I don't get it. Why is President Biden willing to go medieval on Facebook over vaccine disinformation, but isn't even willing to mention Fox News, a far more influential purveyor of vaccine falsehoods?
Priorities, people.
51 thoughts on “Biden should call out the vaccine lies on Fox News”
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It’s possible he doesn’t quite understand just how pernicious the influence of Fox News has been when it comes to vaccines? I have observed that a lot of people erroneously attribute a stronger negative influence to social media than to Fox News on a variety of areas, including vaccine hesitancy. Seems to me it’s possible the president or his advisers are no exception.
I think its difficult to weigh the relative influences of the two sources. Fox almost never delivers anything honest or constructive, but social media reach many times as many people, and the information is being exchanged between and among people who often know and trust each other.
It seems sensible for Biden to go after both.
It's fine if he went after both, but he definitely shouldn't let Fox News off the hook:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2021/01/fox-news-is-the-source-of-all-evil/
(What I want to know is: can't some grieving widow or widower or parent sue them for contribution to wrongful death?)
Of course, I agree with you about Fox News. They are a huge problem since their lingua franca is dishonesty.
Q: "contribution to wrongful death?"
I doubt it. In libel law, truth is an absolute defense, but, today in the U.S., stupidity seems like the go-to defense.
Fox: Your honor, you can't hold us responsible. We're all complete idiots.
Judge: You've got a point. Case dismissed.
More seriously, the media can always hide behind the First Amendment. Ironically, Trump would eliminate that freedom if he could - - except only for the "fake news," aka responsible journalism.
Part of it may be that older people still love tv but Facebook is new and gimmicky, and also it has a worldwide reach and a hard to address complexity where Fox has an easy to understand way it can be turned on or off.
On the other hand Facebook at least acknowledges it can do something while Fox insists it's real news and everyone in Washington acts like it's real news.
facebook isn't that new. It dates to the first Bush-43 term, & was as much contemporary then of friendster & meetup as it is contemporary now of tiktok & snapchat.
Also, I saw recently that facebook is returning to its roots as Zuckerberg's slutshaming spankbank by asking its users to send them its noodz so fb can create a database against which to crossmatch user posted revengeporn & remove it more efficaciously.
Also, look like Zuck's docile & pliant Asian wife might not be doing it for him anymore. (Did Richard Spencer lie when he said incels like Zuck just need to tie on one a yellow ribbon?)
Zuckerberg's just ready to die that he doesn't have a spaceship.
But I was thinking more of Biden's point of view in regard to calling out Fox News. To him it may seem like both an easier and a harder target, easier because there's is one person who could just change the whole thing, Rupert Murdoch, harder because it has an actual political party as it's fanbase.
So, rhetorically, Facebook will have fewer committed defenders.
"Some said our last president's Twitter proved he was more interested in being online than serving the people, & in part that's why we elected sedate, almost comatose, mentally-declining Biden. But it turns out, with his lambasting of facebook moderation of antivaxxx propaganda, that it is Biden who is too online".
The deep end is really shallow down at the bottom.
Playing that card would alienate a certain slice of the electorate even further. The general consensus is that the certain slice is too far gone to do anything about, but Presidents have that outlook that goes beyond consensus...and are always full of hope that the country will one day be whole again.
Ron Klain: “I’ve told Mark Zuckerberg directly that when we gather groups of people who are not vaccinated and we ask them, why aren’t you vaccinated, and they tell us things that are wrong, we ask them where they’ve heard that, the most common answer is Facebook.”
https://twitter.com/RonBrownstein/status/1416224981147602944?s=20
FB keeps up the pretense it is doing the right thing so pressure may force some change. Fox is irredeemable.
One difference between this year's surge and last year's is the kind of people admitted to hospitals. Nurses are taking a shitload of abuse. One med center had to post signs that harassing and assaulting the staff will not be tolerated. WTF?
The deplorables are also the unpersuadables. No outreach can reach them. But that's not all the unvaxed. The WH needs to reach the persuadables, hard as it may be. Who knows how many there are. A lot of them may respond only when (practically) forced to vax.
Deaths per Day (7-day avg): up 23% since 7/7 low
New Cases per Day (7-day avg): up 256% since 6/21 low
At what point does the GOP say, How many voters are going to survive till the next election?
