Day: 9/18/2017

Fox News Wants You to Believe That Trump-Bashing Killed the Emmys – It Didn’t

Posted by on September 18, 2017 at 3:34 pm. 1 Comments :

The preliminary Nielsen ratings for the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards broadcast are in and they aren’t particularly good. The program drew about 11.2 million viewers, which is down slightly from last year’s show. But leave it to Fox News to turn this minor slippage into a political catastrophe caused by the relentless liberalism of Hollywood elites.

Emmys Stephen Colbert

An op-ed on the Fox News website trumpeted the ratings results with a speculative headline asking “Emmys ratings crater; Trump-bashing to blame?” The argument presented by Fox’s Brian Flood was that criticism of Donald Trump sunk the broadcast to new lows. He writes that:

“It looks like the 69th annual Emmy Awards are heading into sub-basement territory in terms of ratings after host Stephen Colbert spent much of Sunday’s event attacking President Trump. It turns out American viewers may not have been as into Trump bashing as Hollywood would like them to be.”

For the record, host Stephen Colbert didn’t spend much of the night attacking Trump. In all he spent less than three minutes out of a three hour program. But the real absurdity of this analysis is that it proposes something that’s impossible. Fox News thinks that viewers chose not to watch the program based on their clairvoyant observation of the Trump-bashing before it even began. Obviously, without such ESP skills they would not have known not to tune in.

In fact, the Emmy broadcast has been scoring lower numbers for several years. Trump wasn’t president when the ratings began a falling trend. The reasons knowledgeable people attribute to the decline are that television doesn’t have the popular appeal of the Oscars and the Grammys. What’s more, many of the winning programs are now airing on services like Netflix and Hulu that have fewer viewers than broadcast TV. Consequently, the stars are not as familiar or compelling. And airing against Sunday Night Football didn’t help either.

That didn’t stop Fox News from setting up their biased perspective and interviewing political partisans to support it. Flood first sought the opinion of Dan Gainor of the ultra-conservative Media Research Center. Predictably, Gainor slammed the event as “a Hollywood bubble show.” He further castigated television’s creative community as out-of-touch with America and unqualified to express an opinion. That’s a point of view that disappears from right-wingers when the TV personality is one of theirs. Case in point: Donald Trump (or Ronald Reagan, Ted Nugent, Clint Eastwood, Scott Baio, etc.).

The argument that Americans might have tuned out the Emmys because they objected to jokes about Trump also fails logically. Trump is currently sitting on record low ratings himself. And that’s from the American people, not a select groups of show business professionals. With his approval numbers wallowing in the mid-thirties, it’s unlikely that the program lost many viewers who were loyal to Trump. If anything, the fact that most Americans are repulsed and embarrassed by him might have drawn in a bigger audience. There is substantial appetite in the country for the Trump-bashing that Fox News is lamenting. An example of that is the fact that Colbert has become the top rated late night talk show host largely due to his nightly mockery of the President.

The program did feature some sharp jabs at Trump’s expense. Veep’s Julia Louis Dreyfus noted that her show had considered an impeachment plot line, but abandoned it because they were worried that “someone else” might beat them to it. Alec Baldwin, who’s portrayal of Trump on Saturday Night Live won him an Emmy, consoled Trump by giving him partial credit for an award he never won himself. But the most cutting comedy came from the reunited stars of 9-to-5 who said:

Jane Fonda: Back in 1980 in that movie, we refused to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.
Lily Tomlin: And in 2017, we still refuse to be controlled by a sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.

Those are the sort of comments that Fox News and their conservative disciples regard as intolerable attacks against their White House Messiah. And for some reason they get away with calling liberals “snowflakes” for being too sensitive. Yet it doesn’t bother them when Trump himself posts tweets that show him assaulting Hillary Clinton. Apparently joking about physically attacking women is perfectly acceptable to these Deplorables. But Fox News finds it necessary to write op-eds that lie about the Emmys just because they can’t handle a few harmless jokes.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

When Signing an Anti-Racism Resolution, Trump Confirms the Worst Allegations of His Bigotry

Posted by on September 18, 2017 at 9:38 am. 2 Comments :

Last week members of both parties joined to pass an unprecedented congressional joint resolution. It called on the President to explicitly “speak out against hate groups that espouse racism, extremism, xenophobia, antisemitism and white supremacy.” The fact that there was even a need for this type of communication is evidence of a disturbing sickness that infects the nation. And that sickness has only gotten worse since the election of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump

The impetus for this resolution was the violence and murder that erupted during a march of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia last month. Following the tragedy, Donald Trump actually took the side of the white supremacists. He ignored their antisemitic and racist chants to falsely spread the blame around and charge that there was fault on both sides. It was that botched, insensitive, and universally condemned, reaction that moved Congress to act.

The result was S.J. 49, an uncommonly direct and bipartisan expression of the sense of the Congress that sought to force the President to go on record. It explicitly condemned “the violence and domestic terrorist attack that took place during events between August 11 and August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia.” It further directed the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security “to investigate thoroughly all acts of violence, intimidation, and domestic terrorism by White supremacists, White nationalists, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and associated groups in order to determine if any criminal laws have been violated and to prevent those groups from fomenting and facilitating additional violence.”

Who could argue with any of that? It was a plainly stated rejection of racism and the hate groups that espouse it. There wasn’t a hint of politics in it. Which is why it easily gained the support of both parties. The only people who could fail to put their full support behind this resolution would be the bigots who it was condemning. So of course, Donald Trump could not simply sign it and move on. That would offend too much of his base. So he attached a signing statement to it that diluted the impact of its message:

“As Americans, we condemn the recent violence in Charlottesville and oppose hatred, bigotry, and racism in all forms. No matter the color of our skin or our ethnic heritage, we all live under the same laws, we all salute the same great flag, and we are all made by the same almighty God.”

Notice that Trump failed to do what the resolution explicitly called for. Rather than citing the white supremacists, the KKK, etc., he reduced the criticism to a more vague censure of generalized prejudice “in all forms.” That was a deliberate gesture to take the heat off of his racist followers. And to insure that his point was crystal clear, he followed it up with another public statement placing the blame on both sides:

“You have some pretty bad dudes on the other side also. […] When you look at really what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people are saying and people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump may have a point.’ I said there’s some very bad people on the other side also.”

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Note that Trump is referring to the counter-protesters who oppose the white supremacists as “the other side.” Therefore, his side is the one aligned with the alt-right neo-Nazis. And this is how Trump responded to the congressional resolution seeking to put him on the record. Well, it certainly did just that.