Rupe and His Fox-Funding Terrorist

While I’m an equal opportunity critic of cable “news” I can’t pass up this opportunity to share a clip that offers compelling evidence that Fox is, at times, in the business of completely and utterly lying for the sake of pushing a partisan agenda. Journalism by any standard other than that of Chairman Mao, Josef Stalin, or Big Brother is simply not practiced much of the time at Fox “News”. As I wrote last week, the Not-at-Ground-Zero-not-a-Mosque pseudo controversy  is yet another case of cable “news” and its taboid breathren beating a dead horse in the dog days of August. (Wow! That was a tortured metaphor. But I digress.) This time, though, it’s even worse than you might have imagined.

Of course hypocrisy at Fox or MSNBC or occasionally CNN is nothing new. But in this case it exposes a dangerous pathology most closely resembling pure political propaganda.

Fox viewers are told that certain individuals are akin to dangerous enemies of the state but NOT that these same individuals are also funders of the network. How is that different from the way the Chinese government treats viewers of Chinese state television? How is it different from Big Brother employing Winston Smith at the Ministry of Truth to create a history that serves The Party, not the people?

This is a cancer that is killing our democracy. How can we ever solve any of the incredibly difficult problems we face if our information is served up by craven liars posing as journalists? Fox and its ilk have managed the unthinkable — sowing a level of distrust in the free press never before seen. In Gallup’s annual poll on how Americans think of our major institutions, TV news now falls below banks. Banks! It has been a precipitous slide since 2003 — coincidentally about the time Fox “News” began to take off in the ratings.

Americans aren’t stupid (generally, anyway). We don’t trust the press because so much of it has chased Fox down the rabbit hole of invective and opinion dressed in news drag. MSNBC jettisoned any pretense of being a part of NBC News when it turned to opinion in prime time. CNN, needing to compete, tolerated Lou Dobbs for years and is now pinning its revival on Eliot Spitzer (!?!?). Even the “real” news shows on the networks have fallen victim to fashion, dressing up their evening newscasts and shows like Nightline with breathless cable-style hyperbole and “edge”. And the audience? Vanishing.

As I pointed out last post and many times before, the audience for news on television (let alone newspapers) is disappearing — or dying if you read the stats another way. Every blogger (um…like me), analyst, columnist, seer and critic has poured out reasons why and fixes for the problem. But is is really a problem? Isn’t the real issue journalism and facts versus propaganda and lies?

This isn’t someone else’s problem to fix. If you eat crap everyday it will make you sick (or worse) as Morgan Spurlock so brilliantly demonstrated in Super Size Me. It follows that if you fill your brain with crap everyday it will make you sick as well — sick with the disease of illogical, uninformed, inchoate anger. So STOP watching this shit. If you really want to be a good flag-waving chest-thumping American, do just the tiniest bit of work and QUESTION WHAT THESE BASTARDS ARE TELLING YOU! Sometimes they’re reporting facts. Sometimes not. Don’t be a passive slug.