Is FoxNews a News Organization or a Terrorist Organization?

How many hours a day is there a Special Alert graphic flashing Warning!!! in the corner of the FoxNews screen?

Multiplied by 12 months a year. For how many years now?

Times how many millions of viewers?

For what purpose is this constant High Alert status maintained?

…other than to agitate and unsettle and create fear in viewers of FoxNews?

David Weigel at Slate wrote a piece about this in 2012.

The perpetual high alert status of FoxNews is itself a kind of terrorism.

It is a constant, urgent, near-hysterical threat warning being pushed at millions watching on TV.

What is the purpose? Is there a need as urgent as the urgency of the flashing words? What does it do to people to feel compelled to be constantly alert to imminent danger? And danger of what?

Is it vital to keep the people in Portland, Oregon in an alarmed state of vigilance because of a violent act in Chattanooga?

The alarm is more to the purpose than the information, which is not delivered in a responsible fashion but in a fashion designed to elevate the audience’s worst fears, its most irrational hatreds, its most violent instincts. It is a social medium for the antisocial monster inside all of us.

There isn’t any official public safety purpose for the constant alert status flashing on FoxNews. We know this because FoxNews also promotes a constant drumbeat of condemnation for anything from our government or its officials…unless they are Republican officials.

The FoxNews constant WARNING! beacon flashes day and night for the sole purpose of creating feelings of vulnerability and unease and alarm and mutual suspicion and hate among as many people as possible. Because they are the most watched network on broadcast cable they have millions of threat-addicted viewers.

And that unease/alarm/suspicion/hate is put to a very specific and clear purpose: to make people susceptible and receptive to the messages that follow or accompany the constant alert. Namely the hard right agenda of FoxNews and Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. (Ailes originally conceived of FoxNews while working in the Nixon White House. His concept was to be called GOPTV.)

The stern, know-all visages of the FoxNews anchors play a role very similar to the hectoring face of Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. “Stay tuned here and you will be safe. Stay tuned and do what we tell you to do and you will be safe.”

Granted, CNN has its own case of Breaking News Syndrome, but the agenda is less direct and coherent and one-sided. There’s less browbeating at CNN. The brow furrowing of the CNN anchors is more fake concern than stern condemnation and alarm, which is how I’d describe the brow furrowing and Obama-mocking that Fox engages in.

AdWeek's TV news column addressed this alert-pandering of CNN a few years ago. But the motivation is audience goosing and profit boosting, not political.

FoxNews has used the electric jolt of the alert beacon to kick people into line on a variety of issues. Most of them unrelated to the particular, often small and isolated, events being pushed by the flashing warning.

Fox has used shootings to drive the NRA agenda. They’ve also used the "fear candy" of isolated shooting incidents to drive the agenda of ExxonMobil and Koch International.

“Come to be entertained by the gun violence. Stay to be forcibly persuaded that 99% of the climate scientists are engaged in a massive climate change hoax.”

It’s like the old National Lampoon cover: “Buy this magazine or we’ll shoot this dog.”

Only FoxNews is saying it this way: “Buy this irrational mistrust of the government and scientists and experts and public education and liberals and people of color and Muslims and people you don’t know who happen to be walking past on the sidewalk in front of your home. If you don't someone will invade your home and murder your family.”

"Be Vigilant” Fox is saying “And Do As We Tell You.”

The constant alert has been a very effective way to kick people into line on a narrow set of ideas and orthodoxies. It’s also helped enlist viewers to kick their elected officials (of both parties) into line with these orthodoxies: pro fossil fuel, anti science, pro guns, anti immigrants, pro Republican, anti Democratic, pro military spending (except when it requires more tax dollars to care for veterans), anti diplomacy (even when it means cutting spending for embassy security in dangerous parts of the world), etc. It’s pro America and anti everybody else (especially our allies) but it’s mostly pro American business. (And it’s less pro American business than it is pro American business CEOs and pro CEO pay and anti taxes on CEOs.)

I think it’s time to exclude FoxNews from the honorable category of Journalism and sort them into their proper category of propaganda. But they are engaging in more than propaganda. What they are using to sell their propaganda is the non-stop terroristic threat they flash in the corner of their screen for many hours of every week.

We need to admit it. FoxNews is a terror organization. And it is larger and more influential and has a larger devoted following than ISIS or al Qaeda.

Earlier this year Forbes posted this excellent review of a film about how Fox brainwashes its viewers.

And the Daily Beast posted this story written by the filmmaker and the father she said had been deranged by FoxNews.