Lol, your percentage is inflated by the low case totals. Keep on ignoring the bulk of unvaccinated are colored. Loser.
Black people are only about 14% of population so they could not come close to accounting for the majority of unvaccinated. Unvaccinated are over 60% in some states.
They are 25% of the prime age population. Try harder.
Prime age population is an even smaller number than overall population.
Ah, so an evidenced based reason.
Older people who watch fox news are vaccinated. It's younger coloreds and noncollege white that is the problem.
Collards?
Because his old boss tried that in 2009 and got his head handed to him.
Strike a king, kill a king. Biden and the Democrats either fight hard to utterly destroy the Murdoch family or they bend the knee. It’s a binary choice.
They surrendered long ago.
Then the ultimate Republican triumph is only a matter of time. It is impossible to win a war (or an electoral cycle) if your only response is to try to “rise above”.
Well, Foxy`s viewers do NOT believe Foxys lie - although they are paid to lie
Going medieval on Facebook? Well that has at least a little bipartisan cover (if only very little) under the “going after ‘Big Tech’” banner whereas “Big Fox” does not.
Speaking of “going medieval”… does this mean the beginnings of a change in perspective regarding https://jabberwocking.com/publishing-information-does-not-make-the-white-house-authoritarian/ ?
Outreach to the Hawley-Gabbard national conservative movement, & seeking to neuter online rabblerousing assholes like Michael Tracey & Glemm Greemwald who do not support it (allegedly), is almost as lost a cause as trying to give David Crosby a liver or Dick Cheney a heart.
Maybe Biden negotiates with people who might cooperate rather than pick a fight with Murdoch's windmills.
There’s negotiations from a position that improves one’s chances of success and there’s foolish appeals to the better angels of sociopaths.
Al Capone understood this and the Democratic leadership could learn much from him about power dynamics and the art of the deal. For example, as Big Al once sagely observed: you can get more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.
Start by calling it the Tucker Variant.
There is a deliberate, coordinated effort to stop vaccinations on Facebook, which has a far greater reach than FNC.
Russia targeted FB (FB and Instagram), not FNC, for a reason. Russia's targeting influencers into getting them to post disinfo. Effectively, they've turned influencers into Russian agents.
I agree with everyone, Facebook is more dangerous than Fox when it comes to vaccine & COVID-19 disinfo. Facebook and other social media reaches a broader audience, an audience that is not totally gone so there's hope that cracking down on social media might make a difference.
Also we should be heaping shame on atheletes who vaccine refusniks and lauding atheletes who are pro-vaccine. 50% of the Washington Football team is unvaccinated, the highest in the league despite the efforts of the coach to bring in public health experts for Q&A sessions with players. Of course WFT is such a major trainwreck I will be writing to whoever is governor next year (VA governors are elected year after presidential elections) to beg them to not support building a team stadium in Virginia. They are not reflective of Virginia values, they are not welcome where. Heck I want their training facilities gone too.
Better an NBA expansion team in Richmond or the Washington Spirit building a soccer complex in Alexandria than a Washington FT coliseum somewhere near Dulles.
Fox News is beneath contempt. Perhaps Biden's people feel that calling Fox out is a waste of time because it pretends that Fox is NOT beneath contempt.
Hey, you have NYT, WaPo, AP, Reuters, ABC, PBS, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN. The result? 79% of Americans don't believe your media. LOL
Looks like Kevin is going thru the President spending his morning calling into Fox & Friends withdrawal, & needs El Pepe Maximo to give him the fix that El Jefe no longer can.
Here's how Dan Crenshaw got elected to Congress,
https://i.redd.it/ov3ywuw9dsb71.jpg
He's obviously a man of some people, presumably.
Looks like a man in front of a typewriter.
Thanks anifa puke. Say howdy to AOC for us. LOL
I would suspect a number of reasons:
- Biden and his people may believe that going after FaceBook is not entirely pointless. They may actually have some success at influencing zuckerberg to make some tweaks. In the case of faux news, they may feel that it’s not just hopeless, but possibly…
- Going after faux news may be counterproductive. The network executives will raise a storm about the strong arm tactics of the totalitarian Biden regime; and,
On top of that, the Faux viewers would likely respond by just doing the opposite of whatever Biden and his people say. They’re members of a deeply pernicious cult, and they cannot be approached with any expectation that they will respond in a logical manner to a rational and reality based argument.
