Posted on 02/16/2014 7:50:42 PM PST by campg
We deserve better than Fox News
I’ve gathered information for this column from two recent books: David Brock’s “The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine” (2012) and Gabriel Sherman’s “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” (2014).
Both books deserve serious attention, if only to refute. If you watch Fox News, you owe it to yourself to understand its history and outlook. If you find Fox News unbalanced and unfair, both books offer powerful support.
Thinking Americans — whether liberal or conservative — have every reason to feel deeply, constantly, seriously dissatisfied.
Consider:
(1) Watching Fox News/Nation degrades your knowledge of our world. Granted, a few hits of Hannity or O’Reilly now and then won’t hurt, but regularly believing Fox pundits’ assertions only makes you ignorant. Brock points out that “Polls consistently find Fox News viewers among the most ignorant on a variety of issues.”
He goes on to list several bits of misinformation that Fox viewers tell pollsters they believe because they heard it on Fox. Moreover, “the University of Maryland released a study finding that Fox News viewers were the most misinformed audience of any major news network.”
According to that study, 91 percent of Fox viewers believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs, 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit, 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse, 63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts, 56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout. It goes on.
And Fox viewers constantly get told that Obama has become a dictator because of his constant use of executive orders. The truth: Obama has issued the fewest executive orders of any president, certainly including G.W. Bush. (168 to 291).
I strongly believe in checking with a variety of sources on all assertions from media, but especially anything from Fox News. By the way, if you think the “mainstream media” is just as bad, you’ve already been Fox-newsed.
2. Fox’s pundits and its biased news amount to paranoid and melodramatic nonsense much of the time, thanks to boss Roger Ailes. Ailes, the founder and overseer of Fox, behaves as if the whole world is out to get him and runs his news outfit like any paranoid would -- obsessed with grand conspiracies, filled with fear and hatred of anyone who opposes his wacky ideas.
As Sherman points out, “Through Fox, Ailes helped polarize the American electorate, drawing sharp, with-us-or-against-us lines, demonizing foes, preaching against compromise.” At least some of our current gridlock goes back to hard right groups who leap off the deep end at the very mention of compromise.
Brock’s book enhances that point, “Ailes’s paranoid style and its resulting aggressive and over-the-top reactions create a climate of fear among current and former employees. [A biographer of Rupert Murdoch] observed, ‘Everybody outside Fox News and Inside News Corp. is afraid of Roger Ailes.”
3. The best reason to question Fox? Personal health, both mental and physical. Taking Fox’s distorted worldview seriously will make you as paranoid and angry as they are. Fox viewers become victims of “confirmation bias,” meaning they get told only what they want and need to believe.
They assert that Obama is a socialist, then only show stories that supposedly prove it. Or the “worst president ever.” That opinion is simply ridiculous, but not to those who only watch Fox News. That’s all they hear and know.
In a surprisingly short time, steady viewers see evidence of Fox’s absurdities everywhere. Any ideas to the contrary get put in the “enemy” camp.
They grow to distrust anyone who brings up opposing ideas, and end up stressed out, furious, and impossible to talk to about anything but weather and sports. That’s where we are now, thanks partly to Ailes and Fox News.
We all deserve better.
How fast can you say “draft dodger?” I knew you could...
David Brock! LOL! The homosexual David Brock? LOL!
I remember reading "The Real Anita Hill". It was solidly researched and documented.
Then he received a one MILLION dollar bonus from American Spectator to write a Hillary biography.
It was actually surprising, because it was rather boring, and not full of real insights, like his Anita hill book.
Soon thereafter he wrote his "apology" to Bill Clinton, and attacked Emmett Tyrell, the American Spectator publisher.
Now he completely disavows his work in the Hill and Hillary book, by saying he was just "making it all up".
Why this guy is "trusted" by the left is beyond me.
Apparently he can be bought, if the price is right.
He's the "journalist" equivalent of Charlie Crist.
Complete sludge with no real moral center.
