Dana Milbank writes today about the latest Fox News lie, the Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim:
It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.
This is exactly right. We can and should treat the founders, shareholders, employees, advertisers, and boosters of Fox News with nothing but shame and contempt. They know the harm they're causing, but the money is good so they keep on doing it.
But it's a different story for the rank-and-file viewers of Fox News. They're victims as much as the rest of us. It's hard to say that they should be treated with empathy—I guess I'm just not a good enough person to go that far—but at the very least they should be recognized for what they are: marks in a con game run by Rupert Murdoch. They don't deserve the contempt that the folks helping to run the con so richly deserve.
The con game is not something that was invented by Rupert Murdoch, it is a deliberate strategy adopted by Republicans starting over 50 years ago. They switched from being the party of equal right to being the party of white supremacy, and they got an immediate payoff in the election of Nixon and Reagan. The way this campaign has been waged has changed - the invention of cable TV opened up the possibility of dedicated propaganda outlets and Murdoch took advantage of this. If Fox News had not arisen, some other outlet would have. The internet opened up still more propaganda opportunities. The response of liberals has to be more than just blaming Fox News.
+1
You are soooo right on that one. Don't forget that before Murdoch launched FOX, he had to be -- and was -- granted citizenship. By Ronald Reagan.
He also rebuilt the FOX brand for television on the backs of Black targeted shows like In Living Color, Martin, & Living Single, then pivoted to hating people who look like Martin Lawrence when Roger Ailes jumped ship from CNBC to start FOXnews.
I suppose in a world in which none of this mattered, where our health and our democratic system of government were not in grave danger, we could afford to make such distinctions.
But no, we don't live in that world, and anyone who spouts anti-science or fascist propaganda needs to be called out forcefully.
+1
Ues
That is, Yes
in my experience, most fox news types are also huge assholes. sure, to some extent they're being conned, but the con is designed to appeal to selfish, racist, sexist, xenophobic jerks. aka republicans.
+1
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In my experience, they also tend to be gun owners, so having sympathy while afraid of them is simply not possible. I'm not fearful of farming relatives who own one gun for good reasons, friends who keep one safely held at home for possible emergency use, but where so many have multiple weapons & some give them to kids, I just cannot sympathize.
Yes
I seriously doubt my anti-vax and now politically lunatic nephew is influenced by Fox News. He is influenced by his lunatic pastor in his “Christian” church who I think would be just as looney without Fox News. And his mom is a nurse who keeps urging him to at least allow his kids to be vaccinated.
I think there are a lot of “churches” that hold similar views. Their pastors worship at the alter of Trump because they recognize him as grifter in chief.
Well, sure. The problem is, FOX grants his aired views and grievances the legitimacy they otherwise would not have.
Push me-pull you
Nope. They are not victims. They deserve all the scorn, ridicule, and contempt we can muster. And I’d also suggest beating the crap out them if you can. Left wing deaths squads! Why can’t we get some of these gangsters to whack them? We let them out of jail, now do some good!
Hmmmm.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/21/media-journalism-future-527294
I blame bloggers. They started it.
The Washingtonienne should have kept her downlow buttlove with Mike Dewine's Senate Chief of Staff in the bedroom.
It was all downhill after Jessica Cutler went public.
For me, it was Lush Rimbaugh broadcasting his hate to military camps in Vietnam.
Art speaks to a pre-existing state.
The elderly get sucked in--and they have my sympathies. As do kids who grow up with it....
But the man is the middle.....esp. those using it to fleece others....yeah....
Great observation about "the elderly." Apparently, lots of them log hours of teevie time, and if they're tuned to Faux News, they really don't seem to have much critical reasoning ability (anymore). They don't distinguish between what's even plausible and the most preposterous lies. They're perfect marks. Dupes. Suckers. Raised on Walter Cronkite, they think if it's on the teevie and called "news", it's true.
Many an adult has watched their elderly parent/grandparent fall under the Fox Spell.
I don't necessarily agree. Fox viewers want to hear this stuff, if they didn't, Fox wouldn't be selling it. In other words, I think it's the viewers driving the content.
Where Fox gets dangerous, and this admittedly makes my point grayer, is they exaggerate the problem by adding a legitimacy to the BS. Trotting out a couple of economists who think tax cuts pay for themselves can do a lot of damage if the corresponding 100's who disagree are never shown or at best shown as an equivalency.
Don't get me wrong, Hannity, Carlson, lowest of the low, and they know what they're doing, but the people showing up want to hear this stuff.
Did you all see the same Biden press conference that I did? I don't need Fox News to tell me that Biden is losing mental acuity.
I watched and he seemed fine to me. Could you describe how you reached your conclusion?
Right wingers like to say shit like that because Democrats questioned Trump’s mental health. There was a period of time when I, for one, suspected Trump had Alzheimer’s. His speech patterns on occasion certainly mimicked those of my father in his early stages of the disease. Later, I came of the opinion that Trump suffered from sleep deprivation and perhaps loose dentures.
But questions regarding Trump’s mental health were what led him to take that test that he bragged about “passing with flying colors”, person woman man camera tv. My dad, even well into the disease passed the test.
It’s difficult to say whether there’s anything wrong with Trump apart from the obvious mental illnesses (narcissistic and sociopath) but it’s clear that he has some problems which he didn’t have when he was younger. My own thoughts were that he’s a chronic abuser of adderall (which would explain his poor sleep) and needs glasses which he’s too vain to admit. Loose dentures is certainly a possibility.
