You’ve got to hand it to the folks at Fox. Even after a University of Maryland study certified that people who watch Fox News are more misinformed than viewers of other networks, Fox still has the chutzpah to stick with their campaign to make idiots of their audience. These stories broke today on the Fox Nation:
With headlines like “Obama Brings Back ‘Death Panels'” and “Hey Gore, Eagles-Vikings Game Postponed Due To Snow,” Fox is proving their commitment to enhancing the ignorance of their audience.
Who would have thought that Fox would have the gall to revisit the thoroughly discredited assertions of “death panels” that were originally raised during the health care debate? Everyone knows that the advance-care planning that most medical professionals advocate are patient-directed conversations with doctors – not death panels. Well, everyone but Fox News viewers who still think they are government mandated arbiters of who lives and dies.
And the climate change deniers are getting another leg up from Fox with their utterly imbecilic assertion that global warming is a hoax because it’s cold in Minnesota in December. This ignores the recent heat waves and droughts in many parts of the world as well as the global average temperatures that set a record high for 2010 and for the past decade. It also ignores hundreds of scientific studies that affirm the warming trends.
The Fox Nationalists are not deterred by having been exposed as serial liars. In fact, they are taking the opportunity to spread the stupid on even thicker. It’s almost as if they are saying, “You think we were misinforming people before? You aint seen nothin yet.” And with that they take on death panels and snowstorms in the same news cycle. Perhaps their next move will be to combine the two into DeathStorm and release it for the Xbox. I’m sure the Fox audience will eat it up (recommended for ages 4-6).
Are these folks even familiar with the time-honored phrase, “Too cold to snow?!”
Regarding the snow headline, there is a lot going on. Forgetting for a moment the idiocy of confusing “weather” with “climate” or vice versa, not to mention highlighting a sample size of ONE, what I find truly reprehensible is the “Hey Gore…” reference. By framing, over and over, the scientific question of global climate change and its causes as a political issue , and specifically as personified by Al Gore, FOX and many others on the right reduce the weight of evidence and research to mere ideology. The issue isn’t one involving the cult of personality wherein science is relegated to a he said/she said dynamic, the exact opposite of reality.
Good point. They want to hang this around Al Gore’s neck because he’s a politician. Then they ignore the studies produced by actual scientists. It’s a recipe for ignorance.
It’s a recipe for willfull ignorance. There, fixed it.
Hey Fox, This week in Indiana, in December/January, It’s going to be above freezing.
These people always use one example as fact when it suits them, but where it is against their outlook, many examples are just isolated incidents… We need to pass a law that lying/bending the truth on the news can get you fined… or something like that.
Yep. When it snows in winter they go apeshit over how cold it is. But just last June we had record highs and they never bothered to mention it.
And the word for today is — “cherrypicking.”