Is there a civil war brewing inside Fox?

For years, the corporation has seemed like a John Gray book: the entertainers are from Mars, the newscasters are from Venus. The actors, writers and producers who create films and TV shows tend to be liberal; the anchors on Fox News tend to be conservative. It’s like cats and dogs living in a mansion, but in different soundproof rooms.

That last part changed this week.

Now the entertainers are hissing at the barking anchors.

The flashpoint for this clash is Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy, which had been tearing refugee families apart. Most of America and the world is horrified by the sights and sounds of kids sobbing as they’re ripped from the arms of their parents and locked in cages inside abandoned big-box stores.

Make no mistake: this is state-sanctioned child abuse. You don’t need to be a developmental psychologist to grasp the trauma. As former first lady Laura Bush wrote in the Washington Post, the policy is “cruel” and “immoral.”

The only way Trump could make his disdain for American values more symbolically clear is if he were to replace the Statue of Liberty with a giant pitchfork. Border control and immigration — that’s about policy and enforcement.

A policy that forces families to separate — that’s about evil.

But not everyone is morally aghast. Not everyone has a heart.

Over on Fox News, many pundits have defended the indefensible or downplayed the treachery. On Trump’s favourite show, Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy balked at the notion child detainees were held in “cages.” Instead, he described one prison as “a great big warehouse facility where they built walls out of chain-link fences.”

Electric chair? No, to Doocy, that’s just a smart La-Z-Boy. Broken glass? That’s just tiny sculptures lovingly crafted from liquid sand. Go ahead and walk over it; you can pretend it’s the beach before paramedics arrive.

So, yes, this zero-tolerance policy has once again revealed that Fox News broadcasts from a sunshiny parallel universe in which reality is inverted, the truth is up for debate and Trump is a divine overlord who is to be adored and never questioned.

The spiritual forebear to Fox News is not Edward R. Murrow — it’s Leni Riefenstahl.

Fox News once attacked Barack Obama for eating Dijon mustard. Trump could launch a surprise nuclear attack on the city of Dijon and Sean Hannity would orgasm: “The people of Burgundy had this coming! It’s Crooked Hillary’s fault!”

Or consider this: while Laura Bush sees the new refugee detention centres as “eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II,” Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham sees them as “summer camps.” Yes, what a blessed opportunity for those ungrateful minority freeloaders to expand their horizons by sleeping under tinfoil blankets and telling ghost stories around a bonfire that is America’s reputation going up in flames.

And this “Problem? What problem? Everything is great!” tone of immigration coverage on Fox News has finally pushed some Fox entertainers too far.

After Tucker Carlson, Fox’s smug talking head with the constipated resting face, encouraged viewers to “always assume the opposite of whatever they're telling you on the big news stations,” Seth MacFarlane, creator of Family Guy, tweeted he was “embarrassed” to work for the same company.

Steve Levitan, creator of Fox Television’s Modern Family, and Paul Feig, who has made two films for Fox, echoed the sentiment. Producer Judd Apatow, who hasn’t worked for the company in 16 years, encouraged those who remain to “speak out against destroying families and how Fox News supports these policies.”

But instead of threatening to leave Fox, as Feig did, should powerful entertainers not stick around to fight from the inside? Though it often seems to be part of the lunatic fringe, Fox News is the top-rated cable network. It is more quote-unquote MSM than many of the rival outlets it disparages.

Shunning it is pointless. Until viewers decide Fox News is a “propaganda arm of this evil administration,” as Apatow puts it, fleeing the entertainment side will only embolden the news division. Retreat is not an option.

Guilt-by-association is not just a useless response — it’s self-defeating.

So instead of heading for the exits, Fox entertainers should make inroads with news colleagues who are not part of the Trump Cult. It’s easy to forget, but Fox News employs many talented journalists who broadcast with integrity and intellectual honesty. Hollywood should not ignore Fox News because of Hannity, who is a lost cause. It should champion journalists such as Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace. It should lavish praise on contributors such as Andrew Napolitano and Geraldo Rivera, Trump supporters who’ve broken ranks over this zero-tolerance depravity.

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Fox entertainers could also use their cultural influence and financial clout to help fund investigative and public-service reporting you don’t see on Fox News. This is exactly what MacFarlane did this week when he quietly donated $2.5 million to NPR. You don’t go to war with fake news and partisan spin by pretending neither exists. You battle those anti-democratic forces by arming journalists on the front lines, the guerrilla soldiers trying to tell the truth when the truth itself is under siege.

Sometimes good things come from terrible events.

And by defending Trump’s malevolent immigration policy, Fox News has put itself on wobbly ground. Instead of turning away, Fox entertainers should help tip it over.

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