Nevertheless, his thinking does seem chaotic and unfocused. But some of this is consistent with narcissism. Probably will need an autopsy to really know.
If it's not a word salad filled with hate & lies, some people don't recognize it as good speech.
Was he wearing the same earpiece as Bush-43 at the first debate with Provolone Surfboard?
He seemed not only lucid, but communicated well, addressed the questions, and made sense. That former guy would have just raged on and on about his "Sacred Landslide". Using no more than 20 distinct words, all of them simple.
You counted 20 words? Must have been a good day for him.
This is projection.
Don't feed the troll.
If that was true, it’s amazing how an old man in that state is so so so much better than any of the “leaders” of the Republican Party. If that is true, the gop is even worse off than I thought. I’m not a Biden fan, but the alternative is a group of thugs who are enemies of democracy. Easy choice.
Maybe if he had used smaller words you would have understood it better.
The reality is there's more than one type of Fox News viewer. Some are racist jerks who know, deep in their hearts, that the outcomes they want are profoundly wrong and unjust. But they support the things they do (and consume the news they consume) out of resentment and bitterness. They're like Gollum. I know one or two like these. And there are also Fox News viewers who genuinely are entirely bereft of the ability to analyze what's going on in the world. And they really do believe the stuff Murdoch pushes on them. Such people are profoundly ignorant.
The world is a complicated place.
+1
It's hard to vilify an entire group of people who failed to develop a crap detector by the time they became adults. But I usually do so anyway.
Hmmm… hard to argue with the accusations of hypocrisy. 😂
“Biden is in the clutches of pontificating and condescending progressives who speak voter suppression because one needs to show voter id, while mandating proof of vaccine to eat in a San Francisco restaurant. The irony and hypocrisy are stunning.”
If you equate voter suppression with keeping the community safe, then, I can see your point.
I don't agree, as "voter ID" is a "solution" in search of a problem, while vaccines actually do help solve a deadly problem.
As a lefty guy, I try to be on the lookout for such inconsistencies. If I want to be anti-war then I have to grapple with the challenges posed by evil governments and terrorists. If I want people to be responsible, I have to figure out what to do with those who aren’t.
That example may be an imperfect analogy, but it gets to the challenges of creating systems of accountability and responsibility. Some things we care about and so we are content to impose on people to encourage one behavior and discourage another.
Even if they are victims, it doesn't mean they aren't victimizing.
They deserve contempt, even if for different reasons (e.g., many of them are just simply assholes).
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I had an interesting exchange upthread with iam4man which has caused me to think a little bit differently about Kevin’s argument that Fox News viewers don’t deserve our contempt. Upon more careful reflection, I think that, on the whole, they derive our contempt because they are as much in on the joke as Tucker or Hannity. My reason is that Fox News viewers remain loyal and don’t suffer from anything like the cognitive dissonance one might reasonably expect.
The campaign to portray Joe Biden as physically and mentally feeble is illustrative. I remember that during the 2020 campaign there was a concerted effort to portray Biden as a man so feeble that he couldn’t leave his basement or perform normal physical activities for a man of his age. This was pushed constantly by Fox News commentators and “reporters” and initially I took Kevin’s point that these people are living in a closed information system in which they’re constantly bombarded with propaganda. Et pourtant, this commentary or straight news reporting was invariably accompanied by video of Biden performing impressive physical feats such as vigorously riding his bicycle over long distances.
So this would be something viewers are watching that is completely inconsistent with the claims by Fox News. The viewer must be experiencing the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. This is clearly beyond the capability of most individuals to resolve the contradiction between the video and the discussion in order to reduce their discomfort. My thinking is that they’re not even trying.
In other words, they know that Fox News is spreading falsehoods and agitprop. They don’t experience dissonance because of an awareness that they are watching something that is factually untrue but which reinforces their tribal identity. And also tells them the current party line which they parrot, not because they believe it but instead because if it can be repeated enough, it will be believed and it will hurt the tribe’s enemies. They are willing participants who know they are spreading falsehoods but choose to do so because it helps their tribe. Which means that Fox News viewers do indeed deserve our contempt.
When a Fox News viewer hears about how enfeebled Joe Biden is at the same time as they're seeing images of him doing vigorous activity like riding a bike their reaction is not cognitive dissonance but an encouraging, invigorating sense of how great it is that a man so impaired can function, or seem to function, so well. It gives hope to the hopeless while as the same time assuring them of the incapacity of others.
It's not dissonance, it's weaponizing dissonance, smoothing it out into a narcotic bedtime story.
These are the people who think of Reagan as a towering figure, but he is only because he motivated a huge number of otherwise incompetent people to think that.
Its OK, Kevin, I have contempt enough to cover both, with an extra share for the fleecers
I work with many of these people. Hard to have sympathy for them. Maybe for their families, who, in several cases I see, disagree strongly with the trump fan.
No, no, there are millions of people who need their political-cultural biases reinforced.
Fox new viewer know exactly what they're buying (with their attention and ad dollars) and they want it. If it wasn't Fox, it would be someone else. Even they have been outflanked by new, even more wing-nutty outlets like OAN. The base knows it lives in an alternative reality and it *prefers* that reality. They idea is to live forever in white, Christian, small town 1950. These stations give them that.
Blame Fibre before Fox? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/23/internet-access-decline-civic-engagement-uk