Fox News: The Most Powerful Propagandist Since Goebbels

Fox News waited until the last day of 2011 to publish the most absurdly hyperbolic piece of journalistic comedy/trash of the year. And that’s a high bar for Fox.

Dan Gainor is a VP for the Media Research Center, an ultra-conservative operation that exists to bash Democrats and advance the myth that the media is liberal. In an op-ed for Fox, Gainor breaks all records for overstatement and ironic tunnel-blindness. He begins the unintentionally hilarious article by declaring that the…

“Huffington Post, HuffPo, as it is sometimes called, has evolved from a simple news aggregator into one of the most sophisticated propaganda operations the world has ever seen. […and that Arianna Huffington is…] the most powerful propagandist since a guy named Goebbels.”

That’s the kickoff to Gainor’s Fox News article that castigates Arianna Huffington and the Huffingtong Post as left-wing missionaries of fascism. [This just in: The CEO of Huffington Post/AOL, Tim Armstrong, has contributed the maximum donation this year to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney.]

It doesn’t get much better after that. Gainor carelessly contradicts one of the primary edicts of conservative free marketing: that Fox News and talk radio are so abundantly successful because the media consuming public prefers the conservative message. He says of Huffington that…

“The site was started by political chameleon Arianna Huffington, who used to be conservative before she discovered it was far more lucrative to be liberal.”

There you have it. Apparently the people do want liberal media. From there Gainor goes into a diatribe against HuffPo that would make a much better tirade were it directed at Fox’s own Fox Nation. It’s astonishing how oblivious he is to the twisted irony of his words. For instance, he wonders aghast that “Everywhere you look on the site, Republicans and conservatives are doing something bad.” Replace “Republicans and conservatives” with “Democrats and liberals” and you have a perfect description of Fox Nation. Then he continues his HuffPo rant…

“The few stories that mention Democrats at all are such puff pieces that most journalists would be embarrassed to be associated with them. One shows a baby putting his hand in Obama’s mouth: ‘Obama Gets A Mouthful,’ readers are told in this thoroughly silly story.”

Fox Nation - Obama Eats Baby HandIndeed. A thoroughly silly story that most journalists would be embarrassed to be associated with. Which must be why Fox Nation featured it for six days running as their “Pic of the Day.” And their version was adorned by a mocking headline that evokes child abuse and cannibalism. Would they have chosen that imagery for a white president?

But Gainor is clearly unaware that he is insulting the journalistic integrity of his pals at Fox. Just as he is unaware of the similarity of the following invective aimed at HuffPo to the Fox Nation business model:

“Of course, they don’t write it all themselves. The HuffPo staff is masterful at combing the internet for stories and digging through them for one nugget that makes their point. They write a couple graphs about the nugget, package it with a sometimes huge headline and a stock photo and, voila, their work is done.”

That’s Fox Nation in a wing-nutshell. Except that they write none of it themselves. Every single article on Fox Nation is merely a reference and a link to some other (usually brazenly biased) source. And often its presentation is overtly dishonest as demonstrated here. And Gainor isn’t through yet.

“But the site doesn’t work if it doesn’t generate traffic. After all, Americans aren’t forced to read Arianna’s propaganda. So it’s filled with sex, more sex, comedy and enough other trash to keep people visiting.”

You mean like this? I took a look at Fox Nation’s “Pic of the Day” for just this year and found an abundance of evidence that they are obsessed with naked women, particularly their breasts.

Fox Nation - Sex

And being a young blonde in a short skirt appears to be a prerequisite to be a female reporter on Fox News. Just ask Megyn Kelly, Martha MacCallum, Shannon Bream, Gretchen Carlson, Monica Crowley, Ainsley Earhardt, Courtney Friel, Alisyn Camerota, Molly Line, Molly Henneberg, Julie Banderas, and Steve Doocy. [Oops. I have to scratch one of those. Julie Banderas is not a blonde].

