with many other major studios, but typically Universal, and the last one of his TV shows to air on a Fox-owned network was Undeclared, which ran on Fox from 2001 to 2002 but was actually produced by Dreamworks Television.) Notably, anti-Fox News sentiment has been boiling among celebrity creators with longstanding associations with 20th Century Fox, beginning with Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, who said he was “embarrassed” to work for a company that also contained Fox News and tweeted about the restoration of the fairness doctrine, a former broadcasting rule that the Federal Communications Commission abandoned in 1987, which required stations to present all sides of controversial issues. (The restoration of the fairness doctrine probably wouldn’t change how Fox News does business, as the cable network is not overseen by the FCC, but it would definitely shift how local news stations report on issues.) MacFarlane’s statements caused a small groundswell of similar sentiment. Most notably, Modern Family co-creator Steven Levitan stated that after the upcoming 10th (and presumed final) season of Modern Family, he would be departing 20th Century Fox, which produces the show and other, less successful Levitan productions. It was the sole mention of someone with a longstanding deal with Fox directly stating they would no longer do business with Fox. A similar statement arrived from Paul Feig, who directed The Heat and Spy for 20th Century Fox and is the creator of Freaks and Geeks and a longtime friend of Apatow. In and of itself, this push from Hollywood’s creative folks against their corporation’s news division is fairly unprecedented, though it hasn’t exactly been hard over the past two decades to find progressives who get paychecks from 20th Century Fox who also quietly grumble about the influence of Fox News. Levitan’s statement, in particular, marks an escalation in this particular Hollywood cold war. Or it would, if 20th Century Fox and Fox News weren’t about to be entirely separate companies.