Wouldn't surprise me if the Soros $ dried up, he'd attempt suicide.
One can close comments on a video. It could have a link to redirect to an FR thread for those who want to discuss.
“Fox News isn’t perfect, but it is the closest thing to real journalism left in this country.”
In the seats and between the foul poles! A home run.
I’ve pretty much turned off the TV news. Get most of my news here at FReepers, BriteBart, The UK Telegraph, The UK Guardian & the AFP.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion even if they do lump care-givers and murderers together.
OK. just WTF is that????
As oppose to ancient Roman Letters????
Who cares what this Marxist thinks? We need a true Conservative TV network.
Pray America wakes up
The International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) was established to promote and foster contemporary imaginative writing.
Modern Letters postgraduate creative writing programmes - PhD
Well, yeah.
But I’m old enough to remember what it was like before FoxNews.
And I’m very grateful for Fox.
““Polls consistently find Fox News viewers among the most ignorant ...”
THIS IS A BLATANT LIE.
The MSM get away with it because their msgs are aimed at people who don’t watch FOX - and not to those who do.
I have some people on FOX I can’t watch .. and there’s a whole new bunch of ultra lefties recently .. Bill Press; Carville .. just to name a couple. If this is the route FOX is planning to take .. they’ll sink their own ship.
If everyone is so dissatisfied with Fox News, why is it trouncing the other outlets in the ratings?
Dumbass.
And what’s that station at the bottom of the ratings? Maybe you should write about their problems, Brock...hmmmmm?
Of course it is - that is why you are complaining, isn’t it?
But the serious question is, “Why are essentially all journalists promoters of socialism?” If you can answer that, you will know why rich conservatives don’t start a conservative channel.I posit that journalists are socialism promoters because that is the natural result of being in the business of writing and talking rather than of working and making decisions in a timely fashion - that is to say, before knowing all the ramifications of those decisions. If all you do is talk, the only way you can impress people is by criticizing and second-guessing the people who actually do things. And IMHO the best definition of socialism is, “the theory that the affairs of men should be controlled by people who have not sullied themselves with experience which would inform their decision making, but rather have promoted themselves by criticizing those who actually have credentials and experience running things.”
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sorbonne:People who believe that, don’t become journalists. Or socialists.
That assumes that people can be objective. You show me someone who says he is objective, and I’ll show you someone who is not objective about himself. To expect news to be free of opinion is to expect water to flow naturally uphill.The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors. And as we cannot always be satisfied merely with being admired, unless we can at the same time persuade ourselves that we are in some degree really worthy of admiration; so we cannot always be satisfied merely with being believed, unless we are at the same time conscious that we are really worthy of belief. As the desire of praise and that of praise-worthiness, though very much a-kin, are yet distinct and separate desires; so the desire of being believed and that of being worthy of belief, though very much a-kin too, are equally distinct and separate desires.
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
David Brock is a puling faggot whose Media Matters is a Soros propaganda mill. His opinions are worthless
Well, isn't he?
Interesting - he describes a left-wing entity (like his own employer) and attributes it to FOX, but the part that makes FOX wrong is that there is some truth injected into the deal. That truth polarizes Americans by keeping the whole ball of wax from becoming a single melted glob of commie-loving morons.
Did I get that right?
David Brock was to write THE Book about Hillary and he already had his title picked out, “The Seduction of Hillary Rodham Clinton.” He had made his bones with “The real Anita Hill” and was a conservative “Darling” on his way to slay Hillary. A funny thing happened. Brock was the one who was seduced when he found the White House crowd better social company than the staid old “Right Wing.”
I knew Brock then, and have seen how he has taken everything he can get from both the right and the left. His only loyalty is to his ego and his wallet. I’m not at all surprised that he became paranoid and hired bodyguards, nor that he seems to have mental problems. His evolution from Berkley, The Heritage Foundation, The American Spectator, and one of the many Bill and Hillary defenders was quite impressive if one admires turncoats. Brock spun like a ceiling fan and it is plain to see that he still spins.
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