For Gainor to use an editorial on Fox News as a platform to gripe about the Huffington Post being a liberally-slanted web site is an Olympian feat of hypocrisy. But for him to venture off into Nazi references is offensive in the extreme. Arianna Huffington is not responsible for the slaughter of millions of innocents and the comparison to Hitler’s regime trivializes the horror that was the Holocaust. Furthermore, his assessment of HuffPo as biased is an affirmation of acute self-delusion. He is so altogether unaware of his perversion of reality that he can utter this phrase about HuffPo without meaning it sarcastically: “It’s also unmatched on the right.”

Unmatched on the right? Certainly Gainor has read Fox Nation. He is also presumably aware of The Daily Caller, The Blaze, BigGovernment, Townhall, National Review, Weekly Standard, Drudge Report, RedState, WorldNetDaily, Washington Times, NewsMax, and many more.

Gainor’s editorial is typical of the ignorance-inducing disinformation that is the hallmark of Fox News and his own Media Research Center (publisher of the reprehensible net newsrag, NewsBusters). He launches odious insults, accuses his targets of improprieties that he engages in himself, and ignores obvious information if it contradicts his predetermined conclusions. And all of this intellectual mendacity comes together at the start of a new year as if to christen 2012 for a journey to new and more loathsome states of dishonesty and thought control.

Happy New Year, America.

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9 thoughts on “Fox News: The Most Powerful Propagandist Since Goebbels

  1. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry at this…

    What bothers me is the way unthinking readers will latch onto this hypocritical irrationale to feel superior… that’s what highly partisan articles like this create.

    I can remember a few years ago talking to my mother (a Fox news viewer and Limbaugh listener) who said in a haughty tone of voice: “At least my news channel has lefties and righties.” I was flabbergasted at her comment, perplexed to say the least, and just said, “My radio station (local public affiliate with NPR and PRI programs) has both democrats and republicans!” She didn’t have an answer for that and she changed to something else. I realized later that someone she was watching or listening to was making the charge that CNN, MSNBC and NPR *never* let a right-wing figure come on any show.

    Similarly, Jon Stewart did a comparison of NPR and talk radio that really cracked me up. While the right-wing jerks were talking about how the democrats are carrying the US to hell in a hand basket with apocalyptic fervor, NPR was doing a science story about ants!

  2. So Huffington switched sides because liberalism is more profitable? I always thought it was because, having lived in this country long enough to shed her Republican husband and come to her senses, she saw the errors of her original American politics and bravely converted. (And the association with Al Franken didn’t hurt.)

    But it was purely a business decision? Live and learn.

  3. “that Fox News and talk radio are so abundantly successful because the media consuming public prefers the conservative message”

    Yeah so successful that they elected Obama in a landslide.

  4. This post points out how the right-wing celebrates ignorance, then projects their delusional view of the world onto their perceived enemies;the so called liberal media in general and ,in this case, Huffpo in particular. I will take any so called liberal media source, i.e., NPR, Huffpo, MSNBC(evening line-up), Current TV et al, and put them up against Fox News et al, and compare them for factual content and the so called liberal press will beat the right-wingers everytime for truthfulness without exception. Like Stephen Colbert says “reality is liberally biased”.

  5. With all due disrespect to Herr Goebbels and the nazi Ministry of Propaganda, there’s never been anything like News Corp before.

    A global media company reaching into so many nations, using the public airwaves and otherwise tilting their news media (newspapers and radio and television), and all of it under the pretense of being news and information, when in truth all of it is simply an influencing and manipulating of people’s political opinions…

    Not only did Herr Goebbels and Hitler not have such a global reach and influence back then, they didn’t even have global media companies back then, no one did!

    But rupert murdoch does today.

    Herr Goebbels would marvel at murdoch’s influence and power, he would bow to this media king, he would call him mein Fuhrer.

  6. The fact that the propagandists Goebbels and Murdoch are both right-wingers is no coincidence. The Right needs to perpetrate brainwashing on an ever-increasing scale to keep the masses dumbed down and manipulated into supporting a politico-philosophical position that is hostile to their (99 per cent’s) own interests.

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