This article in the New Republic calls it Angry Fox Geezer Syndrome.

This article in the American Conservative agrees that FoxNews is in the business of agitation not information.

Fox is a propaganda network. A terror organization. It is the loud voice shouting FIRE in a crowded theatre. It is in the business of mass intimidation and retribution as surely as the information offices operated by Josef Goebbels––the original dispenser of the Big Lie.

FoxNews's purpose is to enforce obedience through fear and to incite violence and hate against those who disagree. It is the brownshirt of American media. The mob-whisperer. The presser of our most violent buttons. It is not a news organization.

Finally, the day I posted this story, Italian media was discussing a similar problem in that country. For decades their politics were poisonous, largely because of the right wing opportunist who became their president, Silvio Berlusconi. A vulgar, misogynistic, loudmouth with fascist tendencies who happened to be a media billionaire. Yesterday, Pope Francis condemned Berlusconi's style of news reporting, which is essentially character assassination by mass media. Which is very much like the FoxNews model of "some say" journalism and hyper partisanship. It poisons the public conversation. It destroys people's trust in journalism. It destroys their ability to sort truth from lies.

Bias In Journalism...and it aint' liberal

(Trump Gets All the Media Attention. While Bernie Has More Voter Support)

Dear ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, TIME, et al...

ABC World News Tonight Has Devoted 81 Minutes To Trump, One Minute To Sanders. This according to The Tyndal Report, which tracks these things.

Endless focus on a outrage-spewing narcissist demoralizes voters. Is that the goal?

The bogus false equivalency standard makes it hard to call out the outrageousness, because failure to find an equal amount of outrage on the Democratic side would make the news organization feel guilty of bias. So instead they air it without analysis. Unfiltered. And the public assumes what is not called a lie must be the truth, what is not labelled outrageous must be publicly acceptable.

Do we require every bit of sound science be balanced with an equal amount of garbage science? Well…. maybe we do see that a lot.

Which makes my point.

TIME chose Ms. Merkel, a remarkable woman most Americans spent about five minutes hearing about this past year and weren’t really interested. Why choose Merkel? Because the obvious contenders were Trump and Sanders. Trump is too disgusting to pick for this honor. Sanders then? Not on your life. It would be biased of TIME to reject a quasi-Republican near-fascist and pick a lefty pragmatist. Their ad sponsors would revolt. (Leftist revolts aren’t the kind they worry about.)

Our news media is seriously messed up.

Maybe you can discuss this over the weekend and think about your coverage going forward.

Pasquino

http://pasquino.blogspot.com

Really? Can That Be True?

The Independent of London published a story today explaining how Margaret Thatcher was actually a liberal. Really? I said. Then I read the article. Not really.

Actually it said, or seemed to say, that Margaret Thatcher was liberal toward arch-conservatives, tolerant of her own race and class, openhanded and generous with the very rich, and permissive with capitalists who found corrupt practices useful and government regulation a nuisance. She was not a liberal. It was just a tease. "We dare you to read this article." It was a provocation.

That is the point. Not honesty. Not truth. Not fact or provable logic. It’s all about provocation.

My wife summarized it in one word: CLICKBAIT.

News media are starved for validation, for numbers that will justify their ad rate, just as we are starved for the validation of “likes” on Facebook. That validation is the volume of clicks. The reader may exit the page dumber than he was going in. He may stop partway through and throw his laptop across the room in disgust. No matter. The website already scored the click. Clicks are drawn by provocation. “Come see the bearded lady” who is really a man in a dress. “Come read about this outrage.” This is the most popular because one provocation arrives with sidebars about other provocations, some of them less about issues that they are about sexual titillation.

The point is this: DONALD TRUMP AND BEN CARSON ARE CLICKBAIT FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.

It doesn’t matter if they are wrong or lying or depraved or monstrous or sociopathic or psychopathic, they drive the key numbers that justify media ad revenue. Sarah Palin, the dumbest of them all (who last week said Jesus would fight for Second Amendment rights, which caused me to ring a little bell on the revenue justifier for whichever site reported it) is the ur-clickbait candidate.

We are growing stupid because of this––because journalism is supposed to inform. It’s supposed to make us smarter, to inform our judgments. Instead it is turning us into 300 million rats in a giant advertising experiment.