The only solution for dealing with any issues around faux news is to get it off the air. Short of that, every other effort is just more conspiracy fodder for the faux acolytes.
"The only solution for dealing with any issues around faux news is to get it off the air. "
Just remember that sooner or later, the powers that be will be people who regard your beliefs as false and misleading, and then you will be censored. Censorship is a double-edged sword. Better not to take it out of its sheath.
The solution to bad speech is more good speech. And that doesn't mean just routine public service announcements conjured up by administrators in public health agencies. I think that perhaps we're getting on the right track with celebrity endorsements. Though they shouldn't really influence rational people, people just aren't that rational. If celebrities and athletes can move peoples choices about consumer goods, maybe they can also move peoples choices about vaccination.
In general the “more speech” approach is commendable;
But, at some point, you have to wonder whether or not faux news isn’t the equivalent of yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.
No rights are absolute. So there’s always a need to strike a fine balance. And, at present, in the midst of a pandemic as well as a sustained assault on our democracy, I think it’s legitimate to question how much faux news should be allowed to continue its campaign against that fine balance.
I’m not going to look up the details now, but I’ve read that certain countries with a history of problems with fascism, such as Germany, do not allow broadcasters to just openly advocate for death, destruction, and right wing totalitarianism (as Faux appears to be doing). Pretty much all liberal attempts at democracy interpret and implement the ideal of free speech differently. And, after the 1/6/21 coup attempt, I think we may need to rethink our own approach as well.
Yep, in the end "progressives" are no different than the fascists you claim to oppose. Good luck getting our guns, kids. LOL
Would this include the "progressive" censorship of the lab origin of the virus? Not at all. China owns Xiden, and "progressives" bend over for China. Notice how your Hollywood friends no longer promote Tibet?
Falsehoods, you say? Look in the mirror, "progressives." You lie as effortlessly as you breathe, and you are stone-cold racists. LOL
Cordially,
The Latinx
"you are stone-cold racists"
Dude, it you going to just throw out sweeping, Trump-like insults constantly, please comment on some other blog. What's the point really? Do you think that calling people racists is going to change their minds on anything? Instead, you are just confirming the liberal-progressive bias that thinks conservatives are now the leading edge of political intolerance.
This is what you are, racist. These are YOUR people, Anglo racist.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/protests/portland-officer-shares-experience-as-black-man-on-protest-front-lines/283-94e5fedf-542b-4bbb-acc3-749e2b7aa7f7
Seems you are the only one expressing racist thoughts here. Being Latino does not give you a pass. Please consider the things you say to others.
Regarding the link, some leftwing/anarchist nutjobs in Portland do not represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Please make that distinction.
You are a violent, stone cold racist "progressive." Arrogant Anglo who thinks we Latinos want to join your blacks on your racist plantation. No thanks, hypocrite. LOL
The Latinx
Good point. I think Biden may be reluctant to call out the media because he wants to break the bad example set by Trump who said our media is trash (even if much of Fox News, especially the work of the commentators, is).
Biden is making an attempt at healing our culture, but if you read the Trumpee commenters on RW blogs you'd think he is the devil incarnate. Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt! Hunter! So Old! Dementia! Hunter was a drug addict! Hunter's laptop! Stolen election! Fauci!
Xiden is a senile, corrupt piece of shit.
I believe one reason is the abject terror that Democrats have of being accused of government censorship. A lot of the old geezers like Biden grew up in the time of the Soviet Union when state-controlled media was always the monster under the bed, especially on the left. And the activist left in this country always fixated on it because of legitimate abuses during the '50s and '60s. But there was nothing even remotely like the Media Oligarchy we have today. Fox News, and Newscorp generally, functions like the "state-controlled media" that created such abject terror in those old days, but they successfully pose as legitimate broadcast media. Even a hint of criticism launches them into faux outrage over "censorship," and it triggers that same ol' reaction in the old-timers. They simply can't grasp how massively the world of disinformation has changed.
So, "progressive" racist, you have MSNBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Pravda (NYT), WaPo, AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, and almost all of the failing metro dailies. The result: 21% of Americans trust your bullshit. LOL
Fox News is cable-based, and cable is about where Blockbuster was in 2010, at the precipice. Social nets are online and look to be with us for the foreseeable future.