We are entering a second and more voluble age of yellow journalism. (I expect soon to read some editorial demanding war with Spain) with the national conversation corrupted and whipsawed for profit. It’s not just a dumbing down, it’s a brutalizing process. Donald Trump eggs on some of his followers beating up a black man one second and the next he’s lying that thousands of Muslims cheered when the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11. Really? Is that true? “Some say…” is the FoxNews standard.

I used to have a friend who constantly said “Really?” about stuff we were kidding about. We would drop some preposterous falsehood into the conversation and she’d say “Really?” and we would all laugh at her. (We were brutes. This was years ago.) This is now the business model of journalism. The spokesmodels for this are Pat Robertson, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Rick "Oops" Perry and Victoria Jackson. The beneficiaries are the monied backers who want a large gullible electorate to give them power.

Laughing at Rupert Murdoch, Ha Ha

We can laugh at Rupert Murdoch all we want, but he's laughing at us because he has enormous power over us. Think of it: a right-wing Australian owns a dominant part of the American media, the key parts being the Wall Street Journal and FoxNews. He uses these platforms to lie to us. Does he also use them to spy on us?

The Daily Show's take is funny in a creepy kind of way. Andy Borowitz's piece begs the question: are the readers and viewers of Murdoch's news operations intelligent enough to be granted adult privileges? Should Murdoch be trusted with a news operation at all?

No, we shouldn't laugh. News tells us what to do in our lives, and if we are lied to we behave like fools. Corrupt news is a public danger. Here is an excellent summary of the Rupert Murdoch machine, with excellent links.

The shameless, predatory propaganda 'n scandal sheet News of the World [sic] is just one media enterprise owned by Rupert Murdoch. He also owns the Times of London, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and FoxNews. Would you guess that he runs his other organizations any differently than the runs the NOTW?

Ran, actually. The British public, after being nauseated and addicted by it for years finally had enough and Murdoch shut it down...presumably shifting the vermin from that paper to his other papers. Not to FoxNews, presumably, because it's all vermined-up. But it does make you wonder... Does the Wall Street Journal engage in the same criminal tactics to get news and to distort the news into balloon animals to amaze its captive audience? What about the New York Post? What about FoxNews? Dumb question. I think we need an aggressive progressive paper like the Guardian over here. It was the Guardian that blew the lid off the News of the World [sic] sleaze factory.

The Rupert Murdoch Propaganda Machine

Rupert Murdoch lies for profit. Coincidentally, his newspapers and broadcast companies function as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party here and the conservatives in Britain. Their power is his power and he does very well for them.

The News of the World, the infamous London tabloid, fools millions of working class Brits every week with its addictive sleaze and distortion. Their methods are outrageous. The most recent revelation involves the Murdoch tabloid reporters and editors hacking into the cell phone of a kidnapped child, leading frantic parents to believe she was still alive, stripping the privacy and dignity of crime victims to sell newspapers. The story was broken by reporter Nick Davies of the Guardian.

This is predatory journalism. Actually, to use the word journalism degrades that important and often heroic profession. What Rupert Murdoch's company engages in isn't journalism, it's just predatory. Rupert Murdoch thinks of the reading public as so many defenseless and deceivable chumps.

This behavior isn't any different at FoxNews here in the U.S. TruthOut published a very good piece recently about the set of tactics used. The "news" operation is run by Roger Ailes, who is not a newsman but one of the most egregious practitioners of smear politics and dirty tricks, and a deep-dyed Republican. Rolling Stone recently published an excellent and damning portrait of Ailes.

FoxNews makes no pretense of actual truth or decency. Beyond its cynical slogan of "Fair and Balanced" there is no attempt to be either. The stream is all pro-Republican and harshly anti-Democratic 24 hours a day. News is a team sport. it's about winning the political game to push Murdoch's right-wing agenda as hard as it can be pushed and thereby increase Murdoch's personal wealth and corporate power.

The Murdoch operation is a throwback to the ugly press of an uglier time. Shades of Germany in the 1930s, and a period in this country when newspaper magnates bragged about starting wars in order to sell newspapers. The goal of the Murdoch organization isn't to inform but to provoke.

They are willing to intentionally distort and misrepresent clear facts about the most critical issues of our time to toe an ideological line and win a political ballgame. (This piece by Shawn Otto describes how Fox took a Reuters headline about global climate change and changed it to give it the opposite meaning, helping stall efforts to head off the looming calamity.)

What Fox does is insulting and beyond dishonest, it's criminally dishonest. FoxNews has demonstrated again and again that it doesn't deserve to be allowed anywhere near the public airwaves, any more than an embezzler should be handed the presidency of a bank.